Please No More Super Bowls for NBC
Andy McCarthy
The Corner
A game so fantastic it even overcame the coverage by the awful NBC — Al Michaels and John Madden honorably excepted.
People tuning in to football for an escape were treated, as they have been all season, to Keith Olbermann. I used to like Olbermann as an ESPN sportscaster when sports was all he did, but that was a long time ago. Now, just the sight of him turns off a lot of the audience — though I am nut for football, I generally just don't watch, turn off the sound, or switch to something else when he's on, and I know I'm not alone. If I'm stupid enough to watch his nightly rant on MSNBC and succeed in getting myself aggravated, then fine — he's got a right to his views, they have a right to put him on the air for the 15 or so people who evidently watch, and everyone knows what the deal is, so I should just change the channel or not turn on the TV in the first place. But the Super Bowl is a national event and (is supposed to be) a non-political event for a captive audience. Why Olbermann?
But even he was not as blood-boiling as Matt Lauer's cloying interview with President Obama. It would have been mildly annoying, but par for the course, if we had only had to endure Dear Leader's views on football (Matt Lauer's he's-so-cool gape as POTUS wows us with his intimate knowledge of flaws in the BCS system, his breakdown of the Steelers/Cardinals, and Look, mom, he even uses his own Blackberry!). But lapdog Matt, of course, couldn't leave it at that. So minutes before gametime, we were treated to the correspondent's observation that "many people were disappointed" when not a single one of those awful Republicans voted for the "stimulus" bill in the House — remarkably, of the two guys in the room, Obama was the only one who approached fair-and-balanced, telling a seemingly incredulous Lauer that Republicans had "a lot of good ideas" which he hoped to incorporate. (I found myself cheering when NBC had technical trouble and lost the audio feed for stretches of the interview.)
Years ago, before Fox started and NBC finally dove headlong to the Left — to the point that they are more agitprop than news network anymore — NBC did nearly half of all pro-football coverage (the old AFL and, after the two leagues merged, the NFL's American Conference) and they were just terrific — all game no politics. They then dropped football for many years and they haven't been missed because all their best people got snapped up by other networks. They had also dropped baseball, so for the past several years, as they've hyper-politicized, we've only needed to endure their making the Olympics unwatchable every couple of years. But now they've got a slice of the football coverage pie back. Again, the Madden/Michaels duo that calls the game is great, and I guess that's the important thing. As for the rest, though — yuck! Fox may be the conservative news network, and CBS obviously leans Left, but when they do football, they do football. For NBC, it's just part of the permanent campaign.
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