So NBC, in a moment of unparalleled cynicism, decided to hire Roberts and Weir to be their Gays. NBC's LGBT employees were clearly freaked out to the point the network felt compelled to send out a memo promising that it would do all it could to protect folks working in Sochi.
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Plus the IOC issuing, every few weeks, yet another statement saying that it had been reassured by the Kremlin that everyone was welcome at the games. What with the gay torture videos and Putin's declaration of martial law: He's banned all protests, marches, and public gatherings in Sochi for the duration of the Olympics. Still, it was harder and harder in the months that followed to pretend that nothing was happening in Russia. NBC has been dodging attempts from activists to hold them accountable since the laws were enacted.Ī letter from the gay lobbying group Human Rights Campaign's president asking NBC to include news of Russia's human-rights violations alongside their standard Olympics coverage elicited a mealy-mouthed response from the network, which said it would "provide coverage of Russia's anti-gay laws if the controversial measures surface as an issue during the upcoming Winter Olympics." As though the fact that Neo-Nazis keep luring gay men to hotel rooms by baiting them online, then kidnapping and torturing them and posting their videos online isn't an issue at all so long as no queers are actually forced to drink their own urine in front of NBC's cameras during the snowboarding finals.
One in which lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender people are being reduced to a status eerily reminiscent of Jews in the days before the 1936 Berlin Olympics. Like mentioning to the more than 200 million Olympic viewers expected in America alone that the backdrop to all of Sochi's bobsledding and figure skating, thanks to the country's anti-LGBT laws, is a political landscape reminiscent of Nuremberg-era Germany. NBC paid $4 billion dollars for the rights to cover the Olympics from 2014 through 2020, and it'll be damned if it's going to do anything that might hurt its bottom line. NBC's decision earlier this fall to hire Thomas Roberts and Johnny Weir, two bright white upper-class gay men with matching husbands, to serve as apologists commentators during Sochi was just the latest in a long string of feints by the network to appear gay-friendly while accommodating a homophobic regime.
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The country and the games have come under increasing international scrutiny and criticism: First, in the wake of the Kremlin's passage, this past June, of a trifecta of draconian anti-LGBT laws disguised as measures for child protection, and then by the failure of the International Olympic Committee (IOC) to enforce its own charter-which, as this helpful image from Boycott Sochi 2014 reminds us, states that "any form of discrimination with regard to a country or a person on grounds of race, religion, politics, gender or otherwise is incompatible with belonging to the Olympic movement."Īll of which places new pressure on NBC Universal, the primary American broadcaster of the 2014 Winter Olympic Games in Sochi, to decide whether it's going to go down in history as an organ of the free press or as a collaborator in the Kremlin's and the IOC's conspiracies of silence. That "tightening," which intensified when Russian President Vladimir Putin returned to power last year and immediately set about silencing any form of opposition to his notoriously crooked government, has reached a fever pitch in the months leading up to Russia's hosting of the 2014 Winter Olympic Games in Sochi this February.
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"The move," the news service wrote in its own account of the story, "is the latest in a series of shifts in Russia's news landscape, which appear to point toward a tightening of state control in the already heavily regulated media sector."
There is no longer even the illusion of a free press in Russia-not after yesterday, when the Kremlin posted a decree on its website announcing the liquidation of RIA Novosti, the leading state news agency.