The Olympics are a cesspool of hypocrisy and cold, slimy greed

JEJU-DO, SOUTH KOREA—I’ve read that the Olympics are producing some thrilling moments this year. I wouldn’t know.

During the lead up to the Games, when China blocked journalists from accessing websites such as Amnesty International and the BBC, there was a huge media kerfuffle about broken promises and the absolute need for a climate in which reporting could be done freely and without restriction. The Olympics, the argument went, are about cultural exchange and openness, and limiting access was hostile to the very spirit of the Games.

Yet here I sit in Korea, five days into the Olympic media orgy, and if I want to watch an event or a feature from my home country—because let’s not be naive: the Olympics are also very much about nationalism—I’m shit out of luck. Every attempt I’ve made to access Olympic content on an international website has been a failure, and in general, my quest for online Olympic coverage has been by far the most strangled Internet experience of my life. Not since the sweaty-palmed days of my Catholic school dances have I been so thoroughly denied.

That’s because networks in every country have paid obscene amounts of money for Olympic rights in their territory, and no one is allowed to step over anyone’s virtual boundaries to siphon ratings away from the winners. As such, when I try to watch any of the dozens of Olympic videos that CBC has paid millions of dollars to bring to Canadians (not that there are many compelling reasons for us to watch yet), I get a little blue screen saying

SORRY, THIS VIDEO IS NOT AVAILABLE IN YOUR AREA.

The BBC tells me something the same thing. NBC, which paid $900 million for rights to the games in the U.S., is, in true American style, more blunt: “We’re Sorry. [BTW: No you’re not.] NBC is required to restrict this video to viewers within the United States.” The closest thing I’ve gotten to Olympic coverage are the Al-Jazeera video featurettes about ticket fraud and Beijing opera posted on YouTube.

I’m sure if I tried hard enough, I could find a way to wriggle around these firewalls. Besides which, if I’m desperate for Olympics coverage, I can always watch one of the three networks covering the Games in South Korea (MBC, SBS and KBS)—where monopolistic coverage isn’t scheduled to come into effect until 2010 — replay Park Tae-hwan’s gold medal performance in swimming over and over and over and over again until I go batshit insane and start dumping pots of kimchi into the swimming pool at the Ramada in a gesture of crazed patriotism. (See video above.)

In reality, what I’m probably going to do is fully, once and for all write off the Olympics, which claim to be such a beacon of hope and purity in the world, as a cesspool of corruption, hypocrisy and cold, slimy greed.

There may be a great deal of difference in the motives that the Chinese government and the major broadcast networks have for restricting access, and it’s certainly true that the content they’re controlling is different. However, the fundamental result is the same: I want to find information or images online, and I cannot, because someone has decided that my accessing those images or information will upset the status quo, threaten the reach and bankbooks of those in control and open cracks in their fortress walls that will surely, in their eyes, turn into chasms. Someone has seen fit to drive a flag into the virtual skin of cyberspace, thereby declaring it their territory and their property, to be managed and branded as they see fit. Consider this quote from Scott Moore, executive director of CBC Sports, on whether or not the networks would be able to broadcast from Tiananmen Square—typically a pretty tightly-managed area of Beijing:

“As rights-holders, we impressed upon the organizing committee that we’re not there necessarily to embarrass anybody, but we felt very strongly, whatever happens at the Games, we have not only rights that we’ve paid for, but a right as journalists to cover that.”

Piss on your authoritarian grip on the media; I paid my money!

Don’t get me wrong. I realize that if someone pays a kazillion dollars for something, they expect to be treated accordingly. But I just hope the irony doesn’t escape anyone: Communism and capitalism both have their great walls—they just build them from different stuff.

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Posted on Thursday, August 14th, 2008 at 11:41 am. Follow comments through the RSS 2.0 feed. Comment or trackback.