• WSJ (paid subscription required), Thursday, February 16, 2006 10:46 AM

Wall Street Journal writer Steve McKee, writing the "Here and There" column from Turin, where he has been dispatched to watch the Olympics up close and personal, has used his downtime to view the Games on local TV. And what has he discovered? To his surprise, the coverage is both different and, for the most part, edifying. He noticed fewer intrusions by anchors. More attention is paid the athletes and their competitions, less to blathery analysis and, uh, commercials. "Here's a tip for NBC Universal," writes McKee. "Rai Sports [an Italian channel] saves all its commercials for after its evening program. Now there's a concept!" McKee says he counted 10 consecutive TV spots on Rai, and he watched them all. As for French TV coverage, also accessible to McKee from his perch in Turin, he observes, "This was sports TV for the people who get sports. One event after the other-- men's cross-country, pairs figure-skating short program, women's moguls --was broadcast with little or no transition. Interviews weren't interviews, they were conversations. That I understand French poorly doesn't matter; the longer I watched, the more one thing became perfectly clear. There was no Bob Costas because there was no need for a Bob Costas to explain these sports."

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