Olympic World and the Real World….

This is my first Olympics as either a journalist or a sports fan, and I’m sure in any Games there always a bit of disconnect between Olympics World and the Real World. But I’m thinking this disconnect is a bit more pronounced here, in Beijng in 208. Can you imagine what the press coverage in the US would be if, in the run up to and during the early parts of a US hosted Olympics there had been three separate , successful terrorist attacks in, say, Utah or California? Would we the press not be going pretty much nuts covering that?
Well, out there in the Real World today, Wang Lequan, the Communist Party chief in Xinjiang, where the unrest among the Muslim Uigher community is plainly mounting, today called China’s fight against terrorism it a “life and death struggle against the `three forces’” (terrorism, separatism and religious extremism.) In a statement to the (Party controlled) Xinjiang Daily , he said Chinese security forces must “stick to strategy of seizing the initiative to strike preemptively.” But his statement barely made a dent in China’s news coverage, which remains resolutely focused on China kicking the rest of the world’s butts in the almighty race for Gold.
But one place Olympic World and the Real Word do intersect occasionally is the daily press briefing by IOC officials, local and international, on the State of the Games. A colleague from the International Herald Tribune filed this account of this morning’s briefing. As you’ll see, the tenor seems something less than One World-One Dream-y…
http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/08/14/asia/press.php