Comics, cartoons, and the NFL...

[Johnny1A]

Right now, the National Football League is 'enjoying' the experience of what happens when you assume your fans agree with your politics without checking first.  Other institutions may be on that same road, though:

https://pjmedia.com/lifestyle/2017/09/27/teenage-mutant-ninja-turtles-comic-writer-tweets-death-gop/

The only legendary comment, "If you want to send a message, use Western Union." is a cliché for a reason...

[Johnny1A]

The NFL's slow self-destruction continues.

As it happens, I've never been a (American) football fan, I always tended to find the game dull.  If I do spectator sports, I prefer baseball.  But in a 'watching the car crash' sense, the NFL has become fascinating as an instance of social and cultural and political phenomena.

One interesting question that's being debated by NFL fans and former fans and observers is whether the NFL owners and corporate personnel even understand why their TV ratings are collapsing and they're suddenly having trouble filling stadium seats.  (The former is vastly more important than the later from an economic POV, but both matter.)  Some people think they know, and either are unable to, or do not wish to, address the problem.  Others think they are genuinely clueless.

The fact of the matter is that the NFL audience trends either conservative, traditionalist, or nationalist.  They tend to be either working class or the traditional end of the professional class, and they are, as a group, unsympathetic to Black Lives Matter, or their political/social allies.  All they see, when the players 'take a knee', is an attack on the flag, on the cops, on veterans, and on the idea of America, and their own culture and beliefs.  No matter what explanation the players give as to what it's supposed to mean, the sight of them taking that knee overrides it among the fans.

When the NFL appears to be bending over backward to indulge the players in this, the result is fury, and it's taking huge bites out of the NFL's ratings and ticket sales.  Yet it's not clear that the people running the NFL even comprehend that this reaction is happening.

The parallels between the NFL and the Republican Party are eerie in some ways.  Both seem to be trying to appeal to an audience, or an electorate, that doesn't exist, while alienating the one that does.

[Þorkell Sigvaldason]

FWIW I guess it doesn't help that America is unique in playing the national anthem before every sporting match.

[Johnny1A]

On Monday, October 30, 2017 at 6:59:42 AM UTC-5, Þorkell Sigvaldason wrote:

FWIW I guess it doesn't help that America is unique in playing the national anthem before every sporting match.

True, as far as I know that's a distinctively American trope.

The problem for the NFL, though, is that it's been central to the sports experience for a very long time.  Patriotism, or at least the image of patriotism, has been tightly tied to the professional sports industry since the early 20C, and that's become part of the whole aura around it.  Maybe it was never sincere, maybe it was always partly or entirely mercenary on the part of the major league baseball organizations, the NFL, etc., but there it was.

Which is why the various stopgaps the NFL and the sports media are attempting right now simply aren't working.  There have been suggestions of dropping the anthem entirely to avoid the protests, but the fans would see doing that now as giving in to the players and indulging their illegitimate protests.  Some of the sports media have been deliberately skipping showing the anthem to try and tamp down the controversy, but the fans have the same reaction again:  Why aren't you showing the anthem the way you're supposed to?

The NFL has let themselves get backed into a no-win situation.  At this point, the fans, for the most part, don't want to see the anthem left out, they want it broadcast as usual, and they want to see the players on their feet and showing respect for the flag and the country...period.  No fist in the air, no sitting it out in the locker room, no protest at all against flag or anthem.  As far as they're concerned, the players have no case and their protests are invalid.

But the sports media prefer to lionize Kaepernick and the players, for political and financial reasons.  The owners are afraid the players will 'strike' or throw games or otherwise sabotage the process if they clamp down, and they know if they do the organized left will dive in with more protests and nuisance litigation and so forth.  They know the sports media, for the most part, are on the players' side.

No matter what they do, they see a losing prospect.

Nor did Trump set this in motion.  He raised its profile, but the fan anger goes back well over a year, they resented Kaepernick's actions from the word 'go', and the ratings slide was already under way when Trump first tweeted.  Even before Kaepernick, the NFL was rubbing fans the wrong way with their handling of player law-breaking, 'breast cancer awareness' days, and a dozen other things that the fans didn't want to associate with football.

One of the reasons some observers think the NFL guys are really, genuinely out of touch with their audience is that it was widely thought among the sports media and NFL that NFL fans would rally to the players against Trump.  Instead Trump 'won' that public argument almost from the first tweet, and it left the NFL stunned.

The NFL owners and corporate PTB could probably have solved this easily enough if they'd clamped down on Kaepernick at the start, a couple of years ago.  Now, though, they're in a quagmire.

[Johnny1A]

Related to the NFL, though you have to understand the pop culture dynamic before it becomes obvious, is the mess the comic industry now finds itself within, as I noted on the first post.

