Presumably The New Yorker recognized that "women's gymnastics is getting shortchanged" is a better human-interest story than "the US Olympic coverage is terrible", but the second option has more substance.
http://www.nbcolympics.com/live-stream-schedule
or do you mean this?
"Look! The American took 3th place! Let's interview her and show a little mini-biography of her life and not even show or mention the Australian and Chinese competitors who took gold and silver!"
I found the making of videos they have on that page interesting. Basically the OBS are the ones doing the actual filming and broadcasting of all the Olympic events , and then all the broadcasters of the world rebroadcast that. They also provide all the onscreen graphics.
So NBC could send down a tech crew and an uplink truck and we would still get full coverage of the Olympics minus all the color commentary.
The BBC feed for weightlifting has been excellent (and it's a sport that needs it, with more 'meta' strategy than many things), while NBC's coverage has been US-obsessed and tepid-to-awful for pretty much every competition.
If it really bothers you I think that a decent proxy and the BBC iPlayer can get you good all-around event coverage...or so people have told me...
[0] - http://results.nbcolympics.com/schedules/ [1] - https://www.nbcolympics.com/live-stream-schedule
[1] (No idea if these only work in Germany... )
http://rio.sportschau.de/rio2016/live/Alle-Livestreams-von-O...
Is it too much to ask in 2016 for a single web page that lets me filter down to each event and see all the heats leading up to the final? Or how about a single page with all the events happening live so I can put the one I actually want to watch?