MMMM #9 - Faking It in Beijing

The little Chinese girl who sang the Olympic host country's national anthem at the opening ceremony wasn't singing at all. Chinese officials decided she was pretty enough for the job, but her voice was not good enough. In came a ringer to provide the actual singing. But it wasn't that fakery that's the subject of this MMMM. It's the fakery of NBC in presenting old news and acting as if they don't know how it turned out.

China operates on a single time zone...12 hours ahead of U.S. Eastern Time. Yet each night on NBC News, Brian Williams and crew refer to the Olympic competitions you'll see that night as if they had not already occurred. Yea, yea, I know can you imagine? Old Tim is shocked that there's fakery going on in TV News! But it's the acceptance of the play-acting that's wrong. It sets a tone that it's acceptable to look the other way in the interest of a better show.

Brian Williams talked with Rowdy Gaines last Tuesday night for analysis of what could happen that night when Michael Phelps went for this third gold medal...but the event had already happened, and both Williams and Gains knew Phelps had won that medal. Williams made a side comment about it, saying its "complicated", but it isn't really. The reason for delaying the airing of the broadcast is because NBC can charge bigger rates for the larger audiences they can generate in the evening than they can in the morning. On top of all that, some of the fireworks we thought we were seeing on TV were fakes, added in for TV viewers. And the London Times reported even the 56 children in their "native Chinese" costumes who were on display in the opening ceremony were not what they were presented to be:

"There were no Uighurs, no Zhuangs, no Huis, no Tujias, no Mongols and definitely no Tibetans... all 56 were revealed to be Han Chinese, who make up more than 90 per cent of the country’s 1.3 billion people."

It's one thing for a network to make believe there's a Santa for the sake of kids. It's another to make believe actual events haven't occurred and to participate in fakery in the name of boosting a country's image.