In America, the two big comic companies are DC and Marvel.  DC is the older, the letters originally stood for 'Detective Comics' back in the old days, and their star characters, Superman and Batman, go back to the 1930s.  Marvel goes back to the 1960s, between them most of the famous American comic characters belong to one or the other.

For years, though, sales have been dropping, and the usual explanation is competition from the Internet, smartphones, etc.  There's a certain amount of truth in that, of course.  But it leaves out the fact that both companies have let their product become politicized to a remarkable degree, in violation of the old 'Use Western Union' law of entertainment.  There are other problems separate from but linked to that, as well.

The problem in entertainment media of any sort with politicized product is that you limit your potential audience.  It matters less what the politics are than that unless your product is very desirable, or a monopoly necessity, you alienate that portion of potential audience that doesn't like your politics...and once you do that, it's hard to fix it, because the process of fixing it risks alienating the audience you still have, and upon which you are financially dependent.  Mess this up to badly and you can find yourself in a 'death spiral' of shrinking audience that you can't risk offending but must offend to regain share.

This is especially true of ongoing serial product like comics, TV series, books series, etc.

The American comics industry has increasingly become a venue of left-wing politics, sometimes not very well disguised or not disguised at all.  Since the target audience of Marvel and DC is less kids than teens and young adults, this has an effect on sales.  When Superman is giving lectures about the virtues of illegal immigration and various high-profile characters are being given token replacements from whatever favored racial/gender/whatever category is popular, chunks of audience walk away...and it's hard to get them back after that without politicizing the other way, which risks the audience you still have.

There was a Marvel Comics guy who accidentally spoke that truth a year or so ago, commenting that all their 'diversity' characters and comics were struggling, most of the fan appreciation and preference went to the old characters and the old titles and stories.  There was a huge lefty Internet backlash and he had to rush out and give the usual formulaic 'I was misunderstood' bit, but he wasn't misunderstood and there's no reason to doubt the truth of what he said.  It just isn't a popular truth.

These days, the superhero movies are carrying the comics companies.

But the above is just an example of the reason for that old cliché:  If you want to send a message, use Western Union.

Entertainment media, in that respect, is no different than, say, a deli.  A deli owner who decides to incorporate a political message written in mustard on every sandwich had better have damned good sandwiches, or a big chunk of his customers are likely to go elsewhere.  He might get away with it if people like his food so much they'll tolerate the politics they hate, or if he's a monopoly provider...but in the latter case he'd better hope no competitor comes along.

This is like the NFL in that both the NFL, and the comic companies, either don't care about the interests, views, and wishes of their customers, or don't understand them, because their actions are exactly what is necessary to interfere with sales.

[Þorkell Sigvaldason]

 Even before Kaepernick, the NFL was rubbing fans the wrong way with their handling of player law-breaking, 'breast cancer awareness' days, and a dozen other things that the fans didn't want to associate with football.

In European sports the players are involved in some charitable causes such as donations to childrens hospitals or cancer awareness. Some players even may have foundations and such to aid a certain cause. The club may even have an event putting the spotlight on a certain matter. 

Am I to understand the above sentence in such a way that NFL fans wouldn't want to see NFL players involved in such matters?

[Johnny1A]

The problem is the context.  This might be hard to explain to a non-American, because it so many local roots.

No, players involved in charity work is fine, lots of athletes have done it and been respected for it.  The problem for the NFL is the particular causes, the way they're doing it, and the allies their allying with.

The problem with 'breast cancer awareness' is not breast cancer, it's the perception that the NFL is doing it because liberal and esp. feminist groups pressured them into it, that they're trying to appease liberals.  Most NFL fans don't favor liberalism (American meaning of the word) to begin with, and they don't want football to be 'feminized'.  But that by itself would merely have been an irritant.

Likewise, the NFL players include some people who have had reasonably serious run-ins with the law, and gotten off mostly because they are NFL players.  The fans might tolerate that in itself, but it doesn't incline them to like hearing attacks on police and law-enforcement personal from the NFL players bench.

But what turned this into an unmitigated disaster for the NFL was that they let a few players, most particularly Colin Kaepernick, drag the league and the game into the heart of the political. and social fury around the Black Lives Matter movement.

American liberals (including most of the media including the sports media) tend to want to portray BLM as a civil rights movement, heroic protest against police abuse of young black men, the 'good guys'.  Most of the right wing of the population and probably a solid majority of the NFL's fan base tends to see BLM as thugs and criminals, people who call for the deaths of police and push the same old liberal agenda under a new pretext.

So when Kaepernick first 'took a knee', they saw an indulged, overpayed athlete disrespecting the country itself, its heritage, the veterans who fought for it, the police who protect it, and the fans themselves.  As the other players joined with Kaepernick, all the fans see is more of the same, and even causes that might otherwise be admired or neutral get dragged down with it.  The sports media wants to portray Kaepernick as a hero, the fans tend to see him as one of the bad guys.

