The #Nbcfail Olympics: Access, Liveness and the Public Interest

JPTV 1 (1) pp. 121–128 Intellect Limited 2013

Myles McNutt University of Wisconsin-Madison

The #NBCFail Olympics: Access, liveness and the public interest

Abstract Keywords This article explores the deeper meanings within social media criticism of NBC’s Olympic Games coverage of the London 2012 Olympic Games, focusing on the divide between broadcasting those social media users and what NBC perceives as their audience for prime- liveness time, tape-delayed broadcasts. While viewer frustration has been dismissed as a public interest selfish desire for instant gratification in an era of conspicuous consumption, it also NBC demonstrates the complicated relationship between NBC’s broadcasting strategies Twitter and liveness, which creates concerns over access. Similarly, although viewer frustration has been positioned in opposition to the economic imperative of commercial broadcasting, it seems necessary to engage with the notion of the public interest in the light of NBC’s broadcast history and the nationalized appeal of the Olympic Games. In their rush to characterize #NBCFail as evidence of Twitter’s mob mentality, analysts fail to ask what this backlash might mean for the Olympics’ place within the larger spectrum of broadcast programming in the post-network era, and for NBC’s responsibility to viewers when it comes to this global event (and broadcasting in general).

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When NBC’s coverage of the London 2012 Opening Ceremonies began, the latter had already ended. The tape-delayed broadcast allowed for inserted commercial breaks, excised segments (so as to fit into a single three-hour block in prime time) and an expedited parade of nations (with some countries earning only a few seconds of air time), on the whole delivering a broadcast that best suited the prime-time, nationwide audience in the eyes of the network. This kind of tape-delayed broadcast is standard issue with NBC’s Olympic broadcasting strategies in recent years, but this year was different. As the first Olympics outside of North America in the era where social media is decidedly ‘mainstream’, anyone who spent time on Twitter or Facebook on the afternoon in question could see their friends’ tweets and status updates about an Opening Ceremony that they could not see until hours later. While some of these friends could be in the United Kingdom, or elsewhere overseas, they could even be close to home: CTV, the primary Olympics broadcaster in Canada, chose to air the Opening Ceremonies live during the afternoon. NBC’s choice to air the Opening Ceremonies on tape-delay served as the first bellwether moment for the #NBCFail hashtag, a Twitter meme that gained considerable steam after mainstream outlets picked up on the growing discontent. It would prove a versatile term for responding to NBC’s blanket strategy of saving marquee events in swimming and track and field for tape- delayed, highlights-style prime-time broadcasts where advertising revenues would be higher. The perils of this temporal displacement were most clearly captured during a prime-time broadcast in which NBC aired a commercial promoting the appearance of 100m backstroke gold medallist Missy Franklin on the Today show (1952–) before they showed her winning the race in question (Yomtov 2012). While the media picked up on this and other gaffes, their discussion of #NBCFail often failed to ask larger questions about the nature of this viewer frustration. In a collection of articles pushing back against social media criticism, writers from Variety (Wallenstein 2012), The Hollywood Reporter (Goodman 2012) and CNN (Bark 2012) defend NBC’s decisions as logical and business-oriented. However, in doing so they portray those using the hashtag to criticize NBC’s coverage as ‘tweeters [who] don’t want to wait even extra seconds for [information]’ (Bark 2012), while sports journalist Will Leitch seeks to educate ignorant Twitter users regarding the fact that ‘NBC is in the business of making money. You know this, right?’ (Leitch 2012). In this article, I will explore the deeper meanings within criticisms of NBC’s coverage, and in this divide between social media users and what NBC perceives as their audience for prime-time broadcasts. While viewer frustration has been dismissed as a selfish desire for instant gratification in an era of conspicuous consumption, it also demonstrates the complicated relationship between NBC’s broadcasting strategies and liveness, which are limited by concerns over access. Similarly, although viewer frustration has been positioned in opposition to the economic imperative of commercial broadcasting, it seems necessary to engage with the notion of the public interest in the light of NBC’s broadcast history and the nationalized appeal of the Olympic Games. In their rush to characterize #NBCFail as evidence of Twitter’s mob mentality, analysts fail to ask what this backlash might mean for the Olympics’ place within the larger spectrum of broadcast programming in the post-network era, and for NBC’s responsibility to viewers when it comes to this global event (and broadcasting in general).

