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During the NBA Finals, as LeBron James Los Angeles Lakers fended off the pesky Miami Heat, two basketball fans got into a Twitter spat. It had nothing to do with basketball and everything to do with an issue that seemed to consume these bubble finals: TV ratings.

The finals were setting all-time lows for viewers, and Sen. Ted Cruz , R-Texas, had a theory for why: The NBA is engaged in a concerted effort to (1) insult their fans & (2) turn every game into a left-wing political lecture. Thats dumb, he tweeted at Mark Cuban, the owner of the Dallas Mavericks.

Weaponizing ratings slips has become a hallmark of Trump-era Republicans, who routinely blame low viewership on the athletes and leagues that speak out about social issues. This years historically bad NBA playoffs viewership The Finals fell about 50% from last season were gleefully noted by President Donald Trump and across conservative media, from Fox Newss Laura Ingraham to the Daily Wire to Breitbart. Their rallying cry: Get woke, go broke.

But viewership of major sporting events is down across the board, including in leagues with no social-justice messaging to speak of. According to data compiled by the website Sports Media Watch, Golfs U.S. Open was down 42%. The Kentucky Derby: 43%. The Stanley Cup finals: 61%. The vaunted NFL is down 13% early in its season. Major League Baseballs division series was down 40%. A World Series between, potentially, Atlanta and Tampa Bay isnt likely to change the tide.

Several factors are fueling the drop, according to data and interviews with TV executives and industry observers: the intensity of the political news cycle; a glut of sports on TV; and viewers lives being upended by the global pandemic. A new survey shows that some Republicans say theyre tuning out over social-justice messaging. But the data tells a different story.

We just believe so strongly that the whole business of sports fuels social connection and is fueled by social connection, said Mike Mulvihill, head of strategy and analytics at Fox Sports. For obvious reasons, our whole environment of social connection is completely inside out. So sports and the ability of sports to act as a unifying force is really undermined.

Added Cary Meyers, ESPNs senior vice president for research and insights: What were seeing is casual fans are having a hard time putting other things aside. And, obviously, there is also cable news.

As the NBA prepared to return in July, with hockey, baseball, football and other sports on the horizon, networks predicted pent-up demand for live sports. ESPN touted a poll in which 59% of fans said they planned to watch as much as they could when sports returned, with a renewed appreciation for the role of sports in their lives.

Executives say theres some evidence that happened, at least for some die-hard fans. Over the first five weeks of the NFL season, the total number of minutes of live sports consumed was up 2% over the same period last year, according to ESPN. A similar analysis by Fox found that from baseballs restart through Week 4 of the NFL season, total sports consumption was up 7% this year.

And, as usual, sports still rule live television: 39 of the top 40 rated programs last week were either sports or news, with Saturday Night Live the only entertainment property in the mix, Mulvihill pointed out on Twitter.

Still, overall sports viewership will be down from a normal year, with sports spread across the calendar. According to ESPNs Meyers, 92% of sports fans are tuning in more often and for longer durations this year compared with last, apparently turning the condensed sports calendar into a quarantine coping mechanism. But they cant get to everything.

You have an oversupply of premium events, Mulvihill said. Its causing the total pool (of consumption) to not be affected that much. But on a sport by sport basis, everyone suffers.

The other 8% are casual fans, Meyers said, who simply arent watching this year. Fans tuning out cite several factors, according to a recent survey by the Marist Center for Sports Communication. Thirty-five percent blamed concerns over the coronavirus; 20% said they are more focused on election coverage; and 19% said they had no free time for sports.

Cable news viewership numbers support the Marist findings. The average total day viewership on MSNBC, Fox News and CNN is up to 1.49 million in 2020, from 1.01 million last year.

People are telling us sports are no longer the priority in their lives, said Jane McManus, Director of the Marist Center for Sports Communication. Think about it: Youre watching your kids Zoom into classes and you may have stared at a screen all day for work, so youre less inclined to turn the TV on for a game.

There was no more political moment in sports this year than when NBA players, led by the Milwaukee Bucks, engaged in a political strike, sitting out games in protest of the police shooting of Jacob Blake in Kenosha, Wisconsin. Trump seized on it, saying the NBA had become like a political organization, and thats not a good thing, and noting the leagues low ratings.

It was familiar territory for Trump, whose attacks on Colin Kaepernick, the NFL quarterback who knelt during the national anthem to protest police brutality, helped put athlete activism front and center in the culture wars in 2016 and 2017.

