COLLABORATING WITH DICTATORS HAS ITS PRICE, EVEN TODAY: AP: NBC Olympics a ratings “disaster” — and now a tainted brand. “The Beijing Winter Olympics started off as a “cataclysmic” failure in TV ratings, and it ended the same way. . . . This had nothing to do with the performance of the athletes. Viewers knew after NBC’s atrocious brown-nosing of Vladimir Putin’s Soviet iconography in Sochi’s opening games that they already knew what the coverage from Beijing would be like. And they turned out to be correct. This time, though, the moral issues were even more obvious, and yet produced no real shame in Beijing’s corporate partners.”