By Jim Geraghty
Tuesday,
February 08, 2022
Dear readers, is there a more beautiful
phrase this morning than “cataclysmic
loss of audience”?
NBC is
facing a cataclysmic loss of audience for the 2022 Winter Olympics as
viewership tanked for Friday’s Opening Ceremony, averaging just 16 million.
It is a
record low for the Opening Ceremony (20.1 million for 1988 in Calgary was the
previous record) and a whopping 43 percent below the 2018 Games in South Korea
that notched 28.3 million viewers despite also dealing with a less than
advantageous Asian time zone for American audiences.
It comes
on the heels of Thursday’s ratings disaster that saw just 7.7 million people
tune in, dramatically below same-night audiences of 2018 (16 million) and 2014
from Russia (20.02 million).
The Associated Press elaborates: “Through the
first four nights of competition, NBC is on track for the lowest-rated Winter
Games in history. . . . Thursday night’s audience of 8
million marks the smallest primetime Olympics audience on record, surpassing
the 9 million that tuned in for the closing ceremony of the Tokyo Games.”
Discussions about whether Americans should
watch this year’s Winter Olympics or boycott them often veer into what people
think of the Olympics themselves. I won’t be watching, but I don’t
begrudge anyone for tuning in to cheer on Team USA. I actually like that, once every four years, we get really fired up
about downhill skiing, figure skating, curling, etc.
It isn’t the athletes’ fault that the IOC
selected Beijing — not even a particularly cold or snowy city! — to host an
Olympics for the second time in 14 years. It is not even NBC’s fault, although
apparently the network’s billion-dollar investment in broadcasting the
games makes it a hostage–partner to whatever propaganda the Chinese
government chooses to present.
Pittsburgh Tribune-Review hockey
columnist Tim Benz doubts that viewers are boycotting China in significant
numbers: “I’m not sure
the average American refusing to watch luge on a Tuesday night genuinely
qualifies as a grand political action. . . . C’mon. If the Steelers had their first preseason game in China
next August, it would pull a 30 share in Pittsburgh.” But that’s an unfair
measuring stick. If the Steelers held their first preseason game within
the reactor core of the Yongbyon Nuclear Facility in North Korea,
Steelers fans would still watch. Pittsburgh Dad would do a whole video on how the radiation was healthy and would
turn T. J. Watt into the Incredible Hulk. (Love you, Steelers fans!)
Benz points to NHL players not
participating (eh, maybe), the time difference (eh, it’s not much different
from Tokyo or Pyeongchang, South Korea), wonders if patriotism is perceived as
too uncool these days, and observes that, “The Olympics are a two-week-long
network television miniseries in an era when no one watches network television
anymore.”
On paper, that last argument makes sense,
but there’s the glaring exception of this year’s wild NFL playoff
games, which generated monster ratings for three straight
weekends.
One other curious factor is that certain
American companies that are Olympic sponsors are soft-pedaling or cutting back
their efforts this year: “In
Atlanta, soda aisles in grocery stores are bereft of Olympics-themed displays
[from Coca-Cola]. As the opening ceremony unfolded in Beijing on Friday, the
main page of Coke’s U.S. consumer website made no mention of the Games.” On National Review’s home page today, Michael Mazza scoffs that Coke and other Olympic sponsors “are telling
both Beijing and the IOC that, despite corporate commitments to uphold human
rights, all they really care about is making a buck.”
What shifted — besides Covid-19 and the
lack of spectators for the second straight Olympics — is that the IOC is no
longer getting caught in an awkward spot between autocratic regimes and the
democratic West. The IOC is now clearly on the side of the autocratic
regimes. It’s one thing for the IOC to fail to stand up for de facto
hostage Peng Shuai; we’re used to such cowardice. But it’s
another thing for the IOC to voluntarily participate in the propaganda effort, as our Maddy Kearns reports:
In
Beijing, Peng Shuai, the Chinese tennis player, gave an interview with the
French sports newspaper L’Equipe while a Chinese Olympic
official stood nearby. When asked about her sexual assault allegations against
a former high-ranking member of the Chinese Communist Party, Shuai said that
international concerns about her safety and whereabouts had been “an enormous
misunderstanding.”
Shuai also
had a face-to-face meeting with the president of the International Olympic
Committee, Thomas Bach, which no doubt is supposed to alleviate international
concern for the tennis star. When asked whether or not the IOC believes Peng’s
speech is being controlled, the IOC spokesman told the press conference that
while they were pursuing “personal and quiet diplomacy,” “It’s [not] for us to
be able to judge, in one way, just as it’s not for you to judge either.”