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Access, controlled NBC’s coverage of the London Olympics took three forms: daily coverage of certain live events across NBC Universal’s collection of broadcast and cable channels (NBC, MSNBC, Bravo, NBC Sports), live online streaming of nearly all events on NBCOlympics.com, and a three-hour prime-time broadcast which focused primarily on marquee events (swimming, diving and track and field most prominently). On the surface, it appears to offer something for everyone: cable subscribers could enjoy all-day coverage featuring a wide range of sports (including channels devoted to showing live soccer, boxing and tennis), diehard followers could choose to stream any sport or event of their choosing online, while more casual viewers could tune in during the evenings and catch the most talked-about events (albeit after much of the rest of the world had talked about them). In this division, NBC targets three different sectors of its potential audience. On cable, NBC appeals to people who generally watch sports on television: it is not a coincidence that the three sports given their own channels are sports with existing broadcasting traditions in the US market. Online, mean- while, NBC hopes to appeal to the tech-savvy viewers who are active social media users and worried about having results spoiled. Finally, the prime-time broadcast focuses on a mass audience that may not always watch sports, but treats the Olympics as a larger media event to be consumed every two years. These different platforms demonstrate NBC’s adoption of post-network logics of narrowcasting and technological convergence in their programming strategies (Lotz 2007, Jenkins 2006), responding to changes in the industry with changes in how the Olympics are distributed to viewers. The presence of live streaming within this model would suggest that concerns over tape-delay were overblown, but the liveness of NBC’s online streams comes with conditions. Streams of events that would be featured during the prime-time broadcasts – and only streams of those events – could only be watched live as they happened, without the ability to pause (in case you have to go to the bathroom) or watch an archived version of the stream later in the day (in case you do not have an hour in the middle of the work day to sit in front of a computer and watch swimming). NBC’s online streaming site was also limited in two important ways: not only would the necessity for high Internet bandwidth – or smart phones and tablets with data plans capa- ble of streaming media – exclude some potential viewers, but NBC’s site also required you to log in through your cable provider, meaning cord cutters – or those unable to afford cable – would be unable to experience any Olympic events live. Jane Feuer’s now definitive ‘The Concept of Live Television’ argues that ‘notions of “liveness” lend a sense of flow which overcomes extreme frag- mentation of space’, which allows programming like the Olympic Games to ‘insinuate itself into our lives’ (Feuer 1983: 19). Remarking on how new technology of instant replay and computer graphics have changed live broadcasting, Feuer even mentions the 1980 Olympics, arguing that ‘anyone who watched […] had to be aware that the idea of an event happening once is no longer a part of this highly packaged occasion’ (Feuer 1983: 15, emphasis in original). However, Feuer also asks an important question: ‘must the real spec- tator assume the position the text structures for him/her?’ (Feuer 1983: 19). In the case of NBC’s prime-time Olympics coverage, viewers were positioned as though they were experiencing these events for the first time, despite the fact

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that local news broadcasts, Internet news sites and social media updates could have already revealed the results. Feuer suggests that we consider television as ‘constituted by a dialectic of segmentation and flow’ (Feuer 1983: 15), and NBC’s coverage strategy calls direct attention to the former: the #NBCFail hashtag was in part a response to the segmentation of the viewing audience, revealing not simply the fact that liveness was being mediated – which is itself uneventful – but also that access to that liveness was being limited by factors beyond simply a time delay. In other words, the concern with NBC’s coverage is not that it was not entirely live, but rather that said coverage actively constrained liveness in order to manufacture an audience for its prime-time broadcast. What is inter- esting about NBC’s prime-time coverage is the way it adhered to the basic values of liveness while simultaneously betraying them. On the one hand, NBC preserves an element of liveness by broadcasting events that aired earlier in the day as if they have not already happened, attempting to retain suspense and give prime-time viewers the same experience as those who streamed the event live earlier in the day (provided that the results have not been spoiled for them). However, at the same time, NBC actively edits and manipulates those events to fit into the broadcast window, including adding commercial breaks and skipping competitors who will not factor into the race for the medals; in the end, their prime-time coverage resembles a reality docudrama more than a sports broadcast. For those viewers who have the option to choose, NBC’s tape-delay broadcasts are simply one part of a larger coverage strategy. However, for those who do not have the same level of choice, NBC controls how they see the Olympics, and therefore dictates what they are interested in and how they are allowed to consume it. In prime time, the Olympics are a general broadcasting event, distilled into clear, familiar narratives of American athletes fighting for gold; online, the Olympics are a specialized sporting event appeal- ing to niche audiences who have the time, the resources and the interest in viewing sports without the narrative framing offered by prime-time broadcasts. However, should all viewers have the opportunity to sample the wide range of events, and to witness a global competition live as it happens? While to suggest that the meaning of the Olympics hangs in the balance based on NBC’s programming strategies may be reductive, their decisions nonetheless dictate how most viewers are able to – or allowed to – experience the Olympic Games. Although the backlash against NBC has often been portrayed as naïve viewers who feel entitled to live broadcasts, this conflict also speaks to these concerns regarding access, and to what degree NBC’s decision to put live broadcasting of most Olympic events behind a pay wall shapes the meaning of the Olympics Games – and television in general – to different audiences within a post-network broadcasting environment.

