[KS] RE: Olympic Partners?

[Richard C. Miller]

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Regarding Olympic coverage:


For once, eastern Indonesia comes out on top: here most people have
satellite dishes ("parabol," they call them here), so you have your pick
of coverage. TVRI and RCTI (Indonesian channels) predictably carry
anything with an Indonesian in it, but they do so by intermittently
commenting on feed from Australian television. So if there's no sport
with an Indonesian in it at the moment, we get whatever is coming out of
ABC (Australia): beach volleyball doubles (who knew there was such a
thing?), all the weightlifting, the fencing, and so forth. On the other
hand, you can always switch your parabol to CNN if you want other
sports.


If there is a bias in coverage here, other than unusually (for an
American) exhaustive coverage of badminton (in which Indonesia is a world
power), it is whatever is being fed out of ABC. I watched a Korean fence
a German (sorry, I couldn't make head or tails out of what either the
Australian or the Indonesian commentator made of their names...) and I
will say that the room full of Indonesians I was with cheered on the
Korean unreservedly. But then, he won. Everyone likes a winner.


The medal count is printed daily in the newspaper. Indonesia is currently
22nd, I believe. Several people have commented to me, rather
disappointedly I might add, that America, as always, has the most medals.
They find this unfair. But in spite of the current chill between
Indonesia and Australia, no one has complained that Australia is number
two.


I have seen no coverage of the four competitors from East Timor here.
<italic>That</italic> still rankles.


Not being in the States right now, I don't know for sure what the
coverage is like there. But I've read quite a few completes in US
newspapers online complaining about ABC's focus on interviewing the
parents of the American teenagers competing at the expense of showing the
actual competition, and an attempt being made to simulate live
broadcasting. The Washington Post, New York Times, and the LA Times all
ran stories to this effect; one of them quoted the ABC official in charge
of the Olympics broadcasting insisting that "the story" wasn't the games
but the internal conflicts of the competitors.


Funny, I don't recall seeing medals giving out for anguished
hand-wringing...


Richard

--Richard C. Miller

--UW School of Music

--Manado, Indonesia

--rcmiller at students.wisc.edu

  http://www.sit.wisc.edu/~rcmiller/