The NFL was suffering through a ratings decline then, too, and Trump was quick to connect the slump with players kneeling. Back then, there may have been at least some connection: Foxs Mulvihill said the data showed some older, more rural viewers were tuning out, contributing to the lower ratings.

Today, though, kneeling and other athlete protests are more widely accepted. While the Marist Poll found that 70% of Republicans say they are less likely to watch sports because of politics, recent viewership numbers dont reflect those views.

This NBA season, before the pandemic, 28% of the viewers for ESPN and ABC games were Democrats, and 11% were Republicans, with the remaining viewers identified as unregistered or independent, according to Nielsen Voter Ratings. After the restart, the share of viewers who were Democrats increased slightly to 30%, and the share who were Republicans dropped marginally to 10%.

The NFL also hasnt seen much drop off among more conservative demographics, Foxs Mulvihill said. Even after networks highlighted the leagues social justice efforts during its opening week including players kneeling during the anthem or staying in the locker room he saw no evidence older or more rural fans were tuning out.

Im scanning the data for it, he said, and Im not seeing anything.

The same appears true across all sports. Over the first four weeks of the NFL season, Nielsen data shows that sports, as a percentage of total TV viewing for Republicans, didnt change much since last football season: it went from 9.1% last year to 8.2% this year. For Democrats, it was 7.1% last year and 7.8% this year.

There are real, mounting questions for sports networks, about the future of the cable-TV ecosystem and sports popularity with younger audiences. But these viewership dips amid a pandemic, a bitter presidential election and an unpredictable sports calendar may simply not mean what some want them to.

We have ratings panics all the time, even when they arent part of the culture wars, said Jon Lewis, the creator of Sports Media Watch.

But no one has taken less money yet, so the ratings never have long-term implications that any of these leagues have to worry about, for now.

MLB just signed a new rights extension with Turner Sports worth around $3.5 billion, and the NFL may double its billions of dollars in rights fees when it signs new deals that are being negotiated.

My expectation is that were going to come out of the other side of this pandemic and you will see the ability of sports to act as social glue, Mulvihill said. As live attendance comes back, ratings should come back, too.

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So many sports, so few viewers: Why TV ratings are way down during the pandemic - Sports and Weather Right Now

Over the last few years, a new fear has been forming in the already anxious minds of liberal and leftwing Britons. The fear is that the right, made more aggressive by an injection of populism, is no longer satisfied by dominating national politics and defining the shape of the economy. It wants to dominate British culture as well.

Starting with the Brexit campaign, the right has launched a series of culture wars: against remainers, the BBC, the universities, the legal system, the big cities and seemingly anywhere that liberal or leftwing thinking still lingers strongly, despite a decade of Tory rule. These culture wars have mobilised and united conservative Britons, ensured that debates about patriotism and social cohesion are conducted on rightwing terms and helped the Tories win a big parliamentary majority.

The latest culture war is the war on woke being waged by the Tory press, and increasingly by the government as well. This campaign caricatures as dangerous extremists those who believe that Britains power structures, social relations and national identity should fairly reflect the countrys diversity. Conservative commentators describe wokeness as a cult, an epidemic, anti-western, totalitarian, and even as cultural Marxism an interpretation that began as a far-right conspiracy theory.

In his unusually brief party conference speech this week, Boris Johnson still found room for an anti-woke passage, inaccurately associating Labour with those who want to pull statues down, to rewrite the history of our country to make it look more politically correct. Over the summer, the culture secretary, Oliver Dowden, warned a London museum that it might lose its state funding if it removed a statue of the slave trader Robert Geffrye from its grounds. Last month, the Department for Education instructed schools not to teach pupils about extreme political stances such as the desire to overthrow capitalism, or to teach victim narratives that are harmful to British society.

Such episodes reveal a government that regards culture wars as more than a way of gaining electoral advantage. As the Telegraph columnist Tim Stanley recently explained, Boris and Cummings understand that you cant change Britain unless you march through the [cultural] institutions that you cant simply cede culture to the left.

To the rightwing culture warriors, subversive ideas have been allowed to spread through British society largely unchecked for far too long, regardless of who has been in government. But now the Conservatives have realised, as Stanley put it, that when youre in power and you control the purse strings of some cultural institutions, you do have a say to change their political balance. The idea that the dedicated enemies of liberalism Charles Moore and Paul Dacre should respectively chair the BBC and head the broadcasting regulator Ofcom, both supposed to be politically neutral roles, should be seen in this context. That Moore has now withdrawn his interest does not rule out further rightwing candidates.

