(Joshua Paladino, Headline USA) The smallest audience in American history watched the 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics, with NBC attracting an abysmal average 9.3 million viewers during prime time hours.
The Olympic Games’s prime time audience peaked at 11.4 million viewers when including three channels: NBC, USA, and Peacock, a NBCUniversal streaming service.
That peak was 42 percent lower than the during the 2018 Winter Games in Pyeongchang, South Korea, the Blue State Conservative reported.
On average, NBC had 48 percent fewer viewers in 2022 than in 2018, according to the Nielsen company.
NBC blamed the small audience turnout on “very harsh protocols in China” and the network’s small coverage teams in Beijing.
“We had 1,600 people in Stamford [the network’s home in Connecticut] and 600 people in Beijing,” NBC Sports Chairman Pete Bevacqua said. “Normally that would be flipped for us.”
Bevacqua also blamed the low turnout on Beijing’s time difference, but viewers have numerous options with recording and on-demand streaming.
Plus, the 2018 Winter Olympics in Pyeongchang suffered from the same time difference.
Even the Associated Press characterized the ratings as disasterous.
“These Olympics were a disaster for the network: a buzz-free, hermetically-sealed event in an authoritarian country a half-day’s time zone away, where the enduring images will be the emotional meltdown of Russian teen-agers after a drug-tainted figure skating competition and a bereft Mikaela Shiffrin, sitting on a ski slope wondering what went wrong,” the Associated Press wrote.
The corporate media did not admit several other underlying factors: that Americans do not want to tune in to the major television networks and do not want to support the Chinese Communist Party.
The war in Ukraine likely distracted viewers from the Winter Olympics, too.
Slate, however, acknowledged that “China’s blatant disregard of human rights added a repulsive element to this year’s festivities,” Fox News reported.
