The Olympics are an athletic event, but they can’t help but be political when the host country is an abusive dictatorship like China. NBC’s Today failed to see the ideological clash as they championed San Francisco-born Ashley Gu competing for communist China and also striking advertising deals with luxury brands like Louis Vuitton and Tiffany.
Geoffrey Dickens, our Director of Media Analysis, discusses his recent blogs on China and Olympic coverage, especially the failure of ABC and CBS to report on the genocide and torture of the Uighur Muslims in China’s Xinjiang province. NBC aired two long reports, but ABC only aired 23 seconds in the last year, and CBS 53 seconds. NBC strangely glossed over China’s brutal keeping of a one-child policy from 1980 to 2016.
We also discussed the forthcoming hip-hop’s halftime at the Super Bowl, and the obscurity of most of the Best Picture Oscar nods.
Enjoy the podcast below, or wherever you listen to podcasts.
