NBC’s flair for the dramatic

NBC's flair for the dramatic could prompt a frustrating Olympic trend

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The father tried to maintain some semblance of composure – and succeeded, until the dismount – while the mother writhed in pain, as if she were watching her child undergo a horrible medical procedure.

In the end, everything worked out. The exercise went well, and the judges awarded a reasonable score. One would assume the parents' blood pressures went back to normal – or at least close to normal – and remained there until the next excruciating 60-second performance by their daughter.

That small snippet of the hundreds of hours of Olympic coverage being aired by NBC and its fellow TV family members sums up the network's approach to the Games. It's bad enough that popular finals competitions are withheld from viewers for airing during primetime "shows". It's worse that the entire tenor the coverage is tilted heavily toward the dramatic, and more specifically the American drama. It doesn't matter whether a Kazakh athlete's dreams are crushed, but if some volleyball player from Encino has a bad day, it's on par with the Lindbergh baby's kidnapping.

Go read the whole column.

It's NBC. Home of Today Show and parent of MSNBC, the "news organization" that brings you Laurence O'Donnel and F Chuck Todd.

NBC's coverage of the Olympics is akin to their drive-by style of news reporting. The Lindbergh baby kidnapping analogy is spot on. They're playing to an audience that they don't respect very much.

As long as the ratings are there, you can expect this kind of quality coverage to continue.