CBS eye was open here...but blinks too often at Olympics

Remember when the Olympics used to be an athletic competition?
They're becoming less so, at least if TV's prime-time coverage of
the opening days of the Nagano Winter Games is any indicator.
Citing poor weather conditions and economic pressures, the CBS
network, which holds the American broadcast rights to these Winter
Games, has put on an Olympics telecast that so far seems more like a
newsmagazine of human interest stories occasionally interrupted by
sporting events - preferably figure skating.
During Monday's three-hour broadcast, for example, CBS aired less
than 80 minutes of actual competition from just four events, leaving
the other six events going on that day out in the cold. The network
devoted the rest of its airtime to personality profiles and previews
of competitions in the Winter Games' more glamorous events.
For CBS, which spent $ 375 million on the rights to the Nagano
Games and millions more on its coverage, it came down to simple
economics, network spokesman Dana McClintock said Tuesday.
"Generally speaking, people don't want to watch all of the
lesser-followed sports," McClintock said. "We want to please as
many viewers as we possibly can."
But the public's pleasure has not been overwhelming: Nationally,
ratings for the Winter Games are down dramatically compared with four
years ago. Even using CBS' own yardstick - the 1992 Winter Games in
Albertville, France, which lacked the Tonya Harding-Nancy Kerrigan
melodrama of the 1994 Games - ratings are still off by 15 percent.
McClintock blamed the lower ratings on the blizzard that forced
the postponement of many weekend events, and he predicted that
grumbling over CBS' coverage would subside once the "marquee"
events - beginning with pairs' figure skating last night - got under
way.
Feature stories have been an indispensable part of TV's Olympics
coverage since ABC introduced its "up close and personal" segments
in the 1970s. But CBS' reliance on them this year has been
noticeable. During the blizzard, which forced cancellation of men's
downhill skiing and other events, the network could have substituted
more obscure sports. But it reasoned that feature stories built
around the marquee events are better uses of its valuable airtime.
Economics also explained the very different treatments CBS gave
to two new Olympic sports. On Monday night, CBS devoted more than 34
minutes to women's snowboarding, an event that could appeal to young,
advertiser-friendly Americans. Meanwhile curling, a centuries-old
variant on shuffleboard that moves at a slow pace, was shut out.
The six competitions CBS chose not to cover on Monday - men's and
women's hockey, men's and women's curling, women's 5-kilometer
cross-country skiing and women's biathlon - were left to cable's TNT,
which airs the Winter Games during the day.
TNT this week not only showed highlights of the USA-Canada men's
curling match but an informative piece on the rugged Scottish isle of
Ailsa Craig, where the granite used in making curling stones is
quarried.
"Look carefully at Nagano and you'll see a part of Scotland
gliding silently and steadily across the ice," said longtime ABC
commentator Chris Schenkel, who narrated the piece.
Meanwhile, CBS dabbled in time-wasters that bordered on the
gratuitous. No events were shown for a full 25 minutes while the
network aired profiles of figure skaters and an interview with
Ekaterina Gordeeva, whose memoir of her late husband and skating
partner Sergei Grinkov was turned into a CBS movie earlier this
month.
Then the 1998 Games were put on hold as the network replayed
Gordeeva's and Grinkov's gold medal-winning performance from 1994. A
studio camera remained on Gordeeva, recording her tearful response to
the videotape.
CBS, the broadcast network with the oldest viewing audience, has
made several obvious attempts to capture the interest of
twentysomethings. In one latenight segment, "Access Hollywood" host
Pat O'Brien was hauled in to present a reel of offbeat highlights and
factoids ("The top five lugers in Nagano all speak German") set to
rock music - a blatant rip-off of the popular VH1 feature "Pop-Up
Video."
And CBS hired Kennedy, the one-named former MTV personality, to
interview snowboarders. Unfortunately, her presence was typified by
such banal questions as, "How do you say 'gold medal' in French?"
Local viewing down
Locally, viewership levels of the Winter Games have not been
encouraging. On the first Sunday night of the Nagano Games, KCTV,
Channel 5, averaged 22.5 percent of Kansas City households, down 35
percent from the same Sunday night four years ago in Lillehammer.
Monday night was even more humiliating, as only 18.4 percent of
Kansas Citians tuned in the Games, a drop of 49 percent compared with
the comparable night in 1994. The falloff cost KCTV something that
seemed a cinch before the Games - a chance to beat KMBC in the 10
p.m. news ratings.
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Analysis