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Politically Fraught Beijing Olympics Make Tokyo Look Tame

NBC was presented with unprecedented challenges when covering the Tokyo Summer Olympics amid COVID-19 but without spectators in the stands last year. But the U.S. Olympic TV partner is probably looking back almost wistfully on those comparatively straightforward Games as the politically fraught Beijing Winter Olympics rapidly approaches on Feb. 4.To get more news about 2022 beijing winter olympic games, you can visit shine news official website.

The Chinese staging of the global sporting event, taking place amid a worldwide surge of the highly contagious omicron variant inside an authoritarian country bent on total elimination of the virus, is shaping up to be a precarious balancing act between business interests and journalistic integrity for the broadcasters that paid billions for this privilege.NBC is basically in business with the International Olympic Committee and they have a clear interest in promoting the event; but at the same time, they are a news organization which makes claims to journalistic integrity — so it’s an odd place to be,” says Jules Boykoff, a professor at Pacific University who specializes in sports politics (and who also once played on the U.S. Olympic soccer team).

In December, the Biden Administration announced that it would stage a diplomatic boycott of the Beijing Winter Games because of China’s use of forced labor and concentration camps to suppress its Muslim minority population in the western Chinese province of Xinjiang — human rights abuses that the U.S. has declared a genocide. Since then, eight other U.S. allies, including Britain, Japan, Germany and Australia, have joined the largely symbolic boycott.

For its part, NBC executives say they are going into the games clear-eyed, and expect to address human rights issues, China’s stifling of the press, and the pandemic, although as one would expect, that will be secondary to covering the sporting events themselves.

“We are going to be focusing on telling the stories of Team USA and covering the competition. But the world, as we all know, is a really complicated place right now, and we understand that there are some difficult issues regarding the host nation,” Molly Solomon, the executive producer and president of NBC Olympics production, speaking during a press event Jan. 19. “So our coverage will provide perspective on China’s place in the world and the geopolitical context in which these Games are being held.”“I think it’s always important to remember that we have a record of not shying away from these topics,” Solomon added. “Not in 2008, the last time the Games were in China, in Sochi and PyeongChang. And most recently, we covered COVID and the athlete protests in Tokyo.”

To that end, NBC has tapped Andy Browne, editorial director of the Bloomberg New Economy Forum, as well as Jing Tsu, a Yale professor of China Studies, to join NBC’s team in Beijing and provide context on the host country.

But that context may come with close scrutiny from the Chinese government itself.

The host country’s actions closer to the Games themselves have raised alarm among onlookers, such as Beijing organizers’ requirement that all athletes download a smartphone app to monitor their health status — an app which researchers at the University of Toronto recently revealed contains a “devastating” security flaw that could allow surveillance of users’ data and messages. Several Olympic teams, including the U.S., U.K. and Canada, have advised their athletes to leave their personal devices at home and to use only “burner” phones while in China.

A source at a U.S. news organization that is planning to have reporters cover the games told The Hollywood Reporter that they are advising their staff on the ground in Beijing to use burner phones as well.

Of course, China’s strict COVID protocols, combined with security concerns, may also serve to hinder critical coverage by limiting the number of people even able to cover such news. For the first time, NBC will not have any announcers on-site in Beijing, instead having them call all the events from the company’s Olympics headquarters in Stamford, Connecticut.

While there will be studio hosts on-site in Beijing, and NBC News does have a Beijing bureau with some reporters able to report from the ground, China’s closed Olympics “loop” means that access to anyone outside of Olympics venues will be nonexistent, and even access to athletes and others inside the loop will be extraordinarily limited.