NBC's Decision to Delay Opening Ceremonies Hits a Nerve
So, last Friday we were up in arms about the fact that NBC had delayed broadcasting of the opening ceremonies by 12 hours, to all appearances the only country in the entire world that had made that decision (arguably also the only country who paid a gazillion dollars for broadcast rights). Of course, the gamble appears to have paid off, literally, since the network scored its highest ratings since Fox’s airing of the Super Bowl in February. This despite the fact that both the John Edwards scandal and the Russian attack on Georgia had taken over the headlines by news time Friday night (the dog days of summer are always unreliable that way).
However, the Internet being what it is we spent the better part of Friday with one eye on the comments section of this NYT/TV Decoder post written by former TVNewser Brian Stelter, about NBC’s decision to delay and shortly discovered we were not alone — talk about reading what we wanted to hear!
At last glance there were more than 300 comments mostly echoing our disgust at the decision (sprinkled throughout with suggestions that people “get a job”). But it didn’t stop there, the next morning, much to our pleasure, the same story had been re-worked into an above-the-fold front page article (albeit without the frustration we were expressing), which was mentioned again in David Carr’s column today. For his part Carr says the problem is that viewers want to be the ones “want to be the ones doing the programming,” this after NBC spent the day, with the assistance of Google, trying to “plug online leaks.” Which continues to leave us wondering: what makes this less offensive than if they had decided to do this on a less showy story, like, say, Russia invading Georgia?
