Sports and Angertainment: Playing Politics

Media companies love sports programming. They pay billions for the rights to broadcast and/or stream professional sports.

It’s relatively cheap to produce. You don’t need writers and scripts—just a few experts to sit around and pontificate and predict. There is built-in drama with winners and losers. Sports programming creates engagement, and engagement means repeat viewers—they keep coming back. For media companies, that means eyes, ears, advertising dollars, and profits.

College sports attract masses of followers, even among people who have no connection to the schools. Professional teams capture the attention of major metro markets and entire regions of the country. Sporting events even transcend national boundaries. Spectator sports underlie a huge, highly profitable segment of the media industry.

Consider the importance of sports programming to the cable television industry. In the United States, where millions of people are “cutting the cord” on cable and migrating to streaming services, sports programming is the one “exclusive” that the cable industry can hold onto to keep its subscribers. The corporate parents of cable companies pay billions of dollars for sports broadcast rights to maintain their hold on subscribers, while Amazon and other streaming services are paying billions to attract sports fans to their offerings. Amazon alone pays $1 billion annually for exclusive Thursday Night Football rights through 2033, part of the NFLs unprecedented $105 billion media deal.

In 1950, the average professional basketball player earned between $4,000-$5,000 per year. Today, the average NBA salary is nearly $12 million annually—that’s a staggering 2,400% increase. NFL players have seen similar explosive growth: from earning around $5,000 in the 1950s to today’s average of approximately $2 million per year.

In little more than half a century, sports has grown from a cottage industry into an industrial behemoth. Every aspect has been monetized. Audiences have grown. Viewers have shown they will pay more for the content. They respond to the advertising. Ultimately, every dollar that goes into payroll, team profits, league profits, and media revenue—all of that money comes from the pockets of the people we generally refer to in the US as fans. Media companies have been wildly successful in monetizing sports.

A fan. The word is derived from “fanatic.” These fans are the essential element to the financial success of the sports industry. What if you could attract a sizable group of loyal listeners, viewers, and readers to a media operation? Imagine how much money you could make with a vast audience of genuine fanatics if you didn’t have to pay for media rights. Imagine the profit potential when you don’t have to pay star players—when they actually crave the attention you provide and let you advertise to your audience.

You don’t have to imagine any of this. Angertainment, Inc. has perfected the business model and is getting better at monetizing politics every day.

Angertainment Has Turned Politics Into a Game

Real journalism has long been criticized for providing “horse race” coverage of election campaigns. The rise of scientific polling provided reporters with an easy way to frame their stories. Whatever the latest polls showed, reporters could ask candidate Xs team how they saw the race, how they felt about their position, and if they were trailing in the polls, what they might do to catch up. In the Internet era, polling has grown even bigger, providing a constant stream of information for business, the general public, journalists, and angertainment. What are the odds? Whos going to win? The same questions sports fans are asking daily.

Journalism in the late 20th century set the stage for the evolution of politics into sports. Horse race coverage has always been a part of journalism—the news angle is impossible to ignore. Reporters have always found ways to report “whos going to win” stories. Just as in sports stories, they identify the favorites and talk about the underdogs. In politics, as in sports, the biggest stories come when there are upsets.

The photo of a smiling President Truman holding a newspaper with the headline “Dewey Beats Truman” will live in history forever.

Was the challenger gaining, or was the favorite slipping? Primary elections, winnowing the field, gave party leaders and voters their chance to select the starting lineup. The rise of the polling industry amplified the horse race commentary. Every new poll provided a new snapshot of the race.

Election night coverage from network journalists provided one of the least appreciated yet most important contributions to the sports-like coverage of politics: they selected the team colors!

The color code evolved between 1972 and 2000. In 1972, CBS showed Democratic states in red and Republican states in blue. In 1976, ABC coded Democrats in red and Republicans in yellow, with undecided states shown in gray. In 1980, NBC and CBS both went red for Democrats and blue for Republicans, but in 1984, CBS switched sides.

