Games People Play: From Paris to Beijing to Iraq

On the best of days, "One World, One Dream" -- the theme of the XXIX Summer Games -- was an ambitious slogan devised for China's coming out party onto the world stage. But not even Olympic Peace, that Greek tradition for armistice that dates back to the games of 8th century BC -- and was formally sanctioned by the U.N. Assembly in 1993 -- remained intact as Russia bombed Georgia over the weekend. What began as a week where the frivolous heiress of The Simple Life remade herself while successfully mocking John McCain's ad attack on Barack Obama's popularity, quickly shifted gears from the ridiculous to the sublime with the military commission thumbing its nose at BushWorld, handing down a 66-month sentence to Osama Bin Laden's driver, Salim Hamdan, minus 5 years and 1 month for time served, rather than the 30-year sentence the administration demanded. The rest of the week was no less unkind to Mr. Bush: Tuesday saw the publication of Pulitzer prize-winning reporter Ron Suskind's The Way of The World, asserting that a key intelligence document linking Saddam Hussein with Al Qaeda was forged by the CIA, under orders from on high. And, despite the FBI's pronouncement that its case against Bruce E. Ivins was closed, ABC's role in reporting on the anthrax case came under growing scrutiny by week's end. But let's not get ahead of ourselves. The Olympics -- and NBC's coverage of the event -- is an inestimable accomplishment. Its size and scope will re-calibrate and anticipate how media is consumed and distributed. Let the games begin.

In the run up to the Summer Games China announced with nationalist pride that it had overtaken the U.S. as the largest global population on the Internet. It does get points off, of course, for offering a censored Internet. The larger point is that technological prowess has become a benchmark, right up there with economic and military strength. While early reviews of the Opening Ceremonies praised the artistry of Zhang Yimou, NBC's domestic coverage was not given a pass. Avid sports fan Rafat Ali of Paid Content was among the first to express his discontent that rather have Live with Bob Costas and Matt Lauer, it was Live with Regis & Kathie Lee. Given the option of broadcasting the event live and repeating it in prime time, NBC chose to offer tape delay to its millions of viewers. While it didn't appear to suffer ratings-wise -- its audience of 34.2M was a record for any non-U.S. Olympic opening ceremony -- it mightily pissed off fanatics who complained that they were unable to share the event as it unfolded with their friends worldwide. (Unless they were able to watch CBC live on cable.) On the plus side, Web traffic skyrocketed; whereas Athens saw 7M pageviews back in 2004, NBCOlympics.com realized 70M pageviews that Friday -- a 1000% increase. But this boon of added Internet attention has given rise to some of the most virulent criticism for NBC. Silicon Alley Insider -- among other publications -- sought to good-naturedly provide its readers with a round-up of links to find streams for those sports NBCOlympics.com was not offering -- gymnastics, volleyball, and swimming among them. It helpfully sized up Dutch, China, Saudi urls, finding Russia's offerings (!) at the top. The following day it published a takedown notice by the IOC, which has instantly become the sports version of the RIAA. NBC is only offering content that has first been on broadcast television; only then will it make the event available online. Said one poster on SAI: "NBC is making pirates of honest people."

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This post originally appeared at JackMyers.com.