By Richard Nelson
Friday, October 13, 2017
The left wanted to mix politics with sports right up
until last Sunday, when Vice President Mike Pence left an Indianapolis Colts
game at the sight of the kneeling players on both sides (the San Francisco
49ers are the most kneel-happy team in the league).
For years, sports media has enjoyed injecting politics
into sports, but they didn’t seem to like Pence doing the same. Which suggests
that their priority was never about covering the intersection of sports and
politics, as they claimed, but rather the intersection of their politics and sports.
Sports fans, in large number, think of sports as solely
entertainment and largely unifying. Sure, you may be a Clemson grad who hates
all things Gamecocks, but for the most part, sports are what brings communities
together for high school football, colleges together during NCAA Tournament
runs, and diverse cities and entire regions together for pro sports success.
Everyone enjoys an inspiring story, and sports are
chock-full of them. It can be the most uplifting part of your newspaper.
What disrupts our enjoyment of sports is divisiveness,
but sports media has had no time for that complaint in recent years. This was
another realm of culture to claim, so they’ve made things and more political,
even against its better interests.
Sports Media Have
Disdained Their Audience
In 2013, the National Journal studied 200,000 interviews
and charted what sports fans liked, how they leaned politically, how many fans
liked a certain sport, and how likely those fans were to vote.
The sports that skewed left were the WNBA, pro tennis,
the NBA, soccer, pro wrestling, horse racing, UFC, and extreme sports. Only the
NBA ranks among America’s most-watched sports.
Two were right on the line of bipartisanship: motocross
and grand-am road racing (I don’t know what that is, and don’t care to look it
up).
All other sports skewed right: the NFL, the MLB (the
closest to the bipartisan line all these), college football, college
basketball, NASCAR, rodeo, bull riding, drag racing, pro golf, IndyCary, high
school sports, and the Olympics.
It would be wise to take this information into
consideration, right? Maybe not preach liberal politics to right-leaning sports
fans, particularly at a time when we’re more divided than ever? Sadly, many in
sports media have done the exact opposite.
They’ve roundly mocked their own audience when asked to
“stick to sports.” They reference Jackie Robinson and Muhammad Ali as shining
examples of the good that happens when athletes don’t stick to sports (isn’t it
odd they rarely offer examples from the last 35 years?).
Seth Davis allegedly covers college basketball for The
Athletic. Last March, college basketball’s most important month, his Twitter
timeline was full of anti-Trump tweets and his profile picture was an image of
Obama.
I followed him for a few weeks, ready for daily updates
on all the bubble teams. But he was busy scolding his followers. His account
now proudly declares he “doesn’t stick to sports.”
Why Sports Writers
Are Drawn To Politics
You go to work and follow sports on the side, but sports
media has it reversed, naturally: sports is work. So following politics becomes
many writer’s most enjoyable side hobby.
Any chance to weave the two together is a win for sports
media. It’s a ticket to more clicks, more airtime, more front pages, and more
relevance.
If your local NFL team wins Sunday, that story be on the
front page of the sports section. If they kneel, that same writer might get a
story on A1. TV is much the same. Sports is the first thing cut on local TV
when the weatherman goes over time.
There’s also more money to be made with politics: Keith
Olbermann was a popular SportsCenter host, but made more money talking
politics. Jemele Hill’s recent controversy and suspension all but guarantees
her next gig will be at MSNBC or CNN, and she’ll get a nice pay raise with
that.
Many sports journalists got into the business hoping to
cover their own Ali, but those don’t come every decade. For years, they kept
wanting to pull the star athletes into the political realm, but were refused
(most notably by Michael Jordan’s “Republicans buy sneakers too” quip).
As things got more polarized in the latter years of
George W. Bush’s presidency, efforts to find a star athlete who fit the leftist
media’s cause were scrapped. If you started with the cause, you could find
another vessel to weave sports and leftist politics together.
Here’s a few examples:
• Gun control:
When Kansas City Chiefs player Jovan Belcher killed his girlfriend and then
himself, NBC’s Bob Costas dedicated his halftime monologue for a Sunday Night
NFL game to gun control (and not domestic violence, which is something both
left and right have rallied against in pro sports).
• LGBT causes:
Sports fans may not care if their sports figures are gay or straight, but the
media has been trying to make them care. When former NBA player John Amaechi
came out as gay, the search was on for an active gay player. Jason Collins was
that guy, and later Michael Sam, and perhaps both were newsworthy—an organic
intersection of sports and politics.But now our U.S. Women’s Soccer Team are
wearing rainbow jerseys for gay pride, the NCAA is pulling events out of states
that dare challenge the unpopular transgender agenda, and a sports blog
dedicated to LGBT causes, called OutSports, wonders whether Tim Tebow is gay.
And who could forget ESPN naming Caitlyn Jenner its sportsperson of the year,
ahead of a college basketball player who played with terminal cancer?
• Black Lives
Matter: Colin Kaepernick sat for the National Anthem, then kneeled, and sports
media did the rest, plunging headfirst into #KneelingAnthemChallenge
wall-to-wall coverage. CBSsports.com has an entire section of its website
titled “Anthem Protests.”
It was overkill. And now it seems to have backfired.
Through Trump, the
Right Is Striking Back
As much as right-leaning sports fans begged the sports media
to stop, they were mostly powerless, and sports media knew it.
“You’ll still watch,” they said, smugly. They were right,
but only for a while.
Sports media erred in two ways: one, they didn’t see the
long game. Two, they thought that the right would never get involved and try to
promote its own brand of sports and politics.
ESPN has learned the hard way. They’ve lost many
subscribers due to cord-cutting, and many sports fans have grown to dislike the
first channel that was made for just them. The Ringer’s Bryan Curtis has a good
article on the falling out of ESPN’s popularity.
NFL ratings went up the week Donald Trump attacked anthem
protests; perhaps people were tuning in to see how the NFL would respond. When
a record number of players sat, knelt, stretched or stayed in the locker room
for the anthem, fans tuned out. The next two weeks of ratings show it.
NFL Sunday Ticket cancellations were so plentiful,
DirecTV offered full refunds (a smart long-term play to get those fans to pay
next year, should the NFL succeed in quashing the anthem protests).
Trump and Pence’s willingness to join the fray is
unprecedented. At first, I was against it. After all, I don’t like politics in
my sports. I was being consistent.
But now that the NFL is backing down, and sports media
are freaking out about Pence getting involved, I have to sit back and look at
this differently. Pence and Trump didn’t start this battle. But they may have
won the biggest current-day culture war in sports, and it only took a few months
of their first football season in office.
If sports and politics are going to be joined at the hip,
there might as well be some of my
politics in there as well.
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