Control room

In the past ten months, Donald Trump has managed to attend many, if not most, major U.S. sporting events. He was the first sitting president to go to the Super Bowl, drove his motorcade onto the track at the Daytona 500, and traded "Trump dance" moves at the Ryder Cup. (Which he later falsely claimed he "saved" by averting a rail strike.) He not only attended FIFA's Club World Cup finals, he finagled his way into the trophy shot. He came to the U.S. Open, where he acted a lot like a dictator one week after he said, "A lot of people are saying maybe we'd like a dictator." He doesn't go to everything; we didn't see him at the World Series, for example — maybe he doesn't do the sports in the territories he's occupied? — but he was definitely watching the commercials.

Trump's attendance begets inconvenience — ticketholders are warned to arrive up to three hours early for extra security screenings only to be subjected to major start time delays — in a manner befitting the inefficiencies of our new authoritarian regime. But attending sporting events is just part of the job when you're "the greatest champion for sports of any president in American history," as a White House spokesperson told The Athletic. "Sports are at the forefront of American culture, and President Trump loves them as the People’s President." Hear that? He just loves sports, you guys. And he loves seeing himself on the Jumbotron.

But then, at Sunday night's Lions-Commanders game, this happened:

The appearance at Northwest Stadium — remember, Trump wants the new Commanders stadium named after him — was more than just a quick pan across his luxury box. Right as Senate Democrats were caving to a cowardly deal to reopen the government, Fox Sports literally gave Trump the microphone to spin a counter-narrative. FOR NEARLY TEN MINUTES. And using an NFL game to so blatantly spew propaganda sets a very chilling precedent right as the country is set to broadcast the world's biggest sporting events.

The question about whether or not U.S. broadcasters are going to be manipulated by this administration is no longer hypothetical. In July, when CBS canceled The Late Show With Stephen Colbert, the president of the United States celebrated the event by posting on the social media network that he owns and profits from, even while he's in office: "I hear Jimmy Kimmel is next." Jimmy Kimmel was, in fact, next. Kimmel's show was eventually reinstated to all markets, even the ones owned by MAGA mouthpieces Sinclair/Nexstar, by the following week. But Trump was already on to the other late-night hosts, calling for the demise of Jimmy Fallon and Seth Meyers: "That leaves Jimmy and Seth, two total losers, on Fake News NBC. Their ratings are also horrible. Do it NBC!!!"

Just the mere mention of NBC by Trump must have sent shivers down the spine of his buddy Casey Wasserman. That's because LA28 really, really needs to stay in good graces with NBC — the Olympics have a "groundbreaking partnership for the digital media era" with the network through 2036.

This is a make-or-break moment for NBC's Olympics coverage. After years of flagging viewership, Paris was widely considered to be a ratings success. Milan Cortina begins on February 6, and supposedly the coverage will be a lot like Paris, but the Summer Games are where the money's at — and there's a lot riding on LA's success to keep the momentum going. Which is why NBC — technically, ahem, Comcast NBCUniversal; at least it's not CBS? — had to renegotiate its newest $3-billion contract to include not just media rights but also a "strategic partnership" with the IOC that may make it difficult to discern the coverage from the commercials.

The blurring of the lines has already begun. It's not unusual for NBC to break the news of Olympics-related announcements on its own networks; see: LA28's Uber partnership or naming Universal Studios as a venue. But in May, NBC's The Tonight Show basically produced a promotional for Archer, the "air taxi" "company" that's an LA28 sponsor, with Archer's co-founder Adam Goldstein joining Fallon on the couch for to announce the LA28 deal as if he had a movie to promote. There's plenty to ask Archer about: perhaps the connection between its Palantir partnership and this week's purchase of the Hawthorne airport ground lease as an "AI testbed" for 2028. But Archer's LA28 sponsorship — billed as "access to storytelling" — is clearly going to be using NBC properties to manufacture consent for federal approvals. My bet is on the jet-pack slot at the opening ceremonies.

Conveniently, Fallon said shortly after Kimmel was reinstated that he wasn't planning on getting political. "We hit both sides equally, and we try to make everybody laugh, and that’s really the way our show works," he said. "So really, I just keep my head down and make sure the jokes are funny." It sure sounds a lot like Wasserman when he describes LA's Olympics as "America's games." And in the same way that LA28 is aligning itself more with a federal identity than a local one, it seems that LA will have very little say about how our city will be presented to the world — or if what ends up being broadcast will even reflect the reality of what we're experiencing on the ground.

The whole thing is extra insulting because guess who invented the modern version of the Olympics broadcast? That's right: we did! In 1984, LA's organizers transformed the games into a global television event. This was part of a broader strategy to shift expenditures onto commercial interests that helped LA's committee turn a profit. And it also made LA look goddamn fantastic.

An excellent Washington Post story from 2024 details the deal: "In the fall of 1979, ABC agreed to pay $225 million for the rights to broadcast the Los Angeles Olympics and another $100 million to handle television production for the rest of the world — a cost host cities had absorbed previously.” But chair Peter Ueberroth, working with veteran film and television producer David Wolper (Roots, Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, LA Confidential), had devised a plan that made the organizing committee even more money than that, staging a bidding war among the major networks that required a $750,000 buy-in: "This gave the LAOOC more than $3 million that Ueberroth invested in short-term funds that generated nearly $1,000 per day in interest." Now that's innovation!

To get a sense of how big of a deal this was back then, I highly recommend watching the winning 1979 bid video from ABC. The result was not just a financial success, but also a technological and creative triumph, from a production perspective. ABC was on the air for a groundbreaking 180 hours, and the wall-to-wall sports coverage was interspersed with shots of vibrant public spaces, empty freeways, and smog-free skies. It was good for the Olympics — it's yet another way that LA is credited with saving the games — but more importantly for us, this was free advertising for a Los Angeles most outsiders didn't think existed.

The whole plan was so successful, in fact, that the IOC immediately took the control of broadcast rights away from host cities. Before LA's 1984 games even happened, the IOC was busy brokering the deals for the 1988 games. (Remember, both the Summer and Winter Olympics used to be held in the same year.) Funnily enough, broadcast rights then went to NBC, albeit for a much less lucrative deal, and that's where the Summer Olympics have had a home ever since.

What actually ends up on the screen is always going to be political, to a certain extent. But we've entered a very precarious moment. After the U.S. boycotted Moscow's games in 1980, the boycott was reciprocated by 19 countries in 1984. Organizers worried LA's coverage would be criticized for being "too American," and it kind of was. (This is one reason you see the red-white-and-blue Stars in Motion logo being visually phased out over the years in favor of the Deborah Sussman palette celebrating the Pacific Rim.) Now, of course, "too American" could be viewed by certain LA28 White House Task Force members as a feature, not a bug; America's games! The way this administration churns out misleading propaganda is already drawing comparisons to how Nazi Germany used the 1936 games (they hosted both winter and summer!) to sell fascism. Will broadcasters censor the inevitable boos when Trump arrives at SoFi, as they were instructed to at the U.S. Open?

We'll get a chance to see long before 2028. On December 5, the World Cup draw is happening at the Kennedy Center, a public venue being offered to FIFA free of charge, where Gianni Infantino will also present a mysterious new peace prize he may have invented for his sore-loser bestie. After a deal with Apple fell through, FIFA struggled to sell this past summer's Club World Cup to broadcasters, with the rights eventually going to DAZN, a smaller streaming service. But FIFA had no problem selling the rights to the World Cup. You can catch all the action on Fox Sports. 🔥