‘The numbers speak for themselves’ When confronted with this conflict, however, NBC was focused only on their most basic metric for success: ratings. Looking to downplay the impact of #NBCFail, executives touted the record viewership for the tape-delayed Opening Ceremony and the first night of coverage: responding to the fact that ‘it got a little noisy and loud out there’, executive producer Jim Bell assured that NBC ‘can understand and appreciate that people are passionate about things’, but ultimately concluded that ‘I think the numbers speak for

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themselves’ (Guthrie 2012). Along similar lines, Variety’s Andrew Wallenstein called for a backlash against the backlash, deducing that ‘a) if more people are watching the Olympics than ever, then […] b) more people are happy with the Olympics than ever […] c) doesn’t that make the disproportionate amount of coverage about those who are unhappy unwarranted?’ (Wallenstein 2012). Wallenstein goes on to conclude that ‘what seems to be happening here is that a vocal minority of naysayers are drowning out a largely satisfied but silent majority. And for that we have social media to thank, specifically Twitter.’ Effectively, both Bell and Wallenstein are arguing that the high ratings for NBC’s tape-delayed Olympics coverage suggests that people are happy with that coverage, and that Twitter and other forms of social media reflect a vocal minority (which Wallenstein argues was given unfair prominence through journalists disproportionately reporting on #NBCFail). Of course, NBC’s ratings also reflect a vocal minority given the realities of the small statistical samples of the Nielsen ratings. Additionally, and perhaps more importantly, is viewing a particular programme the same thing as being satisfied with it? Do high ratings automatically justify NBC’s programming decisions, even if some of those viewers were not given a choice of how they could watch those programmes based on issues of access? And should NBC’s ultimate goal be the accumulation of mass amounts of viewers, or the comprehensive coverage of an international sporting event? While it would be unfair to ignore NBC’s economic imperative given the high cost of purchasing the broadcasting rights to the games – US$1.2 billion for London – it also seems unfair to reference this imperative as though it wholly justifies NBC’s strategies. Although rarely evoked in a modern context, the concept of the public interest remains – like liveness – a key part of broadcasting history. While Newton M. Minow’s infamous 1961 speech as chairman of the Federal Communications Commission is remembered for his evocative metaphor of television as a ‘vast wasteland’, in 2011 Minow reasserted that

… those were not the two words I intended to be remembered. The two words I wanted to endure were public interest. To me that meant, as it still means, that we should constantly ask: What can communications do for our country? For the common good? For the American people? (Minow 2011, emphasis in original)

NBC’s historical ties to the nation as its first broadcast network (see Hilmes 2007) are actually prominently reinforced through its status as America’s Olympic broadcaster, as the Olympics and other international sporting events are one of the last spaces in which the ‘nation’ remains a prominent figure in an increasingly fragmented, narrowcasted environment. While this does not mean that NBC, as a commercial entity, has a stated goal of serving the public interest, its choice to retain the Olympic broadcasting rights is an attempt to retain a close relationship to the nation (which we could also see in their broadcast of NFL Sunday Night Football). It is true that few who used the #NBCFail hashtag would have conceived of their tweets as a call for NBC to return to the public interest, but their interest in changing the nature of coverage – and specifically speaking out against the economic imperatives of tape-delayed, commercial-interrupted broadcasts – opens a debate that is more complex than live versus tape-delay. Whereas some analysts seek to limit the influence of Twitter by dismissing #NBCFail as an angry mob, the idea of even a small percentage of viewers

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actively criticizing or even considering broadcasting strategies as a collective group is reflective of the way social media discourse has the potential to influence how we understand television. Reframed through the public interest, #NBCFail is viewers taking an active role in the television programming they experience, and having an influence in how that programming is framed and understood, which should be something we celebrate rather than vilify (even if we need to simultaneously separate the wheat from the chaff). NBC’s decision to offer a live stream of the closing ceremonies – something they did not offer for the Opening Ceremonies – does not solve the concerns over liveness and access raised above, but it does indicate their evolving strategy in the light of public concerns, and it seems reductive to suggest the network was only responding to the volume and not the sentiment.

