NBC Hid The Boos For JD Vance. Where’s Trump’s ‘Unfair Editing’ Lawsuit?

Failures

from the they're-saying-boooo-urns dept

If you watched NBC’s prime time broadcast of the Winter Olympics opening ceremony on Friday, you saw Vice President JD Vance in the stands at San Siro Stadium in Milan with his wife, Usha. The commentary team said “JD Vance” and moved on. Pleasant enough.

But if you were watching literally any other country’s broadcast—or were actually in the stadium—you heard something else: the crowd booing. Loudly. Jeering. Whistling. CBC’s commentator captured the moment awkwardly:

There is the vice-president JD Vance and his wife Usha – oops, those are not … uh … those are a lot of boos for him. Whistling, jeering, some applause.

Multiple journalists on the ground reported the same thing. The Guardian’s Sean Ingle noted the boos. USA Today’s Christine Brennan noted the boos. The boos were, by all accounts, quite audible to anyone actually present in the stadium.

Timothy Burke put together clips of many other countries broadcasts, many of which called out the boos or discussed criticism of the Trump admin:

Mexico’s broadcast went on at length, including discussing how the US had to change the name of their Olympic village from “ice house” to “winter house” knowing how it would be perceived.

But if you were watching NBC’s broadcast in the United States? Crickets. As the Guardian reported:

However, on the NBC broadcast the boos were not heard or remarked upon when Vance appeared on screen, with the commentary team simply saying “JD Vance”. That didn’t stop footage of the boos being circulated and shared on social media in the US. The White House posted a clip of Vance applauding on NBC’s broadcast without any boos.

For what it’s worth, NBC denies that it “edited” the crowd booing the Vances. But the analysis on that page by the folks at Awful Announcing show pretty clearly that NBC (which ran a live feed of the opening ceremony as well as a prime time version) turned up the sound of music at the moment the Vances were shown on the screen.

Now, look. As a technical and legal matter, NBC has every right to make that editorial choice. Broadcasters exercise editorial discretion over their coverage all the time. They choose camera angles, they choose what to amplify and what to downplay, they shape narratives. That’s not illegal. It’s not even unusual. It’s called being a media company. The First Amendment protects editorial discretion—including editorial discretion that results in coverage that makes politicians look better than reality would suggest.

Of course, that principle cuts both ways. Or at least it should.

We’ve now spent months watching Donald Trump file lawsuit after lawsuit against news organizations for what he claims is “unfair” editing. The theory in these cases is that editing footage in ways that make Trump or his allies look bad is somehow actionable defamation or election interference. It’s a theory that, if accepted, would basically mean the president gets veto power over how he’s portrayed in any news coverage.

Remember, Trump sued CBS over a “60 Minutes” interview with Kamala Harris, claiming that the way the interview was edited amounted to “election and voter interference.” That lawsuit was, to put it charitably, legally incoherent nonsense. We covered it at the time, noting that Trump’s supposed smoking gun was that CBS edited an answer for time—you know, the thing every television program in history does, including cutting out the bits that make Trump look bad.

Then there was the $10 billion lawsuit against the BBC over a documentary that didn’t even air in the United States. Trump’s legal team actually cited VPN download statistics as evidence of damages, apparently believing that Americans who went out of their way to circumvent geographic restrictions to watch a documentary they weren’t supposed to see somehow constitutes harm to Trump.

Of course, as you already know, CBS, facing the Trump lawsuit while also trying to get FCC approval for the Paramount merger, decided to just… pay up. We called it what it was at the time: a $16 million bribe. Not because CBS thought Trump had a valid legal claim—the lawsuit was obviously baseless—but because CBS was terrified that an angry Trump administration would tank its merger if it didn’t make the lawsuit go away.

And that’s the point. The lawsuits aren’t really about winning in court. They’re about establishing a new norm: favorable coverage or else.

So now we have NBC, which happens to have a rather large interest in staying on the good side of this administration (what with the LA Olympics coming up in 2028 and all the broadcast rights that entails, and you already have Trump and FCC boss Brendan Carr threatening NBC’s late-night comedy hosts), making an editorial choice to mute crowd boos directed at the vice president. And I will bet you every meager dollar I have that no one in Trump’s orbit will say a single word about NBC’s “unfair” editing. No tweets from Trump about “fake news NBC” cutting audio to misrepresent crowd reactions. No lawsuits alleging that NBC’s editorial choices constitute fraud on the American public.

Because the “unfair editing” complaints were never actually about editing. They were about whether the editing made Trump look good or bad. Editing that cuts out boos? That’s just good production values. Editing that makes Harris’s answer seem more coherent? That’s election interference worthy of billions in damages.

This is what an attack on press freedom looks like. It’s not a single dramatic moment. It’s a slow accretion of pressure—lawsuits that are expensive to fight even when you win, regulatory approvals that get held hostage, implicit threats that keep executives up at night—until media companies internalize the lesson. The lesson isn’t “be accurate” or “be fair.” The lesson is: make us look good, or face the consequences.

And NBC appears to have learned the lesson well.

Filed Under: boos, editing, editorial discretion, jd vance, journalism, olympics
Companies: nbc