I admit to having enjoyed the trend toward focusing on more "human interest" stories in Olympic coverage, back in the early '90s when it first began, but now, like all "human interest" journalism, it's getting out of hand.
Instead of waiting for the athletes who didn't fare so well in their events to calm down, take a shower, have some Gatorade and sit down for a few minutes to philosophize about how they'd done their best and were just excited to be competing in such great company, how they'd keep on doing their thing and may well be back in four years, losing athletes are now cornered immediately after their crushing defeat with a microphone shoved in their face, and are asked humiliating and almost soul-crushing questions, like "How does it feel to know that you've worked for this all your life, you came to the semi-finals as a gold-medal contender and then, having let your place in the finals slip away through some careless error, will not be able to compete, thus breaking your mother's heart and betraying your country, and now that you are old and washed up with no chance in 2012, you may as well go drown yourself in the Yangtze?"
OK, I'm paraphrasing. But not by much.
And then there's the close-up, waiting for the tears. In bygone days, the camera would politely turn away after the first tear fell, but, no, these days, it waits about a minute, until the poor 16-year-old diver has apologized about three times for breaking down on camera, while the correspondent makes sympathetic noises but does not remove the microphone from its position shoved in the poor girl's face.
For the third time, she's just -- sob -- happy to be here.
Isn't there an opening for these journalists in election coverage?
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