How can you feel good about the Olympics
after reading something like that?
Jules Boykoff, the author of five books on
the Olympic Games, wrote in Politico yesterday:
The
authoritarian challenge to democracy and human rights is arguably the defining
geopolitical story of our time. Rather than oppose this trend, the IOC seems to
be participating in it. Bach says his group’s primary “responsibility is to run the Games in
accordance with the Olympic Charter.” But that charter speaks of “promoting a
peaceful society concerned with the preservation of human dignity” — goals that
feel impossible to square with the IOC’s unwillingness to engage with critics
and call out human rights violations. Faced with an opportunity to align their
sentiments and actions, the overlords of the Olympics have instead accelerated
the Games’ years-long shift into an economic juggernaut and ideological black
hole with sport appended to its flank.
Americans could grit their teeth and just
live with an Olympic games hosted in Sochi, Russia, or Beijing the first time,
or Sarajevo in socialist Yugoslavia back in 1984. But this? This is way beyond
the pale.
Bad News: The Deer in Your Backyard Just
Refuse to Get Vaccinated
A point in my
recent cover piece:
Another major complication with the
natural spillover theory is that no one in China has been able to find
SARS-CoV-2 naturally occurring in animals in China — or at least, that is what
Chinese health authorities are telling the world. A detailed analysis by
Antonio Regalado in MIT Technology Review in March 2021 noted
that “no food animal has been identified as a reservoir for the pandemic virus.
That’s despite efforts by China to test tens of thousands of animals, including
pigs, goats, and geese, according to Liang Wannian, who leads the Chinese side
of the research team. No one has found a ‘direct progenitor’ of the virus, he
says, and therefore the pandemic ‘remains an unsolved mystery.’”
As we know, SARS-CoV-2 is quite contagious
among human beings. So why is this super-contagious virus so difficult to find
in a bat?
As it turns out, SARS-CoV-2 isn’t just
contagious among human beings; by 2020, we knew that the kinds of animals that
Americans keep as pets could
catch Covid-19, and by 2021, we’d seen evidence
that significant
percentages of pets were testing positive for Covid-19.
The New York Times, late
Monday, offered this
fascinating look at the rapid spread of Covid-19 among white-tailed deer:
In late 2020, the coronavirus silently
stalked Iowa’s white-tailed deer. The virus infected large bucks and leggy
yearlings. It infiltrated a game preserve in the southeastern corner of the
state and popped up in free-ranging deer from Sioux City to Dubuque.
When scientists sifted through bits of
frozen lymph node tissue — harvested from unlucky deer killed by hunters or
cars — they found that more than 60 percent of the deer sampled in December
2020 were infected.
If SARS-CoV-2 is spreading so quickly and
widely among deer . . . once again, why is this virus so
hard to find in bats in China? Why is it so hard to find in any animals in
China? (Or did some Chinese investigators find the virus occurring in nature
and cover it up, because they didn’t want to have to shut down all the wet
markets?)
You know what would explain why SARS-CoV-2
can’t be found naturally occurring in bats in China? If it was a bat
coronavirus that had been altered through gain-of-function research in a
laboratory, making it slightly genetically different from all of the other bat
coronaviruses existing in nature, and more contagious among human beings! Just sayin’!
Separately, there’s another question: Most
deer don’t come within six feet of human beings, or anywhere close to that . .
. so, how are these deer catching the virus?
How humans are transmitting the virus to
deer remains an open question. “It’s definitely a mystery to me how they’re
getting it,” said Dr. Angela Bosco-Lauth, a zoonotic disease expert at Colorado
State University.
There are many theories, none entirely
satisfying. An infectious hunter might encounter a deer, Dr. Mubareka noted,
but “if they’re good at hunting,” she added, “it’s a terminal event for the
deer.”
If an infected hiker “sneezes and the wind
is blowing in the right direction, it could cause an unlucky event,” said Dr.
Tony Goldberg, a veterinary epidemiologist at the University of
Wisconsin-Madison. Or if people feed deer from their porch, they could be
sharing more than just food.
But once one deer is infected, it is easy
to see how it could quickly spread, as the Times offers this
lovely detail: “Wild deer are social — traveling in herds, frequently nuzzling
noses and engaging in polygamy — and swap saliva through shared salt licks.”
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