Should News Orgs Boycott the Olympics?

It's becoming increasingly clear that we've been had.

By "we," I mean everybody who thought that holding the Olympic Games in China would force the country's Communist regime to upgrade everything from its environmental standards to its press freedoms.

Now we see how that's working out. Earlier this week, The New York Times and Wall Street Journal both reported that pollution in Beijing continues to exceed safe levels most of the time, despite extensive measures -- many of them purely temporary -- to curb it.

Meanwhile, the International Olympic Committee admitted yesterday that China is blocking journalists' access to a range of websites whose content it deems unacceptable -- everything from Amnesty International to the BBC's Chinese-language service. In an exquisitely Orwellian twist, it's even barring access to a website, maintained by Reporters Without Borders, that tells journalists how to use proxy servers to evade China's firewall, according to the Washington Post.

Some of the blame belongs to IOC, which promised earlier this month that there would be "absolutely no censorship on the Internet" for foreign press -- even though it knew when it made that claim that Chinese authorities planned to put numerous sites off limits.

But there's plenty of blame to go around. In fact, far from making concessions to foreign calls for human rights, China is, if anything, cracking down: The regime's been accused of "stepping up the detention and surveillance of those it fears could disrupt the Games," and of "forc[ing] international hotel chains to track electronic communications by its guests," according to the Times.

Now, despite my headline, I don't seriously think that any major news organization is going to withdraw to protest the press restrictions and broken promises. It's too big a story, and the arguments for covering it are too many (including Newsweek's assertion that any protest is only going to result in a reactionary backlash from nationalistic Chinese citizens). NBC News, which will have the most visible presence in Beijing, has too much at stake, with parent NBC Universal expected to take in over $1 billion of revenue in connection with the Games. And, inevitably, covering China means covering the repression of speech in China.

But it's worth remembering that the Olympics, for all the money changing hands, for all the political repercussions and human-interest stories, are fundamentally just a dog-and-pony show. The Games aren't news in the sense that an earthquake or a civil war is news -- they're entertainment, a staged event. A good analogy is, perhaps, the U.S. party nominating conventions. Sure, the networks will cover them continuously, and a certain amount of "news" will be made there, but they're carefully choreographed productions whose outcomes are essentially meaningless. Can you imagine how, say, CNN would respond if the organizers of the Republican National Convention blocked internet access to MoveOn.org?

Right now, China is in a nice situation, taking its obligations as a host country lightly while everyone else agrees to uphold the fiction that the Olympics are a Big Fat Deal. By submitting to China's censorship, news organizations are contributing to its propaganda victory. Doubtless, once the Games begin, some test will arise of the foreign press corps' ability to report critically on the situation in Beijing. Will media outlets rise to the challenge, or will they take the path of least resistance?