So, NBC, how's your plan for broadcasting 3,600 hours of Olympics coverage across your 500 different television properties going? With just 19 days to go, we hear you've sold 90 percent of your ad inventory for the games, but we've been hearing that for awhile now.

Sure, most of your programming time will be a cakewalk: Point the camera at Michael Phelps crotch as he dives into the pool; point the camera at Paul Hamm's crotch as he bounds across the gymnastics floor.

But what to do if, say, something controversial — and this means more than your standard doping accusations — happens in Beijing? Like if an athlete starts carrying on about Tibet, or the Chinese authorities crack down on a human rights protest outside Olympic Village, or the Today show's license to broadcast live from Tiananmen Square suddenly gets revoked? You still going to abide by Business As Usual?

NBC News president Steve Capus insists, "If there’s news, we’re going to cover it."

This is funny. Not because we don't believe NBC News' crackteam of reporters will try to do their jobs as best they can, because they will.

Rather, look to corporate overlord GE, who has a lot riding on these Olympics games. And not just the $1 billion in ad revenue.

General Electric, run by Jeff Immelt and long rumored to be looking to unload shareholder concern NBC, is going to be more concerned about the $10 billion it expects to collect from China by 2010 than by any journalistic integrity its news division might be looking to maintain. Access to Chinese business is not something GE will take lightly; risking relationships with the Chinese government isn't on its list of priorities.

When it comes to the Olympics itself, GE has its hands in more than 300 related projects, including technology for the new National Stadium.

So it makes sense, then, that "NBC officials are not eager to discuss the peculiarities of broadcasting from China." Because their ability to do so is as much regulated by what Beijing will allow them than the tightrope GE is walking to put cameras on the ground.

If Chinese authorities ask-slash-demand NBC to shield its eyes from one controversy or another, we'll expect them to do so.

[NYT]