Since 1988, the color scheme has remained the same—Democrats in blue, Republicans in red. It is safe to say that today the team colors are as firmly established as those of any sports team. The red-blue identifier may seem like a small thing, but it is powerful and significant in political news—as color-coded and tribally unifying as the colors that identify the Bloods and Crips in urban gang culture.

The team colors become a brand, a sign of loyalty and the outward and visible sign of allegiance and brotherhood. Imagine the reaction of the fans of the Alabama football team—the Crimson Tide—if the team took the field wearing blue uniforms. What if the Michigan Wolverines appeared in Ohio State red or Michigan State green? It is unthinkable.

Thats where we are in politics in America today. Political scientists, pollsters, and pundits describe it as polarization. There is a simpler way to describe it: the political process—democracy itself—has been transformed from a rational decision-making process into a spectator sport.

Voters Have Become Fans

Step back from all of your preconceptions about democratic elections. Discard the personal values displayed in political memoirs, the ideals expressed in position papers, and the pragmatic solutions proposed in policy platforms. Don’t even think about the dueling soundbites of modern political debates—the forums where the idea of thoughtful discussion goes to die.

Call to mind instead the home team crowd in a packed basketball arena. Imagine the cheerleaders in a football stadium exhorting the fans to “get out the vote.” If you want to see a debate, summon your best imaging of a World Wrestling Federation match: the announcers listing grudges, sideline correspondents providing color commentary and speculating on the outcome, superstars parading and preening in the ring. The outcome? In the wrestling world, scripted entertainment determines whether the hero will succeed or the heel will steal his deserved victory. The outcome in American elections may be slightly less predictable—the polls may be off by a percentage point or two. In reality, victory will hinge on which political team rouses more of its fans to the polls.

Voters researching candidates, considering their ideas, imagining how policies might impact them, and then thoughtfully weighing options before casting a vote? That idea is dead. Voters today—and especially voters under the influence of Angertainment Inc.—are like sports fans. Harking back to the root word “fanatic,” they are not engaged in a decision-making process. They are simply turning out to support the team.

Primary elections are about choosing up sides—selecting the players that best represent your team. General elections are all about the team. Voters aren’t considering the possibility of voting for the other side. That is essentially unthinkable. The only thing that matters is how much enthusiasm they’re feeling for their team in this competition at the polls.

Is this a championship team? Are you ready to root, root, root and go all out in support? Do you have doubts? Maybe you don’t like the coach? Maybe, going back to the primary, you wanted someone else to be the quarterback.

Stepping back and looking at all of this, searching for something like democracy, it is a frightening sight. The reality is straightforward: these voters will never consider voting for someone on the other team.

For a parallel in sports, consider the many athletes who get caught in scandals or even convicted of crimes. They take their PR hit and perhaps even serve time. But when the penalty phase is over, sports fans will welcome them back as long as they think they can help their team win.

Yes, there may be a few fans and supporters who have reservations. Most of the teams base, however—the diehard fans—will welcome anyone they think will give their team an advantage in upcoming competitions.

Character flaws, moral failure, criminal conviction, or betrayal of the public trust be damned—they’re players on our team and so they get our support. The same logic now applies to political figures, at least the ones supported by Angertainment, Inc.

The real triumph of Angertainment, Inc. has come through the power it has gained in building team loyalty. In the pre-angertainment era, voter loyalty was weak. People could be convinced to change their minds. In elections involving Jimmy Carter, for example, and Bill Clinton, these candidates Southern roots helped overcome suspicions of their “liberal tendencies” for many Southern voters. But in the Angertainment 3.0 era, that will never happen. Authentic Southern roots for a candidate will also require authentic Southern prejudices for the Republican base.

Communication Is Futile

Every election cycle, we see serious journalists going into red states to talk with Trump supporters. The reporters ask thought-provoking questions. The supporters provide thoughtful answers. Everyone involved tries to engage seriously in an effort to build understanding.

All of this is, in fact, an exercise in futility.

Imagine the same reporters going into the stands at an Ohio State game asking the fans about why they root for Ohio State. The fans will provide serious answers, but no amount of rational discourse will convince them to cheer for Michigan next week. The team loyalty runs too deep for logic to penetrate.