Raging Cynic

Now, don’t get me wrong. I’m pleased as punch that Hillary finially came to her senses and dropped out. Better for all of us, I’m sure she sees that. And, though I don’t know how much good a Catholic VP will be for building Obama’s support base and I don’t know much about the guy, I didn’t know much about Gore before he came up either.

What’s bothering me though is the several very redundent emails per day that I’m getting from the various Democratic groups I’m affiliated with. And it’s the same stuff. They’re just recycling the same material three, four, or five times a day. Crying out loud peope, organize your selves! These are different groups for a reason, they should be serving their different demographics with different information. If there’s information on other lists, include it as links, blurbs.

Is it that they’re just too lazy to do that? Don’t have the expertiese? Or just lacking the organization? Maybe it’s that comic rule of threes blown out of proportion; they think that if they repeate the information over and over, people are more likely to read it? All gets ignored by me. One compiled newsletter would work so much better.

And I get even more pissed of at NBC. Part of their exclusive US rights package for the Olympics is that viewers in the good ol’ “Land of the Free” cannot access streaming web feeds.

Is it too much to ask that I’d want to watch the Woman’s Beach Volleyball finals LIVE?

Heaven forbid that I should be able to get some information or current events from the internet. I can get watch one-legged coke-whores crapping on masochistic midgets live, but live - REALLY live, not that NBC 3 hour delay joke of a live broadcast! - Olympic coverage is censored.

I’ll hope to have another post soon with a way around this….probably involving a Chinese proxy. Love the irony.

What the hell is NBC doing?

Would you like and example on how things go wrong when you spend too much money on graphic effects and not enough on talent? Bob Costas and his parade of offensive, overly opinionated, and overly obnoxious chorus of “Sportscasters.” Now, I usually tune out who’s saying what due to my preference to avoid such annoying and inane prater, but this Olympic cycle just seems to scream cultural ignorance and racial bias far more often than I’m used to.

Now this might be due in large part to the clearly dated attitudes that Béla Károly repeatedly expresses through condescending comments about the Chinese gymnasts. Maybe it’s the way that Mary Carillo comments on everything but tennis. Maybe it’s that no one on the NBC team has realized that they couldn’t pronounce an non-European name to save their lives and takes no steps to correct this (and why shold they, it’s not like they had any notice that the Olympics would be in Beijing or could possibly think that a person with an Asian name might be qualifying or earning  a spot that puts them in competition with a European nation).

Is there any doubt that the controversy over the tie between He Kexin and Nastia Liukin wouldn’t have been heard if it was Liukin who took the gold? And how about the commentator referring to one of the Chinese gymnasts as a “little firecracker?”

How much time do we have to spend listening to the inane opinion breaking through an otherwise entertaining international contest? How hard would it be for NBC to get some people who know enough to not be so annoying and a bit more objective? Is this NBC’s final admission of not giving a damn?

How bad is it in the international context? I’ve got a friend in China now (yea, the same China that’s repeadly accused of journalistic hyper-control) who were shocked that such blatantly narcissistic, nationalistic opining is part-and-parcel of our Olympic broadcasts.

Then there’s the issue of their liberal use of the word “LIVE.” Their broadcasts are delayed by at hours. I can see the results of an event before the start hits the airwaves. They even keep that “LIVE” tag up during the slow motion replays. Do they hope to be so obvious about this that they assume we know they’re lying? It’s not like a few minute delay to do some post processing, it’s a few hours we’re talking about? If they can’t do it live, don’t say it’s live, is that so hard?

Here’s the true shame that all of this brings to light: print journalism is going out of business but operations like NBC keep running on nothing more than bidding for exclusive coverage and shiny graphics while they let standards of integrity and tallent slip farther and farther from the line of actual journalism. But then, of course, it’s been a long and steady transition from news to entertainment.

Eh, why am I even surprised anymore?