Television has been killing itself off for well over a decade. Rising costs, increased ad time, and the shift to cheap-to-produce content like reality TV are a just a few factors contributing to the slow death of broadcast and cable TV. Competition from online providers continues to get fiercer, and some networks are doing their best to adapt by providing limited, often ill-performing, online content. Major media events offer networks and providers an opportunity to save face, but even these low-hanging fruits are being ruined by one of the darkest forces in contemporary TV programming: commentators.

During the Republican and Democratic nominating conventions, I watched the speakers and events in a variety of ways. Unlike other major political media events like debates or election coverage, it was incredibly easy to find streaming sources. CSPAN’s website had live coverage online, along with a variety of other YouTube channels, Twitch offered many channels with or without commentary, and even several broadcast networks made the event easily accessible. Each source included varying degrees of advertisements and commentary. It was quite a smorgasbord.

Early on, I was watching an interrupted, ad free, commentary free live stream of the early RNC Convention. It was boring. Real boring. So boring that even Twitter wasn’t saying much about it. Later in the day, as the speakers improved it became a bit more tolerable, but still… something was missing. Ah yes, the pundits! That’s what I needed!

So I switched over to NBC and got the exact opposite. 30 or 40 seconds of each speech, followed by Brian Williams and Rachel Maddow talking over the rest of the speech, then cut to commercial break every five minutes. It was hard to tell what I was even watching, but it didn’t feel like a coherent event. During the prime time, big name speakers I switched back to CSPAN. Then I’d look at Twitter to see how people were reacting. It was a very self-curated experience, but unlike new media events in which this self-curation may be fun and desirable, I was annoyed. This was a long, massive, hyped-up event and I felt like I sunk way too much time in to figuring out what the hell was going on.

Rinse and repeat with the DNC. Both were trying to be media events, but both failed. In their work on media events, Daniel Dayan and Elihu Katz (1992) lay out a set of characteristics for media events that is useful for better understanding why the RNC, DNC, and as I will argue shortly, the Olympics, failed. First, for a media event to succeed “audiences [must] recognize them as an invitation—even a command—to stop their daily routines and join in a holiday experience.” Media events are an interruption of daily life, and are coordinated with public bodies like governments, political parties, or international organizations. They are pre-planned and advertised in advance, and are treated with reverence—Dayan and Katz call them the “High Holy Days” of mass media. Key here is that they are treated with reverence by both audiences and broadcasters.

With an election season like ours, and especially the shitshow that has been Trump’s campaign, it’s understandable why audiences and commentators haven’t treated the conventions, or the myriad other political media events, with reverence. These are not “High Holy Days.” They are a frightening mockery of our political system, which we have convinced ourselves is the best in the whole world. Tremendous. Just the best.

But the Olympics? That’s a different story altogether. The Olympics have always been one of the most important international media events since the earliest days of televised entertainment.

You may have seen this absurd and offensive Bloomberg essay blaming millennials for ruining the 2016 Olympics—or, more specifically, putting a teeny tiny ding in NBC’s record setting ad revenue. How dare we. Of course, it was inevitable. Millennials ruin everything. The family unit, the workplace, the film industry with their scheme to make James Bond a politically correct black dude (gasp!). And now, the Olympics.

But, as Brenton Henry articulates in this rebuttal on Medium, NBC ruined the Olympics. Making it impossible to watch for the average person without a cable subscription (surprise, NBC! There are a lot of us!), refusing to offer live coverage most of the time, making it difficult to understand the schedule, and my absolute biggest gripe: the commentary.

I’m not saying there’s no place for discussion and explanation during sporting events; not everyone knows the ins-and-outs of complex athletic events and the personal athlete bios can be interesting. But the sheer level of commentary was absurd. As in the 2016 nominating conventions, commentary took over to the point that the event itself was drowned out. Combined with the outrageous levels of racism, sexism, body shaming, and homophobia, it’s time to ask: What exactly do commentators contribute to the audience experience of the Olympics? Or of any media event?

