Because Of The U.S. Diplomatic Boycott, NBCUniversal's Coverage And The ‘Proud Sponsors’ Of The 2022 Winter Olympics in Beijing Will Receive Negative Media Coverage
Arthur Solomon
No matter how they parse it, NBCUniversal and its “proud sponsors” have now been officially accused of seeing nothing wrong with supporting an Olympics in a totalitarian country. Undoubtedly some sponsors will says that while they do not agree with the human rights abuses of the Chinese government the Winter Olympic Games is not a political event, but a bringing together of the world’s best athletes.
NBC will televise the Olympics from Beijing beginning on February 3, a day before the official start of the games, which concludes on February 20.
Television networks and “proud sponsors” of the Olympics have been using the “we support the athletes” line for decades, regardless of the totalitarian nature of the country in which they have been played. And the more than a year's criticism of Chinese human rights policies hasn’t changed NBC’s or the sponsor’s stance.
In China’s case, the Hollywood Reporter reported months ago that Dan Lovinger, the Executive Vice President, Advertising Sales, NBC Sports Group, said that slots for NBCUniversal’s coverage of the Beijing Olympics are "virtually sold out." Of course, knowing the history of sports marketing sponsors, the U.S. diplomatic boycott means nothing to them and their comments about “supporting the athletes” means nothing to people who value people’s rights ahead of sports.
Stephen Wade of the Associated Press reported what can be considered a template answer by sponsors of the Beijing Games: “We do not have a say in the selection of the host city, nor on whether an Olympics is postponed or relocated,” said Paul Lalli, Coca-Cola’s global vice president for human rights. “We do not make decisions on these host locations. We support and follow the athletes wherever they compete.”
(A short course in sports marketing sponsorships: Sports marketing sponsors remained quiet about prize fighting causing brain damage to fighters, and to the toll that hits to the head have taken on football and hockey players, as well as keeping mum about the steroid era in baseball. Alcoholic beverages have always been hawked by sports marketers on telecasts, and now so is betting from home. Until it was banned by the government from doing so on television tobacco sponsorships also were gladly accepted by the moguls of sports. Who’s to blame: the ball club owners, the TV networks and stations or the marketers? I’d say all three.)
In 2012, The Hollywood Reporter called Bob Costas “the conscience of NBC sports” because unlike other sports commentators Costas always told it like it was. His most recent episode of not glorifying all things sports and pointing out its warts occurred when he guested on Erin Burnett’s OutFront CNN program on December 6.
In a discussion regarding President Biden’s diplomatic boycott of the Beijing Olympics, Costas supported the action saying, in part, “China has to rank as the number one human rights violator on the planet.” Costas, who has been a China Olympic watcher since the country was readmitted to the Olympics in 1996, has hosted 11 games from 1992 in Barcelona to 2016 in Rio, which included China’s 2008 Summer Beijing Olympics, also criticized the IOC’s affinity for authoritarian regimes and said American sports marketers, at least business wise, are in bed with China’s policies.
Costas’ comment about the IOC having an affinity for authoritarian governments didn’t come as a surprise to Olympic watchers.
Students of the Olympics know that the Olympics, dating back to the 1936 Nazi Olympics in Berlin, has been as political as was the White House announcement on December 6 that the United States will not send any government officials to the Beijing Games, but with a big difference: Biden’s action was in support of freedom and democracy, although I don’t think it went far enough.
In a run-up to the Nazi games, U.S. diplomats in Germany, a U.S. member of the Olympic committee and prominent politicians, including New York Mayor LaGuardia and Governor Al Smith, opposed the U.S. sending a team to compete. The Olympic committee member lost his position because of his opposing the decision of Avery Brundage, president of the Olympic committee, who said a “Jewish-Communist conspiracy” was behind the boycott effort. This was the Olympics that sportscaster Marty Glickman, then a member of the U.S. track team, was pulled from his race in order not to offend Hitler.
