The Cable Gamer always wondered if NBC, which paid nearly a billion dollars for the rights to broadcast the Olympics, knew that Lin Miaoke, the cute little girl singing a Chinese song during the opening ceremony of the Olympics on Friday, was a Milli Vannilli-type lip-synching fake.
The Cable Gamer doesn't pretend to know all the ins and out of TV production, but she knows that the technical issues of carrying a live performance are so enormous that it would have been hard for NBC not to know that the Chinese were putting on the vocal equivalent of a Potemkin village.
And yet NBC, and NBC News, kept mum about this news, leaving it to others to eventually leak the story. Of course NBC kept quiet: Because parent company NBC-Universal made a huge investment in the games, and so loyal NBC apparatchiks, such as Matt Lauer--who is allegedly part of the NBC News team, although he is more of a cheerleader for sponsors--was all too happy to suck up to the Chinese dictators and slime Chinese dissidents and protestors in his broadcasts.
And now here's another example of what would seem to be NBC's over-eager collaboration with Chinese fakery: The Chinese also managed to insert fake video footage of a fireworks display into TV viewers' screens (see screen grab above). This is complicated, so let Richard Spencer, writing for The Telegraph, the British newspaper, do the explaining:
As the ceremony got under way with a dramatic, drummed countdown, viewers watching at home and on giant screens inside the Bird's Nest National Stadium watched as a series of giant footprints outlined in fireworks processed gloriously above the city from Tiananmen Square.
What they did not realize was that what they were watching was in fact computer graphics, meticulously created over a period of months and inserted into the coverage electronically at exactly the right moment.
The fireworks were there for real, outside the stadium. But those responsible for filming the extravaganza decided in advance it would be impossible to capture all 29 footprints from the air.
As a result, only the last, visible from the camera stands inside the Bird's Nest was captured on film.
The trick was revealed in a local Chinese newspaper, the Beijing Times, at the weekend.
Gao Xiaolong, head of the visual effects team for the ceremony, said it had taken almost a year to create the 55-second sequence. Meticulous efforts were made to ensure the sequence was as unnoticeable as possible: they sought advice from the Beijing meteorological office as to how to recreate the hazy effects of Beijing's smog at night, and inserted a slight camera shake effect to simulate the idea that it was filmed from a helicopter.
"Seeing how it worked out, it was still a bit too bright compared to the actual fireworks," he said. "But most of the audience thought it was filmed live - so that was mission accomplished."
He said the main problem with trying to shoot the real thing was the difficulty of placing the television helicopter at the right angle to see all 28 footsteps in a row.
One advisor to the Beijing Olympic Committee (BOCOG) defended the decision to use make-believe to impress the viewer. "It would have been prohibitive to have tried to film it live," he said. "We could not put the helicopter pilot at risk by making him try to follow the firework route."
So in fairness to NBC, the prime responisibility for the video "feed" rests with the Chinese, as Spencer explains:
A spokeswoman for BOCOG said the final decision had been made by Beijing Olympic Broadcasting, the joint venture between the International Olympic Committee and local organisers that is responsible for providing the main "feeds" of all Olympic events to viewers around the world.
OK, but one still has to figure that NBC must've been wise to this--all those hundreds of technical people, in Beijing and New York City, they must have known. But they kept their mouth shut.
And it never occurred, of course, to any of them to give this scoop to NBC News, or to MSNBC, or to CNBC. Heck, if the story had been given to MSNBC or CNBC, those netlets couldn't have run it, because they have been too busy covering the Olympics.
With a feed provided by the Chinese communists.
Admittedly, all this techno-trickery made for great television, but NBC News, and CNBC and MSNBC, all collaborated in a huge fraud, working as tools for an authoritarian regime.
And that's why these actions--and no doubt more examples will come trickling out--deserve to be called Olympics-gate.
*UPDATE: TCG reader VSTOL says:
During the live-to-tape NBC broadcast of the opening ceremony, as the foot print segment unfolded, Bob Costas and Matt Lauer revealed to the audience the cinematic electronically generated nature of the footprints.
If your going to criticize someone for not revealing the facts, you should probably make sure your "facts" are accurate.
The Cable Gamer didn't hear Costas and Lauer say this. Maybe they did. In which case, both TCG and Richard Spencer of The Telegraph--which treated the story as a revelation--stand corrected.
And VSTOL still doesn't answer the question of whether NBC had any knowledge of the lip-synching.
