ABSTRACT
This paper explores backstage conventions and conditions for national and local broadcasting of the Olympic Games. While the Olympic Movement sees sport as a means to the larger end of intercultural understanding, American media largely frame the Games as a competition among nations for the glory of athletic victory and superiority. ‘Covering’ the Olympics within this dominant framework leads the American broadcaster National Broadcasting Corporation (NBC) to a studied disinterest in intercultural stories, becoming itself a roadblock to understanding foreign cultures and the Olympic ethos, rituals and symbols. The author, a Greek-American and local NBC employee at the time of the Athens 2004 Olympics, describes her struggles to generate intercultural programming and interprets NBC’s refusal to allow American audiences to view the 2004 flame-lighting ceremonies at Ancient Olympia and the relay through Greece as lost opportunities to temper the stereotyping of host cultures for the American public.
