Olympics Media Bus Hits, Kills Bicyclist

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Journalist Has Twitter Suspended After Complaining About NBC’s Olympics Coverage

Attempting to silence one's critics online almost always results in a massive magnification of their complaints. Today's example comes via the British journalist Guy Adams, who spent hours on Friday bashing NBC's delayed stateside coverage of the Olympics as "disgusting money-grabbing" by "total buffoons." In one tweet from his rant, Adams wrote, "The man responsible for NBC pretending the Olympics haven't started yet is Gary Zenkel. Tell him what u think! Email: Gary.zenkel@nbcuni.com." Soon after, Adams found his account had been suspended — "for posting an individual's private information such as private email address," as Twitter later informed him. Whether the address in question was actually private is arguable, but the shaky application of the rule is only undermined by the fact that Twitter and NBC have a strategic partnership for the Games.

While Adams's account remains down, his cause has blown up.

In an e-mail to Twitter, obtained by Deadspin, Adams writes:

I'm of course happy to abide by Twitter's rules, now and forever. But I don't see how I broke them in this case: I didn't publish a private email address. Just a corporate one, which is widely available to anyone with access to Google, and is identical to one that all of the tens of thousands of NBC Universal employees share.

It's no more "private" than the address I'm emailing you from right now.

Either way, quite worrying that NBC, whose parent company are an Olympic sponsor, are apparently trying (and, in this case, succeeding) in shutting down the Twitter accounts of journliasts who are critical of their Olympic coverage.

Am I to presume, for example, that they decided to complain about me because of my recent article in the Indy's news page about their various failures?

His account of the saga can be seen here, and includes confirmation that NBC Sports filed a complaint to have his account removed for posting the "personal information of one of our executives." (Adams also appears to have retweeted a link to an illegal stream of the Opening Ceremony, but that message was not cited as a suspend-able offense by NBC or Twitter.)

According to Twitter's rules, private and confidential information includes "non-public, personal email addresses," while Zenkel's is clearly corporate, not personal. If it was ever private, it's not now. 

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So far, even the Olympics can’t budge our outdated TV models

Frustration with a lack of access, editing and the overall confusion about who can see what of the Olympics shows how frustrated consumers are about our outdated TV, but NBC has paid $1.18 billion to broadcast the games. Who is the consumer here?

Once again, NBC is irritating the heck out of millions of Americans by messing around with the Olympics. Once again, the decision to show the opening ceremony in prime time via a time delay has resulted in people accusing NBC of “not getting it,” and of thinking “it’s 1992.” Once again, the decision to edit the games has some sports fans irked about cuts NBC made in the opening ceremony.

And once again, U.S. consumers don’t get it. Sure, people are frustrated because they can’t easily stream the Olympics online without a cable subscription, and there will always be sports fans who don’t want the edited version of The Games with the life stories on athletes and dramatic cuts. But frankly, for now, NBC doesn’t really care what those people want.

How dare @NBCOlympics cut the 7/7 tribute from the #Olympics opening ceremony. Disgraceful. ow.ly/czaOk—
Jamie Klenetsky (@jamieklenetsky) July 28, 2012

NBC paid $1.18 billion for the right to broadcast the Olympics and it will be a cold day in hell before it dilutes the amount it can charge advertisers or the value it has to cable providers. In many ways, even though NBC depends on huge audiences to justify the rates it’s charging advertisers, it can afford to alienate some of them. And it’s worth noting that there are probably millions of happy families who watched the opening ceremony last night and had little idea it could be any other way.

In the U.S., people who want to stream are a highly vocal minority, but it’s a minority that is growing. And while NBC may not care that I — as one of the between 3.6 or 9 million cord cutters — couldn’t authenticate to see the opening ceremony via the web or streaming, maybe someone should.

NBC broadcast an edited and time-delayed version of the opening ceremony last night over the air, but I couldn’t see that either. I can’t get over-the-air TV since the switch from analog to digital TV signals in 2009, because my home just doesn’t seem to be in the right location. Even satellites don’t work. The only way I could watch NBC’s broadcast of the ceremony was if I paid for cable, but that’s not something I want to do just to watch a once-every-two-year event. And anyway, I shouldn’t have to buy cable to see the opening ceremony, since NBC is using the public airwaves for free to deliver broadcast TV. Glenn Fleishman via Twitter suggested that the FCC ought to investigate this, and maybe it should.

I believe FCC should look into NBC, which broadcasts over air, restricting Olympics video online to cable subscribers. Fundamentally wrong—
Glenn Fleishman (@GlennF) July 28, 2012

But really what I think needs to occur is a realization that until the business models right themselves in the TV industry, consumers, especially cord cutters, are going to get screwed out of some content. It’s not “fair,” but as the population of people who demand streaming grows, and they in turn are seen a valuable demographic to advertisers, then perhaps the next Summer Games will give consumers more of what they want, where and when they want it.

Image courtesy of Shutterstock user Padmayogini
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Olympics Organizers Filling Empty Seats With Students, Soldiers

Spectators at today's dressage event. (CARL COURT/AFP/GettyImages)

It's now the second day of the 2012 London Summer Olympic Games: China's already taken an early gold medal lead, Michael Phelps has been unseated as reigning swim king, but all anyone seems able to talk about are the empty seats everywhere. Yesterday, Britain's culture secretary Jeremy Hunt called the swathes of empty seats "very disappointing." London's Olympics organizers, still smarting from the whole GS4 security debacle, quickly launched an investigation while devising a seat-stuffing strategy that uses soldiers, security personnel, and local students.

This is somewhat normal for the Games, since most national teams are too busy in the opening days to show up and support their peers, while the vast majority of corporate seats and suites go unused until the more glamorous finals come around. But one Olympics spokesman told the Guardian that, "It's completely wrong to say this is a sponsors issue." Lord Sebastian Coe, the London Olympics head who'd earlier promised to "name and shame" any no-show sponsors, apparently doesn't mind using standby personnel to fill empty seats, though he's not quite ready to back a plan that would open up vacant seats to British fans.

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Weird Britannia: Live From the Opening Ceremony of the London Olympics

Start Slideshow An inflatable yellow submarine floats above artists performing during the opening ceremony of the London 2012 Olympic Games on July 27, 2012 at the Olympic stadium in London.

Olympic opening ceremonies don’t actually have a lot to do with sports. Sure, London's opening ceremony had nods to athletics — Tour de France champ Bradley Wiggins rang a giant bell at the beginning of the ceremony — but it’s really more of a mash-up pageant, attempting to tell entire story of British life and culture through director Danny Boyle's pop-culture-saturated brain.

The show began with a pastoral British countryside, and was then transformed into a coal-dust-laden Industrial Revolution landscape of chimneys and steam engines, all overseen by a mutton-chopped Kenneth Branagh. Then it really got weird: the Sergeant Pepper–era Beatles marched by, Mary Poppins and Voldemort made an appearance, and before long every British cultural touchstone from David Beckham to Mr. Bean made a cameo. Daniel Craig as James Bond escorted the Queen to a helicopter, where she (not really) parachuted into the arena. David Beckham steered a speedboat down the Thames. “Bohemian Rhapsody” played, though we found it funny that a clip from Wayne’s World accompanied it. (“You’re welcome for making that song popular again,” said North America.) There was a Stones song, and a Beatles song, and a song from the Prodigy, and a musical ode to the National Health Service. Hail Britannia!

When the fever lifted, the ceremony returned to normality with the march of Olympic athletes into the stadium. Later on, there would be fire. Check out the photos to get a taste of the madness.

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