The Media Research Center loves to complain about the Olympics, and this year’s Winter Olympics was no exception. Alex Christy did some pre-emptive complaining in a Jan. 30 post:
CBS’s Stephen Colbert did not adequately do his pre-show research on Thursday. During his monologue, The Late Show host hyped Italian politicians demanding ICE “thugs” not be let into the country for security purposes during the Olympics. However, Colbert did not mention the politician using the “thug” label is basically a communist. Later, Colbert would welcome MS NOW’s Jacob Soboroff to continue lamenting all things immigration enforcement.
Amid booing from the audience, Colbert began his Olympic lament by reporting, “It’s time for ICE to get out of there and go to Milan. Because it was just announced that the U.S. will send ICE agents to the Winter Olympics. No! Yes, I agree with all that noise. That’s a terrible idea. The only ice I want to see at the Olympics is ice dancing.”
Joseph Vazquez whined in a Feb. 4 post:
Is it possible just to enjoy a long-cherished international sports tradition without injecting climate scareporn into the mix? Apparently not so for the Gaia-worshipping sub-optimal intellects at The Washington Post.
Post reporters Janice Kai Chen, Nick Kirkpatrick and Júlia Ledur apparently forgot it was winter when they collectively blurted out the following headline February 2, “Climate change is making the Winter Olympics harder to host.”
Kicking the doom-mongering into high gear, the authors cried that “Even with the intervention of machine-made snow, climate change will substantially shrink the number of locations able to host the Games.”
The 2026 games, which are being held in Milan and Cortina d’Ampezzo, Italy, are being threatened by warmer temperatures, kvetched the Post reporters. “With the weather too warm to make snow during the day, the machines had to run at night to create enough snow for the upcoming competitions,” in the weeks leading up to the games, they exclaimed.
But — and this may be news to The Post fanatics — climate and weather have a tendency to be very unpredictable.
[…]This winter in Italy hasn’t always fit the climate-ragebait model. Leading Italian news organization Agenzia Nazionale Stampa Associata (ANSA) just reported January 8 that Italy was being “gripped by cold, temperatures drop as low as 23.1° in Veneto,” a region south of Cortina. “After being hit by violent winds, heavy snow and torrential rain over the last few days, Italy was in the grip of intense cold on Thursday,” the outlet summarized.
As Vazquez surely knows (or maybe he doesn’t), weather and climate are two different things.
Geoffrey Dickens spent a Feb. 5 post rehashing “The Media’s Most Outrageous Olympic Outbursts,” the head one of which was “The Winter Olympics: Too White, Like a GOP Convention.” On a similar note, Tim Graham groused in a Feb. 8 post:
One of the most perennially annoying forms of reverse racism in the media is criticizing the Winter Olympics because they’re too white. Every four years, we at NewsBusters remember Bryant Gumbel on his HBO program Real Sports speaking out against….allegedly White Sports.
[…]The racial scolds of the Associated Press broke this one out before the games began, with a Europe-based sports reporter named Steve Douglas. It wasn’t someone assigned to a “race and culture” beat. Let the bean-counting games begin!
[…]Most Americans and Europeans are supportive of Olympic athletes of all kinds, with an emphasis on hard work and excellence. But you have to laugh when you read stories like this and then there’s a pop-up message asking for donations on the AP website under the slogan “News without an agenda.”
LIke Dickens, Graham couldn’t be bothered to disprove the claim that the Winter Olympics are too white.
Brad Wilmouth rehashed the Olympics climate complaint in another Feb. 8 post:
On her eponymous Friday show, MSNOW host Chris Jansing had on liberal researcher Michael Mann to fret over predictions that few countries will have enough snow to host future Olympic games due to the use of fossil fuels. He also eventually blamed global warming for recent extremely cold temperatures.
[…]After bringing aboard Professor Mann, Jansing began by posing: “Are we looking at a future winter games that are that much of a challenge melting before our eyes?”
He immediately went along with the doom-pushing premise:
Wilmouth, like Vazquez, didn’t dispute the argument being made.
In a Feb. 10 post, Curtis Houck had a fit about an American-trained athlete skating for China:
One day after the pro-democracy former newspaperman Jimmy Lai was sentenced to two decades behind bars by the brutal, Chinese Communist Party-controlled Hong Kong regime, NBC’s 3rd Hour of Today celebrated Tuesday one of the totalitarian regime’s chief figures of soft power, American-born, educated, and resident Eileen Gu for five minutes of fawning over her gregarious personality and success on the slopes, including at the Milan-Cortina Olympics.
Of course, they never asked Gu about anything political (including her criticism of President Trump) or the brutality of the country she represents.
Weird, the MRC usually complains when non-politicians are asked about politics.