With the presidential election just two months away, the White House occupier on Tuesday appeared consumed by the shifting numbers and what they portend for weeks to come. The numbers of NBA viewers, that is.
“Basketball ratings are VERY down and they won’t come back,” Donald Trump thundered on Twitter. On Friday, two days after three playoff games were postponed when Milwaukee Bucks players decided not to play in protest at police shooting of Jacob Blake, a black man in Wisconsin, the president warned journalists that political activism “is about to destroy basketball”.
NBA ratings are lower than in previous years. However, the explanation isn’t as straightforward as Trump suggests, even as fan views on player protests against police brutality seem to fragment along partisan political lines.
A YouGov poll of 7,425 American adults on Aug.28 found that 45% strongly supported the NBA teams’ decision while 21% strongly opposed it. However, broken down by political leanings, 82% of Democrats supported the players while 64% of Republicans opposed their action.
When pollsters asked, “in general, do you support or oppose professional athletes who publicly express their political views?”, 60% of respondents were in favor and 30% against. Once again, the party’s divisions were stark: 85 percent of Democrats were in favor while 67 percent of Republicans were against.
But it’s hard to quantify the effect on NBA ratings of an angry Oval Office tweet, a snide remark from a Fox News host, a troubled relationship with China, or an avalanche of negative columns in the conservative media, especially in this one. aberrant year.
Although ratings are down (even before the impact of the pandemic), Jon Lewis, who analyzes view data on the Sports Media Watch website, believes fans are feeling rejected by political activism “certainly wouldn’t be the reason. main, it wouldn’t even be the secondary reason, it would just be an ingredient to be put in the soup of what is altogether just a rough confluence of circumstances for the league. “
There is the pandemic-imposed shift in playoff games from spring to late summer, with August traditionally a quiet month for television viewing in general. The unusual number of matches in the early afternoon on weekdays when many people are working. All four Eastern Conference first-round series were one-sided. The buzz of returning to sports faded weeks ago.
And there’s the sterile, eerie atmosphere of fanless gaming in the Orlando bubble. “This is a TV show and it’s not quite the same show, the same setting, as it normally would be,” says Lewis.
The three-day hiatus due to player protests last week appears to have had little visible effect on the viewing data so far, as reported by Sports Media Watch. Game 5 of the series between Portland Trail Blazers and Los Angeles Lakers on Saturday drew 2.92 million spectators, compared to 2.98 million in the fourth game. The San Antonio Spurs and Denver Nuggets drew 3.49m for a decisive game 7 on Saturday in the first round of last year’s playoffs. Overall, the weekend picture was mixed, with variations in start time and channel appearing to have a significant impact on views.
While ratings on traditional cable television may be struggling from previous year highs as consumer habits change, this is true of both NCIS or Criminal Minds and the NBA. Numbers need to be placed in the complex context of a general shift in the way people watch TV. Sports programming can also be set for a boost once normal life resumes, as the Nielsen rating system is now measuring away from home viewing in places like airports and bars.
Risking to alienate a part of the fans by supporting political activism of the players is the price of doing business in the age of social media, believes Brad Horn, professor of public relations at Syracuse University and former assistant director of public relations for Texas at the Major. League Baseball. Rangers.
“It’s like flying in turbulence,” he says. “Even if you have all these storms around you as you fly, you have to get to that destination. I think that’s what brings clarity to some leagues, like the NBA. “
Up until the last couple of years, getting into divisive issues was anathema to organizations that feared doing anything that might offend paying customers and politicians with subsidy influence and influence on building new arenas.
When faced with controversy, the typical corporate PR strategy in sports, says Horn, was to “hit the pause button and see how it turns out … we don’t need to go there.”
While older fans may still think of sports as evasive entertainment, he adds, younger supporters expect companies – whether they are retail brands or major league teams – to take strong and quick ethical stances. Silence and neutrality became unsustainable once social media allowed athletes to speak unfiltered in an instant in a national climate of escalating political and cultural tensions.
Additionally, NBA players, 80% of whom are black, would say that rankings are not the league’s priority when they see people who look like them being hit regularly by the police. The main point of the struggle is that it involves a certain amount of sacrifice. Whether the billionaires who own (and profit from) teams agree with them is another matter, but many players believe NBA commissioner Adam Silver is genuinely committed to social justice.
One of the catalysts for the change was the decision of Colin Kaepernick, former quarterback of the San Francisco 49ers, not to run for the national anthem in 2016. Trump, then a Republican candidate, tried to make Kaepernick’s protest a campaign talking point. and blamed it for sinking NFL television ratings, which dropped an average of 8% in the regular season.
“I hope football and baseball are watching and learning because the same thing will happen to them,” Trump added in his NBA tweet on Tuesday.
The NFL season starts on September 10 and there will likely be protests. If Trump’s prediction comes true and America’s most popular sport suffers a steep drop in ratings, the explanation could be politics. But the distracting factor of building a crucial election is a more likely reason than a calamitous Conservative boycott. “It’s pretty typical for ratings to go down in an election year,” says Lewis.
