Bob Costas remembers standing in Tiananmen Square on the third night of the Beijing Olympic Games.

He didn’t find out until the day before that he’d actually be able to report from Beijing’s historic location. NBC was broadcasting a piece about the murder of the father-in-law of the U.S. men’s volleyball coach. Costas had to think of something personal to say after the story ended – in 10 seconds.

‘And then it hit me,’ Costas said to a room of Syracuse University students Wednesday afternoon. ‘We came back and I said, ‘My friend, the late, great Jim McKay used to always say to me, ‘Bob, remember the Olympics are a sports event, yes. But they’re also a travelogue.’

‘Well look around, this is Beijing, China. This is Tiananmen Square on August 10, 2008.’

Costas shared stories from the Olympics and discussed online journalism Wednesday at the S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications. Students and professors filled the 350-seat Joyce Hergenhan Auditorium in Newhouse III, and more watched from overflow seating in classrooms. The event began at 2:30 p.m., and the students sitting in the first available row arrived two hours earlier.

The host of NBC’s ‘Football Night in America’ and the network’s primetime summer Olympics coverage spent two hours answering questions from students and professors. When one of the staff members asked Costas to start wrapping up after an hour, he refused.

‘No, no,’ he said. ‘I’m here until 4:30, or until they throw me out.’

Costas spent the first half-hour telling of his experience in Beijing during the 17 days of the Olympic Games. He disapproved of China airbrushing the image it presented to the world, especially during the opening ceremonies, and called the China Daily ‘almost comical.’

But he said he found a different atmosphere when interacting with the Chinese people.

‘I have never seen an Olympics that’s so engaged an entire country,’ Costas said. ‘Even Chinese citizens who privately would acknowledge that they have serious differences with their government’s policy, they still felt tremendous pride.’

He described interviewing President George W. Bush about what Bush said to Vladimir Putin, the prime minister of Russia, after the conflict between Russia and Georgia broke out the night of the opening ceremonies.

Costas recounted the physical humor of Bela Karolyi, who coached Olympic gold-medalists Mary Lou Retton and Kerri Strug. Karolyi, he said, believed the athletes of the Chinese women’s gymnastics team were clearly under aged. But Costas said his role as a journalist was to raise the issue without giving his personal opinion.

Brian Greene, a senior television, radio and film major, spent a month in Beijing as a production assistant for NBC.

‘I wish I could put together sentences the way he does,’ Greene said. ‘The last thing he talked about – trying to get recognized but making sure quality journalism comes first – that really stuck with me.’

Much of Costas’ answers addressed the importance of quality journalism and the future of the industry. He said in an era when everyone with a computer can be a journalist, fairness and decency still matter. Specifically criticizing blogs, he said some of the information on the Internet is ‘aggressively stupid.’

‘Let’s be realistic here. If you open up the doors to everyone, then what you’ve got is a version of everybody tries out for ‘American Idol.’ And most of them suck,’ he joked.

Had the Internet existed in the 1770s, Costas said Thomas Paine would have blogged his ‘Common Sense.’

‘What’s good is good, no matter how it’s disseminated,’ he said. ‘And crap is crap, whether it’s on the blogosphere, or whether you write it with quill pen on a piece of parchment paper or carve it into the wall of a cave with a jagged rock.’

Though he focused intensely on the Olympics and on online media, Costas also answered questions about the presidential election, his first baseball game at Yankees Stadium, the over-saturation of sports in the media and even the state of the SU football team.

Kristin Quinn, a master’s student in magazine, newspaper and online journalism, said she kept thinking about how Costas was once in her shoes, as a student at SU.

‘I came here not knowing a lot about broadcast journalism and sports, but what he said was really impressive,’ Quinn said. ‘It’s inspiring to see someone who loves their job as much as he does.’

shmelike@syr.edu

Published on September 24, 2008 at 12:00 pm