hink of it all - of the life that is! Study your friends and foes!
Study the past! And answer this: "Are these times better than those?" The life-long quarrel, the paltry spite, the sting of your poisoned pride! No matter who fell it were better to fight as they did when the world was wide.
The 'Olympic' Spirit
"And nowhere is that more true than with the games of the Olympiad, where the obscene cost of broadcast rights means not only charging obscene amounts for advertising spots (hundreds of thousands of dollars in Australia; millions in the US) but cramming as many of them into every hour as possible.[...]
Television rights have underwritten the Olympics for at least 20 years, and major broadcasters pay highly for the privilege: NBC coughed up almost $US1 billion ($1.12 billion) for the US broadcast rights for Beijing. The Seven Network paid $70 million just to get its cameras into the venues, with the cost of actually broadcasting on top of that (apparently another $20-$30 million).
[...]
And that's what's really disappointing about this year's Olympics coverage. Not that we're exposed to more than 200 hours of advertising during the course of it. But that there's so little in those 200 hours to have us cheering."
::View Article::
Oh? The commercialism surrounding the Australian broadcasting of these Olympic Games is staggering. I couldn't care less how exciting the content of Olympic advertising on the seven network might be when I'm being treated like an indifferent fool who, it is hoped, will sit through all that is fed to me:
And here's how it seems to go: a large collection of ads, a single race (say an 800 meter track semi final), ads, a jingoistic and crassly sentimental pre-packaged celebration of some Australian medal win a few days ago, ads, the other 800 meter semi final, ads, another pre-packaged collection of replays of 'Australian glory', and the cycle continues, begging the question... are the limited bursts of actual Olympic competition in amongst all this the real focus here?
No. This 'coverage' isn't so much a presentation of the Olympic games itself, i.e. the privilege to see competition between the world's best athletes in the large variety of Olympic sports, but rather a way for the seven network to recover the superfluous fortune it paid to 'cover' the games, and to make a profit on the back of these costs by showing only the limited range/number of events that the masses (the prospective consumers of the ads) will watch and by luring the masses to the screen through crass lowest common denominator appeals to worst kind of patriotism.
The amount of money that television networks are charged for coverage rights, if this is the root cause of the commercialism surrounding the coverage, is surely not in the 'Olympic Spirit' we hear so much about.
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