‘We are a commercial broadcaster’ While some could argue that the Olympics may not inherently operate in the public interest, athletic competition on an international scale can inspire younger generations to aspire to lofty goals and learn important values of sportsmanship, while the Olympics also reaffirm the imagined community of a nation, theoretically allowing all members of a particular country to rally together around their own. The latter factor creates a sense of ownership, wherein the possessive ‘America’s Olympic Network’ – a moniker NBC often uses – creates expectations over what kind of coverage is available and how that coverage serves certain publics. The resultant conversations cannot be reduced to bitter social media users, but must instead be considered as a space in which the contract between broadcasters and viewers for both the Olympic Games and television programming in general is being negotiated. Perhaps this is why it was so disappointing that #NBCFail did not see a prominent revival later that summer, when the Paralympic Games went by without a single minute of live coverage on American television. In fact, NBC did not even bid for the rights to the London Paralympics: they were purchased by the US Olympic Committee after no network or channel was willing to bid for them, and NBC simply stepped in to broadcast five 60–90-minute highlight packages on its NBC Sports channel (Boudway 2012). Here is an event that, like the Olympic Games, defines the inspirational efforts at the heart of international competition, with the same potential to rally around athletes young and old representing their country. The differ- ence, according to NBC Olympics president Gary Zenkel, was a struggle to engage sponsors so soon after the Olympic Games: ‘Commercial support is very difficult. It is also fatigued and very difficult to re-engage the sponsor base to support the coverage’ (Sweeney 2012). When pushed further, Zenkel defended their limited coverage with a simple statement of fact: ‘We are a commercial broadcaster.’ While this might explain why NBC or any other broadcaster makes certain programming decisions, it fails to reflect the historical negotiation of commercial interests with the public interest, and the complicated appeal – and carefully policed access – to new kinds of viewership in a post-network era. While the dreams of television serving the public interest as its dominant mode never came to fruition in the American context, and PBS’s status as the only broadcaster operating explicitly in the public interest is continually under political scrutiny, the expressed criticism of NBC’s practices on a national and international stage gives us an opportunity to explore the role of the public in

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shaping and framing not only the broadcasting of the Olympics Games, but American broadcasting in general.

References Bark, E. (2012), ‘Is it really #NBCfail?’, CNN, 30 July, http://articles.cnn. com/2012-07-30/opinion/opinion_bark-olympics-twitter_1_nbc-sports- network-peacock-network-bob-costas. Accessed 15 September 2012. Boudway, I. (2012), ‘London’s Paralympics: A Tough Sell in the U.S.’, Business Week, 11 September, http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2012-09-11/ nbc-wasnt-alone-in-passing-on-the-paralympics. Accessed 18 September 2012. Feuer, J. (1983), ‘The Concept of Live Television: Ontology as Ideology’, in E. Ann Kaplan (ed.), Regarding Television: Critical Approaches – An Anthology, Los Angeles: American Film Institute, pp. 12–22. Goodman, T. (2012), ‘Tim Goodman: Why I’m Not Complaining About NBC’s Olympics Coverage’, Hollywood Reporter, 8 August, http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/olympics-2012-nbc-coverage-ryan-seacrest- 359193. Accessed 10 August 2012. Guthrie, M. (2012), ‘NBC Olympics EP Defends Tape Delay, Opening Ceremony Edits and “Today” Ratings’, Hollywood Reporter, 1 August, http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/nbc-olympics-delay-opening- ceremony-edits-ratings-jim-bell-357330. Accessed 2 August 2012. Hilmes, M. (ed.) (2007), NBC: America’s Network, Los Angeles: University of California Press. Jenkins, H. (2006), Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide, New York: New York University Press. Leitch, W. (2012), ‘NBC is ignoring Twitter Diehards and Rightfully So’, Sports on Earth, 31 July, http://sportsonearthblog.com/2012/07/31/nbc-is- ignoring-twitter-diehards-and-rightfully-so/. Accessed 1 August 2012 [no longer available ] Lotz, A. (2007) The Television will be Revolutionized, New York: New York University Press. Minow, Newton M. (2011), ‘A Vaster Wasteland’, The Atlantic, April, http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2011/04/a-vaster- wasteland/308418/1/. Accessed 3 October 2012. Sweeney, M. (2012), ‘NBC blames “sponsor fatigue” for limited Paralympics coverage’, The Guardian, 28 September, http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/ 2012/sep/28/nbc-sponsors-paralympic-coverage. Accessed 4 October 2012. Wallenstein, A. (2012), ‘The myth of the #NBCfail backlash’, Variety, 31 July, http://weblogs.variety.com/on_the_air/2012/07/olympics-backlash- nbcfail-twitter.html. Accessed 1 August 2012. Yomtov, J. (2012), ‘#NBCfail: Network spoils itself again with nighttime promo’, USA Today, 30 July, http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/sports/ olympics/london/story/2012-07-30/nbc-fail-spoils-missy-franklin-race- with-promo/56597752/1. Accessed 18 September 2012.

Suggested citation McNutt, M. (2013), ‘The #NBCFail Olympics: Access, liveness and the public interest’, Journal of Popular Television, 1: 1, pp. 121–128, doi: 10.1386/ jptv.1.1.121_1

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Contributor details Myles McNutt is a Ph.D. candidate in Media and Cultural Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and can be found on Twitter as @Memles. Contact: Department of Communication Arts, 821 University Avenue, Madison, WI, 53706, USA. E-mail: [email protected]

Myles McNutt has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work in the format that was submitted to Intellect Ltd.

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