Gravity of News Seems to Escape NBC

It's a fair bet that before Friday, hardly anyone outside the admittedly obscure circles of luge had heard of Nodar Kumaritashvili. His fatal crash off one of the turns of the Whistler course, however, has turned the 21-year-old Georgian into the face of the Winter Olympics, fairly or not.

You might not be able to pronounce Kumaritashvili's name, but you will never forget what happened to him, in large part because for all our talk of athletes as warriors and gladiators, no one expects death to accompany athletic competition.

It should be, therefore, incumbent on NBC, the Olympics network, to not only do justice to Kumaritashvili's memory, but to ask how he died and whether it could have been avoided.

The results, so far, are mixed. The network's news department did a thorough eight-minute report at the top of Friday's broadcast, as well as a similarly lengthy report Saturday night, but the tone of the Olympic telecasts have been far too celebratory.

For instance, Dan Patrick and Cris Collinsworth seemed more interested in making members of the American delegation laugh Friday night than to get them to talk about how alarmed they were to hear of Kumaritashvili's death. And Mary Carillo's piece Saturday afternoon on the popularity of speed skating in the Netherlands would have been appropriate and hilarious at any time other than less than 24 hours after a man died.

Daytime host Al Michaels did debrief Bob Papa, Duncan Kennedy and John Morgan, the announcers calling the luge competition, at the top of Saturday afternoon's broadcast, with a follow-up report later on the changes made at the course following Friday's accident.

It took nearly two hours into Saturday's prime time telecast before Kumaritashvili's name was invoked in a three-minute piece reported by Peter Alexander, with soft piano music in the background.

Anchor Bob Costas informed the audience that the video of Kumaritashvili's crash wouldn't air during Alexander's piece, nor during the rest of the Olympics telecasts.

Increasingly, American TV networks have become more "partners" of the leagues and entities from whom they purchase broadcast rights than objective observers who critically report on the goings-on, or have you too missed the reporting on concussions and brain injuries during NFL pregame shows?

This is one of those times where a broadcast entity has to step out of its role as partner and become an inquisitor, if need be. NBC has 820 million reasons -- the amount it paid to the International Olympic Committee -- to want to present the Vancouver Games in the best possible light, and that's understandable.

But NBC has one very important reason, its editorial credibility, to press IOC and luge officials about the safety of the course Kumaritashvili died on. Rest assured that if a football player or NASCAR driver lost his life during competition, serious questions would be asked, and this situation is no different.

And the answers shouldn't be pawned off on a Nightly News broadcast, but given during a prime-time telecast. If network officials need extra time and aren't willing to forego some gauzy features, then they should approach their affiliates and ask them to pre-empt Access Hollywood or Wheel of Fortune for a night for the extra time it takes to tell the story properly.

One more thing: NBC should dispatch a crew to Kumaritashvili's home province of Borjami, Georgia, this week to gather material for a profile to air with its findings on how this tragedy happened. He was no less a competitor than any of the people that the network plans to lavish attention on, and his death and the life he lived deserve the best of NBC's Olympic storytelling.