Costas also called out the Chinese government’s censorship polices, pointing out that China blocks statements and punishes organizations and individuals that criticize it. He mentioned how the Houston Rockets and Boston Celtics basketball games were blocked after the government didn’t like what an official and player on those teams said. In the past, Costas also was a critic of the IOC’s underplaying the massacre of 11 Israeli athletes by Palestinian terrorists during the 1972 Munich Summer Olympic Games.)
While Costas was the most outspoken television personality regarding China’s human rights violations that I saw, he wasn’t the only one to go on the record about the Beijing Games, Neal Pilson, who has overseen Olympics broadcast rights deals when he was president of CBS Sports during the 1980s and 1990s, told Seeking Alpha, a crowd-sourced content service for financial markets, that “The diplomatic boycott puts corporate Olympic sponsors in "an awkward spot" but was less concerning than a full boycott including athletes.” During his tenure at CBS, Pilson brought Olympic Games to CBS in 1992, 1994 and 1998.
NBC has been quiet since the boycott announcement, promoting its televising of the games on NBC programs with TV spots and on internet announcements. “Proud sponsors,” which normally are touting their horns about their Olympic sponsorships, also seem to have hit the mute button. Reuters reported that an NBC spokesperson said, “We look forward to bringing the stories of the men and women of Team USA to the American audience as they compete against the best athletes from around the world at the Winter Olympics in February,” a statement that could have been made at any time. (Strange that a major news organization wouldn’t identify the NBC spokesperson, it’s not as if Reuters was asking for state secrets, unless it was the only way they could get a quote.)
However, the U.S. State Department made no mistake about its feelings regarding the Beijing Games. "We want the private sector to be fully cognizant and to operate with full information with regard to what is transpiring in Xinjiang,” said spokesman Ned Price.
As anyone who pays the slightest attention to world or sports news knows, China has been criticized for human rights and genocide actions against its citizens, ranging from Hong Kong to the western regions of China.
For more than a year U.S. and foreign government leaders and human rights organizations have asked the International Olympic Committee to relocate the 2022 Winter Olympics because, they say, China is “imposing forced labor, systematic forced birth control and torture upon Uyghurs, a largely Muslim ethnic group, in Xinjiang, a region in the country's west,” according to an Associated Press story.
Some U.S. congressmen and senators have asked NBC not to televises the games or limit its coverage only to sporting events, which would be a big departure from the traditional Olympics telecast of featuring human interests stories about the host nation and tear-jerking mini-features about the difficult route that many Olympians had to traverse to participate in the games.
During a hearing of the U.S. Congress' Human Rights Commission, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi cited China’s treatment of Uighurs, Tibetans and residents of Hong Kong and said global leaders who attend would lose their moral authority. And Sen. Mitt Romney said, “Withholding diplomats from the Beijing Olympics will bring attention to the Chinese Communist Party’s graves human rights abuses, genocide of the Uyghurs, and threat China poses to the global order. It’s incumbent upon the media to accurately report on what’s happening in China.” (Perhaps alluding to NBC?)
Some people argue that past boycotts of the Olympics proved nothing. I disagree. I concur with the thinking of Sally Jenkins, the Washington Post columnist, who wrote: “Olympic boycotts are a highly disputed topic, only because the argument starts from the wrong end. What matters is not the behavior of the boycotted regime. What matters is the firm behavior of the boycotters. The United States’ refusal to go to Moscow in 1980 after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan was a success in that it organized more than 60 other countries to also shun Moscow, helped lead a global hardening of sentiment against that regime, signaled a global blockade to aggression and set up the firm confrontations of the Reagan years.” While even a full boycott wouldn’t change Chinese policies, even this diplomatic boycott has highlighted China’s anti human rights transgressions.
