Nationalistic feelings and sports: The incident of the overseas Chinese protest against NBC's coverage of the centennial Olympic games

In NBC's coverage of the 1996 Summer Olympic Games Opening Ceremony, Bob Costas’ remarks about Team China invited furious and persistent protests from the overseas Chinese. The protests, which were chiefly based on situational ethics, garnered an extensive grassroots support and continued for weeks after the Atlanta Olympics had finished. Under pressure from the protestors, NBC made a public apology. In response to the protests and NBC's apology, the US media expressed strong discontent. The arguments were basically supported by political correctness. Thus, situational ethics collided with political correctness. Although the protest against NBC appeared to be an accidental incident, a careful review of the incident and the opinions voiced by both sides reveals that the anger of the overseas Chinese with NBC, which justified itself in a number of ways, bears a variety of social and political implications, and that the US media's position has also been justified by the norms that have been formed over the past few years and accepted by the media and the majority of the American public alike. An explanation for the causes of the protest incident begs an in‐depth analysis of broad social and political factors.