The NFL tried to have it both ways and ended up trapping themselves.

[Warren Ellis]

Another issue is that the NFL is essentially a cartel. There isn't much else the fans can turn to for other sources of football. And no, I'm not talking about soccer.

[Þorkell Sigvaldason]

On Thursday, November 2, 2017 at 10:03:17 PM UTC, Warren Ellis wrote:

Another issue is that the NFL is essentially a cartel. There isn't much else the fans can turn to for other sources of football. And no, I'm not talking about soccer.

 Well, there's the MLS....

[Johan Larson]

Well, if you love American football but hate the NFL, I guess that leaves the college game and the CFL. Or something like Aussie Rules if you're a fan of extravagant cable packages.

[Johnny1A]

On Thursday, November 2, 2017 at 7:26:19 PM UTC-5, Johan Larson wrote:

Well, if you love American football but hate the NFL, I guess that leaves the college game and the CFL. Or something like Aussie Rules if you're a fan of extravagant cable packages.

Assuming the problem doesn't spread there.  There have already been instances of 'taking a knee' among high school and college teams here and there, and it's not going to make the fans any happier there than it does in the NFL if it spreads. 

[Johnny1A]

On Thursday, November 2, 2017 at 5:03:17 PM UTC-5, Warren Ellis wrote:

Another issue is that the NFL is essentially a cartel.

This could turn into a double-edged sword before this is over, though.  Already, there is some talk in State capitols and Washington about ending various tax breaks and special treatments for the NFL, which is an indication that a formerly politically bullet-proof institution is looking weak.

Professional sports in America enjoy various special status breaks, some of them official and a whole bunch of them entirely unofficial, but very real.  But those breaks depend on public good will, and the NFL is dicing with disaster on that subject right now.

[Johnny1A]

An addendum to my own comment above:  the NFL really does seem to be in the grip of what looks remarkably like suicidal madness.

The NFL is an oddly structured organization.  It's 'owned' by the team owners, the franchise owners, whatever you want to call them, but it's run by the commissioner and his staff, currently Roger Goodell.  Though he is an employee of the NFL, his authority over the organization is greater than that of the owners (for various reasons).  The commissioner can discipline players who break the rules, sets most of the terms for advertising deals, can cancel NFL assocations, etc.

Right now Goodell's next 5-year contract is being negotiated, and he wants a few things in the next contract deal with the NFL.  Reportedly, he's asking for a raise, from $30,000,000 a year to $49,500,000 a year, as well as lifetime use of a private jet and all heath care costs for himself and his family covered for life, independent of salary.

Okkkayyy...assuming the press has that right (a caveat we always have to apply), think about that.  In the midst of the NFL's current travails, its top officer wants a sixty five percent raise, plus a jet and other goodies.  If everything was going hunky-dory for the NFL, that would be an impressive compensation package.  Everything is not currently hunky-dory in the NFL.

Plus, the public is getting to observe this play out.  As noted upthread, the NFL holds a peculiar legal status, and the public is already impatient with what they consider out-of-control pay and benefits to the elite few.  As one NFL team owner noted, right now the NFL is all over TV and the media and being talked about for everything but the games themselves.  Is this really the image the NFL wants to project to their fans at a time when their fans are already in rebellion?

[Johnny1A]

On Monday, October 30, 2017 at 10:06:45 PM UTC-5, Johnny1A wrote:

Which is why the various stopgaps the NFL and the sports media are attempting right now simply aren't working.  There have been suggestions of dropping the anthem entirely to avoid the protests, but the fans would see doing that now as giving in to the players and indulging their illegitimate protests.  Some of the sports media have been deliberately skipping showing the anthem to try and tamp down the controversy, but the fans have the same reaction again:  Why aren't you showing the anthem the way you're supposed to?

The NFL has let themselves get backed into a no-win situation.  At this point, the fans, for the most part, don't want to see the anthem left out, they want it broadcast as usual, and they want to see the players on their feet and showing respect for the flag and the country...period.  No fist in the air, no sitting it out in the locker room, no protest at all against flag or anthem.  As far as they're concerned, the players have no case and their protests are invalid.

 

The NFL continues to flail around trying to find some way to make all this go away.  According to some reports, they are now considering a policy of keeping the players in the locker room until after the anthem plays.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/amphtml/news/sports/wp/2017/11/21/nfl-owners-weighing-change-to-anthem-policy-for-next-season-if-protests-continue/

The trouble, of course, is twofold.  This doesn't address the players' attitude about their 'right' to protest, if they are blocked from taking a knew during the anthem, there's a good chance they'll end up doing something else to infuriate the fans during the game.

