The 2020 Tokyo Paralympics get underway with the Opening Ceremony tonight. If you live in the United States, however, you probably had no clue (unless you’re related to someone from Team USA, or you experienced the Google shower of Paralympic pictograms on your computer screen).
Of course, media coverage of the Paralympics is scant in the best of times. But with the Delta variant, the evacuation in Afghanistan, the earthquake in Haiti, the floods in Tennessee, and wildfires still raging everywhere, the Games are competing against an unusually large number of other major events for coverage.
That said, just as NBC owns the broadcasting rights to the Olympics, it does so for the Paralympics. But the reason you probably had no clue it gets underway tonight is that NBC gave the Paralympics only a fraction of the promotional hype it gave the Olympics. And this disparity will affect coverage of the events as well, with NBC planning to air only 200 hours of Paralympic competition on its main channels, whereas it aired 7,000 hours of Olympic competition.
What’s more, NBC will air almost all of this Paralympic coverage on its cable stations, namely NBCSN and the Olympic Channel. It is hyping 1000 hours of streaming coverage on Peacock and the NBC Sports digital platform. But my streaming experience during the Olympics was such that I won’t even bother trying this time around.
Of course, nothing personifies this media disinterest quite like NBC’s refusal even to send B-list anchors to cover the Paralympics. By glaring contrast, its coverage of the Olympics was such an all-hands-on-deck undertaking, NBC even dispatched Lester Holt, anchor of Nightly News, to report breaking news happening in America from Tokyo.
Unsurprisingly, advocates for the disabled are accusing NBC of discrimination. Alas, such accusations are as much a quadrennial feature as complaints about host cities not being fully prepared. Of course, Covid has precluded all such complaints.
But iPINIONS is on record defending NBC’s limited coverage. With respect to the 2012 London Paralympics, I argued accusing the network of discrimination was unfair and uninformed.
I noted that hundreds of millions of people simply aren’t interested in watching Paralympic competition the way they watch the Olympics. And that this makes NBC’s decision a sound business calculation rather than prejudice.
Unfortunately, there was no Oscar Pistorius to generate interest this year.
Even worse, a number of investigative reports since 2016 – about Paralympic athletes “gaming the classification system to win medals” – have been even more damning to the Paralympics as a whole than reports of state-sponsored doping have been to Team Russia at the Olympics. Most notable are the BBC Radio 4 report, “Paralympics – Gaming the System,” September 23, 2018, and the BBC report “Paralympics: The Unfair Games,” June 16, 2021.
Incidentally, notwithstanding the schadenfreude when I wrote the above, I would not have wished the fate that befell Pistorius just months later, when he was arrested and charged for murdering his girlfriend. I shared my dismay in “Olympian Oscar Pistorius Now South Africa’s O.J. Simpson?” and “Oscar Pistorius Guilty of Murder. Duh.”
More importantly, notwithstanding my lack of interest, I wish all Paralympians well at these Games. And, for those of you who are truly interested in watching them compete, good luck finding coverage.
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