The Opening Ceremony of the Beijing Games on February 4 might provide a hint on how honest NBC’s Olympic reporting might be. In May, Politico reported, “NBCUniversal is under fire for its U.S. broadcasting rights of the games. Chris McCloskey, the network’s vice president of communications, declined to comment. But Benedict Rogers, chief executive of the U.K.-based human rights organization Hong Kong Watch, urged NBC to avoid its broadcasts from being “hijacked as propaganda tools of the Chinese Communist Party.” That will require vigilance, warns Maggie Lewis, a Seton Hall University law professor who focuses on law and human rights in China. “What does NBC do when covering the opening ceremony and the dancing Uyghurs show up on the screen?” Lewis asked. “Do they have a plan for that?”
A Variety article on December 8 questioned NBC’s ability to deliver credible coverage of the Beijing Olympics. The story led with three-time Olympian tennis player Peng Shuai’s situation since she accused a Chinese official of sexual assault. But it then delved into other problems facing NBC. It quoted Smith College economist Andrew Zimbalist: “NBC and the IOC are in bed together — the interest of one party is the same as the interest of the other, It’s in both of their interests to have as much good PR and as little political disruption as possible.”
In the same article written by Rebecca Davis, she quoted a former Olympian who predicted a more dire future for NBC and the Olympics. “NBC has to worry about its image beyond just the broadcast of the Games, notes Jules Boykoff, a former Olympic soccer player and current department chair of politics at Pacific University in Oregon.
“The Olympic reputation is souring around the world, with fewer and fewer cities vying to host it. Soon enough, NBC could be holding a somewhat toxic property in the Olympics,” he assessed. “It’s not there yet, but what happened in Tokyo and what we’re seeing unfold on the way to Beijing certainly must be making NBC executives nervous,” he said, referring to the widespread local backlash in Japan against its hosting of the Games during the pandemic.
The IOC, U.S. Olympic executives and China’s government officials are watching to see how many countries follow the diplomatic boycott of the U.S. No matter what they say, they can’t be happy about it.
As of this writing on December 26, Australia, Canada, the United Kingdom, Japan, New Zealand, Kosovo, Estonia, Austria, Belgium and Lithuania have joined the U.S.’s diplomatic boycott of the Beijing Games. Other countries are expected to follow the U.S. lead. New Zealand also said it would not send diplomats, asserting "a range of factors but mostly to do with COVID." Thus far, the only president of major country that will attend the Beijing Games is Vladimir Putin of Russia.
Regardless of the outcry against participating in an Olympics held in a totalitarian country one thing is certain, NBC will go ahead with its telecast of the Beijing Games and the “proud sponsors” will continue to say that they support the U.S. athletes, salivating about the riches they hope to gain by marketing to China’s vast population. (As someone who has managed and/or played key roles on international and national sports and none sports accounts, including many Olympic Games, I know that it is not the support of athletes that is important to sports marketers – it’s how much money the sponsors can make from sponsoring the athletes and events.)
In 2014, NBC Universal bought the broadcast rights from the IOC to televise the Olympic Games in the U.S. through 2032 for $7.75 billion. The deal gave the Peacock Network exclusive broadcast rights to the six Olympic Games from 2022 to 2032. The IOC obtains about 73% of its income from selling broadcast rights; about 18% comes from Olympic sponsors. NBC provides about 40% of all IOC income, reported the Associated Press.
But as the New York Times reported, “Other networks have not demonstrated the ardor for the Olympics that NBC has. ESPN and Fox have never carried an Olympic Games, and CBS last showed the Olympics when it broadcast the 1992, ’94 and ’98 Winter Games, and they’re doing just fine without supporting a sports event that receives criticism no matter where it is held.
About the Author: Arthur Solomon, a former journalist, was a senior VP/senior counselor at Burson-Marsteller, and was responsible for restructuring, managing and playing key roles in some of the most significant national and international sports and non-sports programs. He also traveled internationally as a media adviser to high-ranking government officials. He now is a frequent contributor to public relations publications, consults on public relations projects and was on the Seoul Peace Prize nominating committee. He can be reached at arthursolomon4pr @juno.com.