The other problem is that the fans, at this point, are likely to see this as more indulging the players, they want to see those players standing there respectfully during the anthem, and they hold the NFL responsible for it not being so.  If the protests had no happened, this policy change would probably scarcely be noticed, it's a reversion to the pre-2009 status quo.  But now, their absence would definitely be noticed.

If the WaPo can be believed (always a necessary caveat), the owners are even yet trying to have it both ways:

But other owners said at the October meeting that the overwhelming majority of owners wanted players to stand for the anthem but did not want to enact a rule requiring it.

This is going to impress neither the players nor the fans.

Trump has weighed in on this one too, and yet again he's channeling the likely attitude among the fans.  The WaPo credits him for keeping the issue alive, but he's not doing that, he's merely giving voice to a common sentiment that was already widespread. 

[Johnny1A]

On Wednesday, November 22, 2017 at 9:49:38 PM UTC-6, Johnny1A wrote:

On Monday, October 30, 2017 at 10:06:45 PM UTC-5, Johnny1A wrote:

Which is why the various stopgaps the NFL and the sports media are attempting right now simply aren't working.  There have been suggestions of dropping the anthem entirely to avoid the protests, but the fans would see doing that now as giving in to the players and indulging their illegitimate protests.  Some of the sports media have been deliberately skipping showing the anthem to try and tamp down the controversy, but the fans have the same reaction again:  Why aren't you showing the anthem the way you're supposed to?

The NFL has let themselves get backed into a no-win situation.  At this point, the fans, for the most part, don't want to see the anthem left out, they want it broadcast as usual, and they want to see the players on their feet and showing respect for the flag and the country...period.  No fist in the air, no sitting it out in the locker room, no protest at all against flag or anthem.  As far as they're concerned, the players have no case and their protests are invalid.

 

The NFL continues to flail around trying to find some way to make all this go away. 

And my above comments remain true.

The NFL is trying to appease the players with massive financial donations to various groups, most of them lefty, to the tune of $100,000,000.00. 

http://www.espn.com/nfl/story/_/id/21606390/nfl-offers-100-million-plan-social-justice-organizations-partnership-players

The trouble with this is that it misses the point.  The players can't be convinced to stop by this sort of thing, at least not the hard-core ones, and this is just going to infuriate the angry fans even more.  "Yeah, we know you're mad at the players for disrespecting the flag and the country, but we've got it taken care of!  We'll pay them off and give money to the causes of the disrespectful players!"

Whatever the intent, that's how the fans are going to hear it.

The 2017 football season is now in its final stages.  Normally, there would be high interest in the emerging contest for the Superbowl teams.  This year, though, a lot of the games, even the ones between potential Superbowl contenders, have myriads of empty seats, and TV ratings are still anemic at best.  I have heard that some games have NFL game tickets going down to ten dollars a seat.  Ten dollars.  That's unheard of.

It's going to be interesting to see what Superbowl ratings look like.

 

[Johnny1A]

On Monday, December 11, 2017 at 11:04:45 PM UTC-6, Johnny1A wrote:

It's going to be interesting to see what Superbowl ratings look like.

And now the Superbowl is immediately at hand, and the ratings are still anemic, by historical NFL standards.  Historically, there would usually be some excitement among fans and TV people about the imminent Big Game, this year it's more like 'meh'.

Shelby Steele has penned a speculative article for the Wall Street Journal to the effect that he is wondering if the entire paradigm of 'black victimization=black moral authority' has collapsed, given the lack of public support for the kneeling players. 

[Warren Ellis]

BLM also really shot itself in the foot with the tactics it employed, and the mass stupidity of its members who had idiots spouting that white genocide is okay and all.

Combine that with claims of racism that, when really looked at, often barely had anything to do with a systematic racism, or was so random it couldn't really be connected to institutions, slowly ground away the support BLM could've earned and had.

It's much like those democracy protests in Hong Kong. The protesters started to interfere with the daily lives of ordinary citizens there, who actually were sympathetic toward the protesters and their goals, through the blocking of streets and harassment and such that they soured many of their would-be supporters and turned them against them.

[Johnny1A]

We saw something sort of like that, on a vastly smaller scale, in Wisconsin a few years ago, when Governor Scott Walker set out to break the State-level public employees unions.  Now, you can make good arguments either way on that, and naturally the unions protested.  But...their protests could not have been better calculated to turn the public, who might otherwise have sympathized, against them.  They had doctors writing fake sick leaves, protesters blocking streets in the capitol city and screaming at the public and generally making nuisances of themselves.  If you were writing a textbook of how not to protest a public action, that Wisconsin public unions would be a good illustration.

[Warren Ellis]

I remember a small protest for unionizing at a Fresh & Easy near where I live. I was sympathetic until I found out that the protesters were phony and actually hired to do the protest. They were from some sort of company that made money through these protests.

It wasn't even the actual employees protesting but some phony protesters essentially. Pissed me off.