Written by E.M. Swift at WBUR.com
Rio 2016 needs a PR agent… or a new one.
For months, the media has reported on little but the negatives surrounding the upcoming Olympics. Here’s just a sampling: the mosquito-borne Zika virus and the epidemic of babies with microcephaly; unpaid policemen at the airport greeting visitors with a banner saying “Welcome to Hell”; overcrowded hospitals turning away patients; body parts and human waste floating in the waterways where sailing and swimming events will be held; golfers opting to give these Games a pass; drug dealers in favelas selling cocaine in bagsemblazoned with Olympic rings; spanking new bike paths collapsing and killing innocent cyclists; unfinished subway lines; a fire forcing the Australian Olympic team to evacuate the Athletes Village, during which time they are robbed; incipient terrorist plots; presidential impeachment proceedings; and looming budget deficits.
It’s been an unrelenting tale of woe.
Call it “media group-think.” As a card-carrying member of the fourth estate for over 30 years, I know how it works.
All of which is — or was at some point — true. And, all of which has been grossly, repeatedly exaggerated.
Call it “media group-think.” As a card-carrying member of the fourth estate for over 30 years, I know how it works. One reporter, digging vigilantly, writes a piece in, say, March that chronicles the many things that have gone wrong in advance of the Olympics. By May that story has served as the source for 500 other stories from various outlets, only a handful of which have done any additional reporting beyond Googling from a desk: newspaper journalists, internet bloggers, radio pundits, sportscasters, 24-hour news anchors, and columnists. Come June, when the original story is long out of date, the narrative has become nightly fodder for the late night talk show hosts.
Floating body parts, human waste and sailors? Who couldn’t write a punch line to that? By July, it’s been accepted as gospel: Rio is toxic. The Olympics will be a disaster. To travel to the Games is to risk life and limb and generations unborn. People stay away in hoards. Perception becomes reality.
It’s too bad, because most of that stuff is either irrelevant or long out of date. The “Welcome to Hell” sign was on display for one day, in June, as a stunt to embarrass the state into giving the police and firefighters their back pay. It worked. Payments resumed and the sign went away. But the photo of the sign never, ever goes away. It’s on the internet forever.
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