NBC shouldn't be allowed to profit from its coverage of the Winter Olympics in Beijing by making watchers pay for extra services to see events in real time, says Sen. Marco Rubio.
"The concern we have is NBC is putting up a bunch of subscription services that people have to pay for to watch some of these [events] in real-time," the Florida Republican said on "The Ingraham Angle" on Fox News Tuesday. "I don’t think NBC should be making a penny out of this, or at least consumers don’t have to participate in helping them make a penny out of it."
Instead, he said he hopes the network has the "courage" in its news department to "cover exactly what kind of country and what kind of government is hosting these Olympics," said Rubio. "This is a government that’s committing genocide — pure and simple."
He added that clips of athletes will be available online.
"We shouldn’t allow people to monetize from an Olympics being hosted by a genocidal, communist government that is trying to dismantle the United States’ place in the world by targeting our industries, our jobs, and supply chains across the board," Rubio told show host Laura Ingraham.
Coverage of some events has already begun, according to NBC's Olympics website, with the opening ceremonies to be held on Friday.
Rubio also said there are many reasons to be concerned about the safety and wellbeing of American athletes in China for the Olympics.
"If they come down with COVID, the Chinese won’t let them leave the country," Rubio said. "They will lock them down. I think the second is if a United States athlete expresses a political view that runs counter to anything China believes or says, we don't know what’s going to happen or what [the Chinese government] will do."
Rubio also said he's worried about journalists who may go "off script" and say something the Chinese censors won't like, and about China's lack of transparency on COVID-19 and the health of team USA athletes.
"I can tell you that we are not going to have any transparency," said Rubio. "If there are health risks, some novel, new disease, or a new outbreak, or a new variant of COVID, we wouldn’t know about it. There's no way the Chinese government is going to be transparent about that.
"They weren’t transparent about it when the COVID crisis first emerged. They will not be transparent about any risk the athletes run, anything from air quality to a new pandemic or a new disease."
Rubio also spoke out about Americans who defend the Chinese government, given its record of stealing technology and intellectual property while deindustrializing the United States.
"There’s a lot of blame on the United States’ side too because we’ve got a lot of corporations and a lot of political figures who are tied to — either directly through finances, or in many cases because of key constituencies — to companies and/or practices that are helping China at the expense of American workers, American industry, and American national security," said Rubio.
"We have allowed China to steal our technology and looked the other way. We have allowed this to go on for far too long, and if this continues, we’re not going to like the world," he added.
Sandy Fitzgerald ✉
Sandy Fitzgerald has more than three decades in journalism and serves as a general assignment writer for Newsmax covering news, media, and politics.
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