For Dayan and Katz, media events are times for reverence and festivity. If there are key moments in the Olympics for reverence and festivity, they are the opening and closing ceremonies. But even these were drowned out by commentators and commercial breaks. The end of a floor routine or a swim match is the moment that makes the media event important, yet instead viewers saw cameras pan away to two smiling faces or an advertisement for dish soap. The pacing of the coverage, the jumble of athletic even displaced in time and space, the confusing and inane commentary: they do not allow any time to breath or fully take in the event. The audience never loses itself.

In his writing on pseudo-events—events choreographed for the sole purpose of drumming up publicity—historian and theorist Daniel Boorstin described the “mirror effect” in which “everywhere we see ourselves in the mirror.” In other words, we contrive images in order to reflect ourselves back as larger-than-life entities. The problem with this mirror effect is that “nearly everything we do to enlarge our world, to make life more interesting, more varied, more exciting, more vivid, more ‘fabulous,’ more promising, in the long run has an opposite effect.” He writes:

We talk to ourselves, without even noticing that it is not somebody else talking to us. We talk to ourselves about what we are supposed to be talking about. We find this out by seeing what other people are talking to themselves about.

 Such is it with pundits and commentators—the mirror effect playing out during these pseudo/media events; talking to ourselves under the guise of a conversation, either with the audience or the other commentators. But, as seen in the backlash to televised commentary across genres, it has had the opposite effect. It turns out, people just want to watch the gymnasts finish their floor routine.

Boorstin argues that much of the pseudo-event culture is bound up in “extravagant expectations” of contemporary (for him, 1961) America. He argues that we expect exciting and important news events in our morning paper, that we expect our homes to not only give us shelter but also relaxation, dignity, a playground, a theater, a bar. But what happens when we expect less? What happens when we just want to see people swim?

How nice it would be if Boorstin gave us an easy out, but instead he writes that “though we may suffer from mass illusions, there is no formula for mass disenchantment. By the law of pseudo-events, all efforts at mass disenchantment themselves only embroider our illusions.” He concludes: “One of the grand illusions is the belief in a ‘cure.’ There is no cure. There is only the opportunity for discovery.”

What does discovery look like in the context of Dayan and Katz’s take on media events? These authors have a much less bleak view of media events, seeing them as not merely interruptions in day-to-day life intended to delude the masses, but also as potential tools for positive social change. To conclude, I’ll return to a concept I introduced in an earlier essay.

When I first proposed “new media events” as an extension of the theories outlined above, it had only been stewing for a few weeks. In the context of the conventions and the Olympics it may provide some fruitful openings for understanding Boorstin’s “opportunity for discovery.” A key characteristic that I proposed was the multi-media self-curation element of new media events, where the “uncooked” content may come from some origin source but the liveliness and engagement comes from other sources of interaction.

Here I’m more interested in what frustrates audiences about failed media events, and what new media might offer. As Nick Hanford, regarding Twitch streams of the nominating conventions, notes:

The potential of a service like Twitch is that we may start building a more evocative and self-aware form of depicting these events. One that eschews the immediacy and false objectivity of cable news and revels in the hypermediacy of multiple voices contributing to a single project. This sort of goal would create a deeper and more profound consciousness that politics are personal, beginning with how they are mediated.

Along similar lines, I argue that approaching massive media events like conventions, debates, elections, the Olympics, the Super Bowl, and countless other examples from a digital perspective can reveal a glimmer of Boorstin’s “discovery.” This discovery—finding other sources of supplementary content to the “uncooked” heart of the media event—can be a direct challenge to the corporate media narrative and style of broadcast that spoils the festivity of media events. Surfing through Twitch channels that don’t have asshole commentary, following Twitter hashtags to see what non-talking heads thought about the President’s speech, and other new media practices are not likely to “cure” the grand illusions Boorstin condemned. But they are undoubtedly a mode of discovery that is not possible under a mass-mediated pseudo event culture.

Yes, people on Twitter still made racist comments about Gabby Douglas’ hair. Approaching media festivals from a new media perspective will never be enough to destroy white supremacist, misogynist, heteronormative, capitalist ideology. But at least on Twitter you can talk back. On Twitch, there’s more competition. You can leave the channel. As Boorstin argued, you can’t cure the disease. You can only chip away at the mirrors, at the illusion. And so long as the Olympics and nearly every other media event is first and foremost a profit-driven endeavor, the tactics available for doing so will be limited.

Britney is on Twitter.