“Is there a more beautiful phrase,” Jim Geraghty asks his readers at National Review, “than ‘cataclysmic loss of audience’?”
Geraghty shares Dan Wetzel’s term for the good news that viewership of NBC’s coverage of the Winter Olympics in Beijing hit “a record low for the Opening Ceremony.”
“Through the first four nights of competition,” reports the Associated Press, “NBC is on track for the lowest-rated Winter Games in history.”
What’s going on? Americans are voting with their eyeballs! And TV remotes.
An Axios-Momentive poll shows why: “Seven in 10 survey respondents disapprove of allowing China to host these Olympics.”
“The host country, China,” explains Yahoo columnist Dan Wetzel, “is a serious problem.”
Wetzel called China’s use of a Uyghur athlete to light the Olympic torch “a propaganda prop to cover up a campaign of slavery, torture, forced abortions and internment in reeducation camps.”
“Some Americans want U.S. corporations to take a stand as well,” informs FightThirtyEight, the polling website. “When asked whether they think ‘companies should withdraw their advertisements for the February 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics in response to human rights violations by the Chinese government,’ 54 percent of U.S. adults said probably or definitely yes. . . .”
One sponsor, Coca-Cola, “has dialed back its marketing efforts outside of China.” The Atlanta Journal-Constitution notes that “soda aisles in grocery stores are bereft of Olympics-themed displays” and “the main page of Coke’s U.S. consumer website made no mention of the Games.”
“Congratulations to the athletes,” offers a Boston.com reader, “but the pomp and circumstance can’t hide what’s really happening there.”
