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Olympics Propaganda

I realized this in 2008 during the Beijing Olympics.  There are at least two systems being used - one by the United States media, and another by most of the rest of the countries in the world (and Google, by the way).

Look at the page I linked to below.
http://www.nbcolympics.com/medals/index.html


It shows the 2012 medals count.   China is in the lead, and the United States is second place.  Where it becomes strange is with Japan, which is number 3 with medals, but is actually tied for 9th place when it comes to gold medals won.

See, the American media (catering to an American audience) have felt the need to base the country rankings on ALL medals won (gold, silver, and bronze), whereas the rest of the world (and international websites like Google) rank countries based on GOLD medals.

I think the latter is a much better policy.  Being "Number 2" or "Number 3" is not equal to being "Number 1", but NBC (and many other American media sites) treat it that way.  Why?

Because in 2008, China "won" the Olympics.  I mean, China got the most gold medals.  And the American media was ready for this.  They knew that America was likely to get more medals (including silver and bronze) than China, so that is what they chose.

Currently, China is beating the United States even in number of total medals, so perhaps this propaganda system might not work for much longer.

Some countries use "per capita" rankings.  That is, they divide the population of the country by the number of medals (gold or total, depending on whether you're number one or not).  So the U.S. can still be glad that it is still ahead of China in a "per capita" sense, since China would have to win 4 times as many medals as the U.S. to make up for its 4x larger population.

But in 2008, the top country "per capita" using both medals counts was Finland.
http://www.topendsports.com/events/summer/medal-tally/all-time-comparison-pop.htm

There's still room for a country to count "medals per GDP per capita".  It can say, "With only this much money to spend, we were still able to win this many medals!"

That honor might go to North Korea, which is currently 5th place among all participants in the gold medal count.
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