NBC cut 7/7 tribute from opening ceremony

snooks

"The most egregious of these edits was the entire omission of a gorgeous performance by rising Scottish songstress Emeli Sandé, who sang Henry Francis Lyte's hymn "Abide With Me." Not only was this one of the highlights of the original full ceremony that aired live on Britain's BBC, and not only was this supposed to be a huge break for Emeli (whose excited publicists had widely issued a press release announcing that NBC would broadcast her performance)...but this performance was actually part of a memorial to terrorism victims, including the 52 victims of the London bombings of July 7, 2005.

The segment's choreographer, Akram Khan, later told a reporter for the blog Olympic Rings and Other Things: "I feel disheartened and disappointed...It's disgraceful U.S. media could make that decision, and would like to know why." But NBC spokesman Greg Hughes explained the omission to USA Today with a mere: "Our programming is tailored for the U.S. audience." Apparently, it seems NBC executives assumed that the U.S. audience would not be interested in an artsy performance by a relatively unknown British singer, or in a tribute to victims of tragedies that didn't take place on U.S. soil."

From:
http://music.yahoo.com/blogs/heard/nbc- ... 48511.html

That's nice innit :evil:

Headhuunter

That's Americans for you, they are a very inwardly focused nation. Not saying that other nations aren't too but it perhaps would be better for one fo the world's wealthiest nations to be more engaging with other cultures.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not an America basher, I have American friends and they're lovely people and the UK is far from perfect. I just think that the USA is an enormous country relatively isolated geographically from others and the majority of its population has never left US soil let alone bothered to take an interest in what goes on outside the US.

When I lived in Japan, I met a lot of Americans (the ones I met in the US were an exception to the rule) and they freely admitted this. Also the only English newspapers we had access to were American ones like the Herald and Tribune or whatever it's called and they were generally an utter waste of time to read as they would would more readily report that Mrs Smith from Idaho's cat was stuck in a tree than on a devastating flood in India which had claimed millions of lives....

SimonAH

Well, come on, what with breaking the enigma code, winning the Battle of Britain and saving the world at every turn America really can't be doing with something not applicable to Bubba and Sue.

Remember please that this is a nation who are actually considering (and neck and neck in the polls) electing a man like M.Romney to the Whitehouse! This should tell you a little of the psyche of today's America.

SteppenHerring

Americans used to take a keen interest in acts of terrorism in the UK. Mostly by funding the IRA.

Ben6899

SteppenHerring wrote:

Americans used to take a keen interest in acts of terrorism in the UK. Mostly by funding the IRA.

Post of the day.

mudcow007

SimonAH wrote:

Well, come on, what with breaking the enigma code, winning the Battle of Britain and saving the world at every turn America really can't be doing with something not applicable to Bubba and Sue.

Remember please that this is a nation who are actually considering (and neck and neck in the polls) electing a man like M.Romney to the Whitehouse! This should tell you a little of the psyche of today's America.

you forgot about thwarting all of those alien attacks too

Kieran_Burns

Does anyone else think that it was a 'good' thing the bombings were on the 7th July or it would've confused the cr*p out of the Americans?

If it had been on the 13th say - they'd be trying to work out what the 13th month is....

Gizmo_

Ben6899 wrote:

SteppenHerring wrote:

Americans used to take a keen interest in acts of terrorism in the UK. Mostly by funding the IRA.

Post of the day.

Sadly true.

I thought it was disgusting. Put the boot on the other foot: if New York wins the Games in the next 20 years (pretty certain, I'd say), they will include references to "9/11". If we edited them out of our coverage, there would be uproar.

DavidBelcher

Ben6899 wrote:

SteppenHerring wrote:

Americans used to take a keen interest in acts of terrorism in the UK. Mostly by funding the IRA.

Post of the day.

+1. Reminds me of one of my favourite Al Murray "Pub Landlord" lines:

"I'd like to thank America for its help in the war on terror, because if you hadn't funded the IRA for 30 years, we wouldn't know how to deal with terrorists would we? You've played the long game on that one. Good thinking."

David

Headhuunter

Gizmo_ wrote:

Ben6899 wrote:

SteppenHerring wrote:

Americans used to take a keen interest in acts of terrorism in the UK. Mostly by funding the IRA.

Post of the day.

Sadly true.

I thought it was disgusting. Put the boot on the other foot: if New York wins the Games in the next 20 years (pretty certain, I'd say), they will include references to "9/11". If we edited them out of our coverage, there would be uproar.

Actually there probably wouldn't be, they probably wouldn't even notice.... Just as they don't care much about what goes on outside the US they don't care much what foreign TV channels choose to report on...

rolf_f

Gizmo_ wrote:

I thought it was disgusting. Put the boot on the other foot: if New York wins the Games in the next 20 years (pretty certain, I'd say), they will include references to "9/11". If we edited them out of our coverage, there would be uproar.

Whilst I agree with you, the scale of the two atrocities is rather different so although cutting a 7/7 tribute is crass, it isn't in quite the same league as cutting a 9/11 tribute. 9/11 is the biggest terrorist atrocity by death rate so far, 7/7 is at 125 worldwide and would only rank 4th against attacks on US soil - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ba ... st_attacks

Headhuunter wrote:

Actually there probably wouldn't be, they probably wouldn't even notice.... Just as they don't care much about what goes on outside the US they don't care much what foreign TV channels choose to report on...

It's not personal though - if you watch the news in New York you'll struggle to find out much about what's going on outside the confines of the city itself!

rick_chasey

Rolf F wrote:

Gizmo_ wrote:

I thought it was disgusting. Put the boot on the other foot: if New York wins the Games in the next 20 years (pretty certain, I'd say), they will include references to "9/11". If we edited them out of our coverage, there would be uproar.

