My wife and I have never been so horrified of watching televised coverage of a major sporting event in our lives.
Your Much Music news broadcast, sent slightly before 5pm today was absolutely beyond the limits of what we consider decent for viewing before 10pm. We are worried that we will not be able to watch the Olympic coverage with our son.
First you showed video footage of a young adult male in a hot tub with what were obviously underage girls in bikinis, which is an extremely inappropriate sexualization of those poor teenage girls.
Second you showed some video footage of some people doing body shots in a bar. The impression we get is that the Olympics are going to be one gigantic party and this is a very poor impression of the Olympics to be passing along to other countries.
In terms of what we consider appropriate footage during televised coverage during the late afternoon we found your story to be quite disgusting and in poor taste. We were not anticipating being exposed to an a MTV style wild party during coverage of the largest sporting event in the world.
You have tarnished Canada’s reputation in mere minutes that we as a nation have been attempting to build for many decades.
Remember that you are the sole source of information on the Olympics and as such have a great responsibility to represent Canada in an appropriate way.
If you insist on showing footage of a small minority of Canadians partying like wild in bars, you can expect us to stop watching your network, and to encourage our friends to do the same.
Thank you for taking our concerns seriously,
David Wees
Vasilia Wees
Anonymous says:
I thought the under-aged bikini clad girls, body shots and the “remove your gear for beer” stripping contest is totally inappropriate for olympic coverage.
Women have been working to be taken seriously in (Olympic) sport, and showing young girls in bikinis as “props” for the coverage is disgusting.
February 12, 2010 — 8:27 pm
David Wees says:
Yes, this is a really good point. I totally agree, this coverage was also sexist.
In fairness, this was a cut-away clip in the middle of some other news coverage, and when they cut back (in the middle of the “strip for beer” contest), the two announcers seemed pretty horrified as well.
February 12, 2010 — 8:39 pm
Anon says:
Unbelievable, they haven’t even lit the torch yet and CTV has managed to offended Canadians. CTV – Canada’s Olympic Broadcaster? I hope they get called to answer for this footage; either by they advertisers or by the CRTC.
February 12, 2010 — 8:29 pm