Aug
14
The Beijing Olympics: the year of fakery
August 14, 2008
I came across this on Slashdot. “Viewing the 2008 Olympics opening ceremony online at NBC’s Olympics website, you can see that the order in which the countries were presented was very different from the actual order of the countries in the ceremony, as listed at Wikipedia. NBC skipped roughly 100 countries ahead, then jumped back and forth, apparently delaying the appearance of the United States in its home market until later in the broadcast.” So is this a case of unreality TV?
Oh well, I guess that they might as well fake the order to increase ratings as some of the fireworks we saw on the TV broadcast of the Olympic’s opening ceremony were actually computer generated.
While it’s normal for such a large event to have performers lip-synch their own songs and it was quite evident that all the performers at the opening ceremonies of the Olymics were, China went all Milli Vanilli on us and substituted the little girl who sang the Olympic theme song with a pretty young lady straight out of Disney’s It’s a Small World because she wasn’t cute enough for International TV audiences.
It also seems that the Chinese Government faked an agreement to allow people to protest and grant journalists to have open access as a number of would-be protesters are either jailed or missing and as many as 4 journalists have been roughed-up.
We also have fake birth certificates. The latest evidence came when Associated Press uncovered a November story from Xinhua, the Chinese government news agency, reporting that gymnist He Kexin was 13, and not 16 as the Chinese are claiming, which would make her ineligible for the Games. AP found the report on Xinhua’s Web site on Thursday morning; by the afternoon it was no longer accessible.
At least the athletes are real.
Doh!
Tags: Just Stuff
Comments
Search
Categories
- Brand Experience Stuff
- Business Stuff
- Community Stuff
- Customer Service Stuff
- Design Stuff
- Experience Design Stuff
- Funny Stuff
- Just Stuff
- Marketing Stuff
- Neat Stuff
- Retail Stuff
- Search Engine Stuff
- Sports Stuff
- Technology Stuff
- Web Stuff
