and there is also Darfur, adnd interviewing Henry Kissinger without question....
also remember the removal of people in Atlanta to make room for Olympic venues. What happened after that??

Over the last 16 days around 200 million americans got introduced to the "new" China. The rose-coloured cameras of NBC and Canada's CBC depicted a clean, safe, peaceful and beautiful nation, essentially consisting of the olympic venues and China's most famous icon, the great wall, and little else. The western TV media seemed content to be sequestered in the modern-looking ling long pagoda instead of attempting to engage the general populace in any way. Admittedly, the olympics are in the end a sporting event and the sports should in fact dominate coverage, but the consequences of holding such an event should not be ignored. The event has a track record of being more disruptive to the lives of host-city residents than beneficial, in particular the less well off. I fear that this pattern may be repeating itself yet again in my own country with the preparations being made for Vancouver 2010. The city's notoriously poor, drug-ridden east side is an inconvenient eyesore that the image-conscious organizing committee fears will tarnish the games. Their approach, rather than say, using the olympic village as a future cheap housing solution, is to try and sweep the undesirable elements under the rug temporarily with little regard for these people's rights. Much will be made of the financial cost of the Beijing games, and the same will be true of
Vancouver, but unfortunately the human cost will be largely ignored.

"promised that the Olympics would come alongside significant improvements in human rights."

I don't know how they keep feeding us that line. Everywhere the Olympics goes, governments become more authoritarian, not less.

Thanks for this. I think it's important to take the MSM to task for the way they handled everything. They reported on the least egregious "scandals," blowing them way out of proportion.

But 1+ million people forced from their homes? Yeah whatever.

I think that the real story of the Olympics came from th Opening and Closing Ceremonies. You saw thousands of people acting ion perfect coordination. It is frightening to think about China gaining in strength and holding much of our debt, while we fiddle in Iraq.

"The city's notoriously poor, drug-ridden east side is an inconvenient eyesore that the image-conscious organizing committee fears will tarnish the games."

That would the Downtown Eastside, not all of East Vancouver. I don't think it's the Olympics that's the real problem for Downtown Eastside residents, it's real estate developers believing that the Olympics are going to drive up property values like the 1986 World's Fair (Expo '86) did. Of course, that boom had more to do with a rush of wealthy Hong Kong immigrants than Expo did.

B.C. Premier Gordon Campbell said in Beijing that there wouldn't be anyone swept off the streets for Vancouver's 2010 Games. Why? Because it's in the strategic interest of the government to have a visible homeless population. In fact, it's a far more cost effective tool of repression than any military or police tacts the Chinese used in Beijing.

Is one going to agitate for a liveable minimum wage in British Columbia when one's just a paycheck away from collecting pop cans at Hastings and Main? Is one going to fight back as strongly against government cutbacks to vital social services if one fears the next cutback will put them out on the street?

Meanwhile, the rest of us are supposed to be thankful for what we've got, ignore the salient points of the opposition, and blindly cast our ballots for the B.C. Liberals, who have stamped the province's license plates with the dubious motto "The Best Place on Earth".

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Did you see Richard Engel try to track down one of the protesting "missing"? It is too easy to just dismiss media as "co-opted". It is too easy to let uneducated viewers (and bloggers) off and expect the likes of Bob Costas to do the work for us. It is too easy to just sit back and say, "The sports were good but....." Seriously.

This Boswell quote is the perfect illumination to me of U.S. writers ignoring their own conditions back home and reveling in their big, scary eastern China fears. Has Boswell been to any Super Bowl post Sept. 11? I recall speaking with a Detroit organizer there talking about how they totally cordoned off downtown and turned the area into a police state.

I understand that Dave wants to point out the shortcomings of the corporate media in this giant ad fest that is the Olympics. And he, of everyone here, knows what infiltration is like. So, well, I guess I'm just a little amazed at how focused he is on China (a vastly complex nation) and particularly its repression of Tibet.

Dave, you're a resourceful guy. Research Tibet and its history of the Dalai Lamas control over their people. Or how land was distributed there pre-1959. Make your own conclusions. The history is not exactly as peaceful and serene as people are led to believe here.

I'm not pro-China. But the Free Tibet movement can only be fully realized by me as when I envision what freedom would mean for everyone from all the oppressive structural limitations the rich control us through.

Progressives kind of fell in line this summer with the far-more-disturbing China haters out here convinced they eat oil over there and like to strangle us with dollar nooses.

...are so messed up around the globe its hilarious at times albeit sad.

I watched much of the CBC's coverage and nearly every night of the games on the National they ran stories that were obviously not Chinese government approved. Stories about population and demographic problems due to the one child policy; They ran a complete segment on the people who were struggling with property rights and evictions during the Olympics amongst many others. I know its easy for those of us on the "left" to lump what we see as "big media" together as they do tend to follow a script....but your totally wrong on this one....The CBC did a very good job with their coverage and did ask some serious questions. Could they have gone farther? Of course they could have.....but what do you think would have happened to them if they had? Not even the great CBC would be immune to getting kicked out of China by the Chinese government.