Much like most of the United States last night, I watched the Olympic opening ceremonies, delayed 12 hours, by the grace of the National Broadcasting Company (another complaint for another entry, maybe). During the March of Nations, the commentators, Matt Lauer and Bob Costas kept going on about how Chinese does not have an alphabet and, therefore, the sequence of countries in the march would be determined not by any "alphabetical" sequence.
Turns out, it went beyond that. NBC actually edited the sequence of the March of Nations so that the United States was near the end (whereas, in reality, it was somewhere in the middle). I don't know if this happens often or has happened in the past, but this strikes me as entirely unscrupulous. On the one hand, NBC commentators criticize censorship and other forms of government control of knowledge and information in China and, at the same time, their own network seems to be reworking entire opening ceremonies (and thus misrepresenting information to 300 million+ Americans) all for the sake of what? Higher network ratings? I'm not sure if that's as ominous as information control by the government, but it certainly is far more sleazy.
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