Whilst I agree with you, the scale of the two atrocities is rather different so although cutting a 7/7 tribute is crass, it isn't in quite the same league as cutting a 9/11 tribute. 9/11 is the biggest terrorist atrocity by death rate so far, 7/7 is at 125 worldwide and would only rank 4th against attacks on US soil - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ba ... st_attacks

Americans only like stuff/pay attention to it if it's big. :roll:

Whether that's breasts, quantities of food, quantities of money, size of buildings, size of people, tragedies whatever.

adskis

The insular nature displayed by the majority of American people today, did not happen overnight. You need to look back through their history to gain some context for this.
President George W. Bush helped Americans become the slaves of fear they are today with his rhetoric about weapons of mass destruction and ‘you're-with-us-or-with-the-terrorists’ machinations.
Even prior to that, during the early Cold War period, McCarthyism had its grip on the direction of US culture.
McCarthyism has been defined as: the mere failure to denounce the communist ideology with satisfactory fervour or the failure to denounce one's colleagues for communist sympathies has become an unpatriotic act.
Going further back, the US only became involved in the two world wars when it appeared that there was little chance they would recover their considerable capital investment in the Allied forces. There is some question as to whether they would have joined in at all otherwise.
Where did all this stem from? After the Revolutionary War, when the US had thrown off the shackles of the oppressive Empire, (as they saw it) the country slowly began to turn inwards and close its borders and nothing has really happened since to stem that tide.

Gizmo_

Rolf F wrote:

Gizmo_ wrote:

I thought it was disgusting. Put the boot on the other foot: if New York wins the Games in the next 20 years (pretty certain, I'd say), they will include references to "9/11". If we edited them out of our coverage, there would be uproar.

Whilst I agree with you, the scale of the two atrocities is rather different so although cutting a 7/7 tribute is crass, it isn't in quite the same league as cutting a 9/11 tribute. 9/11 is the biggest terrorist atrocity by death rate so far, 7/7 is at 125 worldwide and would only rank 4th against attacks on US soil - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ba ... st_attacks

You're absolutely right to point out the scale difference, yes. And even accounting for the total population difference of ~60m to ~300m, 9/11 was still much more lethal.

But if we're bringing scale into the discussion, and while I have the utmost sympathy for anyone affected by 9/11, 7/7 or any other terrorist activity, I must say I have trouble distinguishing those sorts of acts from the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki (conservative estimate: 75,000 dead on the two days, twice that in total). An act of war, you might say, and therefore exempt from consideration. However a) after 9/11 Bush freely declared (however fatuously) that it had been an act of war, and b) all three events involved the use of extreme force and munitions to attack defenceless civilians. What's the difference?

Anyway. Before we get to Godwin's Law - let's just say that nasty people do nasty things and I'd much rather we were all excellent to one another.

rick_chasey

Gizmo_ wrote:

Rolf F wrote:

Gizmo_ wrote:

I thought it was disgusting. Put the boot on the other foot: if New York wins the Games in the next 20 years (pretty certain, I'd say), they will include references to "9/11". If we edited them out of our coverage, there would be uproar.

Whilst I agree with you, the scale of the two atrocities is rather different so although cutting a 7/7 tribute is crass, it isn't in quite the same league as cutting a 9/11 tribute. 9/11 is the biggest terrorist atrocity by death rate so far, 7/7 is at 125 worldwide and would only rank 4th against attacks on US soil - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ba ... st_attacks

You're absolutely right to point out the scale difference, yes. And even accounting for the total population difference of ~60m to ~300m, 9/11 was still much more lethal.

But if we're bringing scale into the discussion, and while I have the utmost sympathy for anyone affected by 9/11, 7/7 or any other terrorist activity, I must say I have trouble distinguishing those sorts of acts from the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki (conservative estimate: 75,000 dead on the two days, twice that in total). An act of war, you might say, and therefore exempt from consideration. However a) after 9/11 Bush freely declared (however fatuously) that it had been an act of war, and b) all three events involved the use of extreme force and munitions to attack defenceless civilians. What's the difference?

Anyway. Before we get to Godwin's Law - let's just say that nasty people do nasty things and I'd much rather we were all excellent to one another.

It's not a competition.

London suffered during that and it's a part of London's history. You can question its inclusion in it, but that goes for everything in the ceremony.

Given that America can relate, you'd think they'd see the value in it. Not that you need to relate to see the value in it.

Spent 6 weeks in America on two holidays. Enjoyed the holidays, but it confirmed that I'd really really never like to live there.

Bikequin

Ben6899 wrote:

SteppenHerring wrote:

Americans used to take a keen interest in acts of terrorism in the UK. Mostly by funding the IRA.

Post of the day.

I think you must have missed Kieran Burns' post on the "Strava causing relationships thread"

prj45

mudcow007 wrote:

SimonAH wrote:

Well, come on, what with breaking the enigma code, winning the Battle of Britain and saving the world at every turn America really can't be doing with something not applicable to Bubba and Sue.

Remember please that this is a nation who are actually considering (and neck and neck in the polls) electing a man like M.Romney to the Whitehouse! This should tell you a little of the psyche of today's America.

you forgot about thwarting all of those alien attacks too

I love that that film ends with a suicide bombing by the American hero, delicious irony.

rolf_f

Rick Chasey wrote:

Spent 6 weeks in America on two holidays. Enjoyed the holidays, but it confirmed that I'd really really never like to live there.

Where did you go? It can make a huge difference. Not that I would want to live their either. Even the nicest parts aren't going to keep me as interested as Europe can.

First.Aspect

Americans aren't represented by the American media any more than we are represented by the News of the World or the Sun. As a nation I never found them more or less insular than ourselves.

Its a shocker and I would imagine that most right minded Americans would be embarrassed by NBC's decision.