Olympic Games (NBC coverage, 2010-present)

The Olympic games are a series of prestigious sports that feature contestants from all across the world and only happen once every 2 years (with one rotation happening in Winter and the succeeding one in Summer). Considering how prestigious the events are, the International Olympic Committee licenses the events to various broadcasters, and in the United States, NBC owns the broadcasting rights.

Plot
Several of the world's most prestigious athletes compete against each other in their respective athletic fields. Each set of Games begins with the lighting of a uniquely crafted torch, and at the closing ceremony, the torch is extinguished, while showcasing the next location that either the Summer or Winter Olympics will be held.

Why It Doesn't Win Any Medals Nowadays
NOTE: This will mostly focus on NBC's coverage of the Olympics since Vancouver in 2010, though other events will be mentioned.
 * 1) An overwhelmingly large chunk of the events are tape-delayed. To define, it is when the broadcast of a live event is delayed for various reasons, such as to air in a better time slot. Tape delay kills the suspense, as you can easily look up who won online.
 * 2) * This lets executives modify the event so that only their selected highlights get shown. Needless to say, it can be used in a very manipulative manner.
 * 3) Perhaps because they're owned by a private company rather than a publicly-funded operation like PBS, advertisements run suspiciously common. As a matter of a fact, sometimes, commercials will take up more running time than the event highlights sandwiched in between.
 * 4) It's no secret that NBC treats the Olympics less like an international sporting event and more like a reality TV show that happens to revolve around sports. Specifically, John Miller, the chief marketing officer, stated that they formatted it as such because their target audience is mostly women, who don't otherwise care about sports. This mentality both degrades the value of the performances and is quite misogynistic.
 * 5) While it is natural for a country to be biased towards its athletes, NBC takes it too far by giving much less focus to foreign athletes, even when they do exceptionally well, and instead try to stoke up more of the flames of drama and to reinforce nationalistic feelings in American viewers.
 * 6) To add insult to injury, the coverage tends to be insulting of other nations at the same time.
 * 7) * During the Pyeongchang 2018 competition, NBC had its hosts deliberately mispronounce the name of the city (for reference, the last syllable was pronounced as "-chang", when it should've been "-chong").
 * 8) *When Afghanistan introduced it's athletes for the Tokyo 2020 Opening Ceremony, NBC brought up the 9/11 attacks, which were unreasonably irrelevant, since the attacks happened nearly 20 years before the Tokyo Olympics. In addition, it comes off as insidiously racist, since it seems to blame the Afghan people for the attacks
 * 9) *Similarly for the Beijing 2022 Opening Ceremony, when the Russian Olympic team was highlighted, they brought up the ongoing diplomatic crisis with Ukraine.
 * 10) The hosts can, at times, range from oblivious to downright cruel when it comes to talking about other athletes, which makes you question how they got to such a professional pedestal.
 * 11) * In 2016, Al Trautwig spoke falsehoods about Simone Bile's parents, claiming that they were their grandparents that adopted Simone and her sister in 2001. He had to correct that later.
 * 12) Speaking of which, when Simone Bile had to briefly withdraw from the games due to her mental health struggles, NBC could not leave her alone. The gymnastics coverage seemed to revolve all around her struggles in an overly dramatized fashion that felt more like a staged ratings trap than a serious moment.
 * 13) They have previously meddled with the Olympic events in person to fit their needs.
 * 14) * In 2016, NBC had the IOC move select events to air during American primetime, which would be Midnight in Rio. Rumor has it that they also got them to do the opening ceremony in English rather than Brazilian Portuguese so that America would go much earlier.

Redeeming Qualities

 * 1) They do occasionally hype up foreign athletes when they're popular enough, such as Usain Bolt (from Jamaica).
 * 2) Full coverage of the games are available (even live) on the NBC Sports online platforms (while you'll need a subscription to a live TV provider, be it cable, satellite, or streaming, a large array of networks are supported).
 * 3) The theme song by John Williams is absolutely breathtaking.

Reception
While the coverage of the Olympics has continuously been profitable for NBC (with the Vancouver 2010 Winter Olympics being the exception), many in the press have called NBC out on the practices that are listed above. Geoff Baker summarized the way NBC covers the Olympics as waiting to play select sections from a Seahawks v Patriots game, with only select highlights, and emotional Tom Brady segments. Reeves Wiedman from The New Yorker stated that the gymnastics coverage creates an image of athletes being more like models & criticized the way that NBC expects you to know about many sports unfamiliar to audiences, which he argues confuses many Americans.

For a long time, dissatisfied consumers would go up to the US-Canada border so that they could watch CBC's coverage instead, but in 2010, couldn't due to the change in broadcasters to CTV. Starting in 2014, more have been watching foreign coverage of the games thanks to VPNs advancing further and can do it from not only CBC but other channels like Seven, BBC, and Doordarshan.

Trivia

 * NBC had previously won the bid to broadcast the 1980 Games in Moscow but was largely canceled due to the mass boycott over the conflict between Soviet Russia and Afghanistan.

Videos
jkRe3Gt0NBg m3SYG0FmKi4