So our media-critic-in-chief had some thoughts about ESPN this morning. Here is why he is wrong:
You mostly can’t just drop ESPN
Just about everywhere in the country, ESPN is a part of basic cable. If you are a sports fanatic with cable, you have ESPN. If you think sports exemplify all the terrible and corrupt things about our postmodern hellscape of a society, but you really like HGTV and The Food Network, you have ESPN.
This has been a good deal for ESPN, which charges cable systems a carriage fee per subscriber no matter who watches. But as we can increasingly tailor our television offerings to fit our tastes and get our TV through the Internet, people are seeking out cheaper option. For instance the Sling Blue offerings let you get HGTV, the Food Network and not ESPN for $20 a month. ESPN is popular, which is how it gets away with charging cable companies more than $7 to carry it. But it also inflated cable bills to the point where people, sports fans and not, are cutting the cord. To what extent are ESPN’s subscriber losses people who never watched ESPN to begin with? It’s at least some of them.
OK, but maybe the politics make people less devoted to ESPN
This isn’t a bad argument actually. And perhaps we are seeing cultural shifts away from sports fandom. This may be a long-term effect of sports leagues embracing cable TV’s money in the early 1990. Limiting the reach of your broadcasts means you don’t hit certain segments of people and therefore diminish your cultural importance. Sports are still bigger than basically every other subculture, but attract less of a share of the population than they might have in the past. This might make them more willing to give us ESPN.
ESPN doesn’t matter the way it used to matter
Look, ESPN used to explain sports in way not available anywhere else. But now we have the Internet, and I do not have to wait for SportsCenter to get my scores and highlights. I use the ESPN app on my phone for that. So the non-game programming is simply less important to me. As for the game programming, ESPN hardly ever showed my teams anyway. Like if you aren’t a Boston Red Sox, New York Yankees, Golden State Warriors or Cleveland Cavaliers fan, you aren’t going to see your favorite teams on ESPN all that much. As I consider my own cable options in this crazy year where I’m living in two places at once, my main consideration is getting Milwaukee Bucks games, which mostly means I need Fox Sports Wisconsin not ESPN (Come on ESPN, more Giannis).
ESPN is no longer the all-sports network
ESPN has made its big bets on the NFL, NBA and big-time college sports. These are the most popular sports by many measures so this makes complete sense.
But not everyone is a fan of every sport. If you are a baseball fan, ESPN has increasingly less to offer you having made cutbacks to staff and programming in the last round of layoffs. You still get a few games a week, and the Sunday broadcast is good, but nightly Baseball Tonight is gone. And baseball fans have it great compared to hockey and NASCAR fans who get almost nothing from ESPN in terms of highlights and analysis and certainly no live events. Is this politics or market-based choices? Now, if you were inclined, you could make demographic arguments about the fan bases of hockey and NASCAR and perhaps try to line them up with voting patterns – actually hold on, anyone want to do a paper on this?
Sports were always political
I get that people mostly tune into sports as entertainment. I do it too and there is nothing wrong with that until you get to the point where you are stuffing your fingers in your ears going “NA-NA-NA CAN’T HEAR YOU.”
Think about last night’s NFL game between the Texans and Bengals. It started with the national anthem. It probably did not have a military flyover, but those shows of military might pregame are not rare. It was played in a stadium built with public funds that will cost local taxpayers nearly $1 billion over the life of the financing. Stadium costs actually took up 16.4 percent of the Hamilton County, Ohio Budget in 2010, money not being spent on any other civic priority. The players were largely trained at public universities (JJ Watt, Go Badgers, hope your finger is OK) and before that at public high schools around the country. The NFL team owners are billionaires because of the tax code. Labor laws govern the business relationships between the owners and players. The bulk of the money comes from broadcast rights, which are a mix of the legacy of giving away the public airwaves, laws creating a property interest in the broadcasts of the game and FCC policy governing the growth of cable. All layers of the game are shaped by political choices. And this is even before we starting going cultural studies and talking about the dramatization of the workplace and the racial and gender politics of sports on display.
We are really talking about other things
When people are complaining about the rise of politics on ESPN, they are complaining about people talking about cultural changes in ways they might not have done previously. People point to major moments of ESPN losing its way, like conservative Republican Caitlyn Jenner winning an ESPY award or Michael Sam kissing his same-sex partner after being drafted or Kaepernick coverage. And maybe Jenner was a manufactured event. But if you report sports news as a network, how on earth would stories like Sam and Kaepernick not count? Moreover if the players are increasingly speaking out politically because the calculus of sponsorship has changed, what does it mean for a league’s broadcast partner to actively suppress that?
Sheeple, you’re demanding propaganda.
Nostalgia is stupid and bad
The good old days of sports are invoked to describe manhood and toughness and pride and selflessness and any other virtue you want to argue for. Somehow the past was always better. Except in sports, the good old days also signified an era of owner power and media control that made our sports narratives simple. Go back far enough and you never have to deal with a person of color if you are so inclined.
But accounts of decline in sports are often arguments against broader social change. The good old days were not always good for everyone, which is why people within the sports industry fought for change internally and by enlisting people in society at large. And look, we’re all guilty of this. Most of us are not in the industry and view sports through our own lens as fans. And our fan experiences are forged when we are young and things seem simple. The Bad Boy Pistons, the first team I ever loved, were perfect in every way. And I’ll hear nothing bad about them, especially our special envoy to North Korea, Dennis Rodman.
The Anti-PC position as expressed on TV is intellectually vacant
When the White House Press Secretary declares a statement by a television broadcaster “a fireable offense,” that is an expression of what some might call political correctness. Sarah Huckabee Sanders is defining an idea as unworthy of consideration in the public square. To put it another way the chief spokeswoman for the executive branch of the United States federal government – literally the most powerful force that has ever existed on earth – is declaring an idea off limits. God help us if they ever decided to put any actual force behind those words.
Look, I get that people are uncomfortable with college students shutting down speakers, declaring entire worldviews racist and bringing social sanction against those who want to promote unpopular ideas. But chanting college students don’t have nuclear weapons or police power to enforce political dogma. It is fine to chafe against the social sanction they do have. It might even be healthy. But if you are taking a principled position against PC culture, you need to address actual power differentials. And you need to stand up when it is being wielded against people you don’t like. Otherwise, you’re being intellectually dishonest and I get to dismiss you entirely.
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