NBC's Eurocentric Coverage Of The Opening Ceremony Makes Me Mad.

I've been sitting in front of the TV for nearly three hours. It is now almost midnight. I'm eagerly awaiting the entrance of the Taiwanese (Chinese Taipei) team into Olympic Stadium. In the meantime I've had to suffer through the seemingly endless list of nations I've never heard of march past my screen. Comoros?

As we wind down the S's, I can see on the convenient little ticker at the bottom of the screen that Taiwan is coming up. I just need to get past Syria and we're there. After the commentators make some useless observations about the civil war in that country, the Taiwanese team starts entering the left side of my TV. Then..we cut to a commercial. What the hell?

Taiwan doesn't have a small team. They are entering 44 athletes at the Olympics. Yet they are not given the live face time awarded much smaller countries like Liechtenstein and Bosnia/Herzegovina. Now that I think about it, I think virtually every Western European country was shown live while most of the countries given snippets of video were non-Western. Some Eastern countries are too big for NBC to ignore. Of course they had to show China and India. With a combined population of over 2 billion people they don't want to piss off a third of the world's population.

Though Taiwan is small country, it is one of the United States' largest trading partners. The little island is so important to us that we actually have a law that mandates our protection of Taiwan from its larger neighbor, even by war if necessary. Yet NBC made us sit through images of the beautiful people from tiny countries like Monaco and Luxembourg while ignoring Taiwan, a small country with a real chance of winning medals in multiple sports, okay badminton and table tennis.

So NBC, since you have a monopoly on airing the Olympics in the U.S., it is your duty to show all the diversity of countries that participate at this illustrious event. Even though most of your directors and cameramen are Caucasian, please give smaller non-Western countries some more screen time. Who knows? You might actually attract more viewers to your expensive programming.