The Beijing Winter Olympics, broadcasting from the capital city of Communist China, were an abysmal failure in terms of ratings.
This year’s winter games were the least watched in Olympic history. Garnering an average of 11.4 million viewers across all platforms, the Beijing games’ ratings plummeted 36% from the last winter games in Pyeongchang, South Korea.
Despite a large uptick in digital streaming, the Beijing games’ 11.4 million is a dramatic drop from Pyeongchang’s 19.8 million average viewership.
Various media outlets rushed to blame Covid and time zone differences for Beijing’s dramatic flop. One reason seems extremely obvious.
Communist China is currently committing genocide and blatantly inflicting human rights abuses on a massive scale.
The International Olympic Committee (IOC) and media outlets, such as NBCUniversal, attempted to distract from China’s abuses, belittling the crimes as merely “allegations of abuse.” Yet, widespread calls to boycott the Winter Olympics seem to have been very effective.
Apparently Americans were not interested in watching a sporting event broadcasting from the center of one of the most repressive and cruel regimes in the world.
The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has long attempted to cover up their crimes against humanity. But hiding oppression on this scale is just not possible.
Millions of ethnic Uyghurs are known to be interned in concentration camps in which forced labor, mutilations, rape, and forced abortions are extremely common. Escaped Uyghurs have testified to suffering atrocities at the hands of CCP officials.
Nevertheless, the CCP denies any wrongdoing, asserting that the internment camps are merely “vocational training centers.”
In spite of the CCP’s vice-grip on the games’ optics, their oppression could be seen bleeding through the broadcast at certain moments.
Chinese tennis champion Peng Shuai, who went missing after accusing a CCP official of sexual assault, made appearances during the games, now claiming everything was “an enormous misunderstanding” and that she was entirely “safe and free.”
In another shocking moment a Chinese official physically dragged a Dutch reporter off camera in the middle of an on-air broadcast.
To say that a cloud of controversy overshadowed the Beijing Olympics is an understatement. More accurate would be to say that a hurricane of cruelty, shame, and attempted cover-ups buried the Communist Olympics.
The result was an abysmal Winter Olympics and an absolutely nightmarish disaster for the network.