This new Tory assertiveness owes much to populism. In 2018 the political theorist Nadia Urbinati wrote: Populism in power is an extreme majoritarianism. Populist governments act as if [they] were the expression of the one right and true majority, and consider any opposition morally illegitimate because it is not made of the right people. Such an intolerance of dissent has been one of the Johnson governments few consistent qualities. Its this seemingly insatiable need to identify and defeat enemies that many non-Tories and some Tories find most frightening about Cummings.

Yet launching constant culture wars is a sign of Tory weakness as well as strength. Even over Brexit, the partys attacks on a liberal elite have been an admission that it can no longer rely on economic arguments. And since the Johnson government has begun to struggle, its striking that its talk of a war on woke has increased.

How effective will this war ultimately be? In the short term, its given the right a cause to rally around during a difficult year. But over the long term, the evidence that culture wars work for the right in Britain is much more mixed.

Like now, the early 1980s saw an upsurge of British activism for racial, sexual and gender equality. Parts of the left became involved, in particular the powerful Greater London Council, led by Ken Livingstone, which gave grants to the activists and also diversified its own workforce and practices. The rightwing press and Margaret Thatchers government were appalled by what they saw correctly as a major threat to the status quo. But they also saw a political opportunity. Branding all practitioners of the new identity politics the loony left, they created a bogeyman that helped the Conservatives win elections for a decade.

But the effects of this culture war gradually wore off. When Thatchers successor, John Major, tried to restart it in 1993 with a speech arguing that social values should go back to basics, his provocation backfired, partly because of a succession of personal scandals involving Tory ministers, but also because public attitudes were changing. The Labour government that replaced Majors repealed clause 28, a homophobic Conservative law passed in 1988, and introduced liberal social reforms such as civil partnerships. There was no significant backlash from voters.

Nowadays, political stances widely considered loony in the 80s, such as celebrating multiculturalism, are commonplace even in the Tory party. The chancellor, Rishi Sunak, describes himself as a proud Hindu. As prime minister, Johnson promotes Black History Month.

Such inclusivity sits very uneasily alongside the war on woke. But its possible that the government will manage to sustain both. Johnson has spent his political career sounding both liberal and reactionary, sometimes in the same sentence, and generally getting away with it. Populists, and the people who vote for them, are rarely bothered about ideological consistency.

Yet the fact that todays Tory culture war (like the Tories) is most strongly supported by older Britons suggests its limits as a political strategy. Back in the 80s, Livingstone predicted that Thatchers social conservatism would ultimately fail because she was trying to restore the more monocultural, conformist country shed grown up in, a country that no longer existed. She abolished the GLC, but he was right.

Some of todays culture warriors act as if wokeness can and should be abolished. At the Tory conference this week, at events about the threat of wokeness, some of the participants spoke with such urgency it was hard to make out all their arguments, but you could hear their desperation their wish that social diversity would simply go away.

But other rightwing commentators accept that some form of wokeness is here to stay. They write about it being kept at bay. Its a reminder to fearful leftists and liberals that the right isnt always as confident and all-conquering as it seems. This may be little consolation to its victims, but for the Tories cultural counter-revolution, the clock is ticking.

Andy Beckett is a Guardian columnist

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The Tories culture war is a reminder that the right isn't as fearless as it seems - The Guardian

Seventeen-year-old Kyle Rittenhouse went to a counter-protest on August 25 in Kenosha, Wisconsin, armed with an AR-15 style weapon. He claimed in video interviews before the shooting that he was a medic in a militia group the Kenosha Guard inspired to protect property during protests. After killing two people and injuring another, Rittenhouse was charged with homicide. His lawyers insist it will be an easy self-defense trial. Donald Trump Jr. said on Extra that everyone does something stupid when theyre that age. Donald Trump defended Rittenhouse, saying that he was trying to get away from them, I guess and he fell. Sure, its stupid. Reckless. Criminal. Menacing. Is it excusable if groups of grown men decide to counter-protest in Kenosha, and Rittenhouse follows suit? Any one of those men could have committed murder, and we have seen it happen before.

The Second Amendment solidifies militias as a way to rebel against tyrannical leaders, but the law simultaneously deputizes vigilante groups as an extension of the police. The armed counter-protesters in Kenosha declared they were militiamen, but Wilbur Miller, professor emeritus of history at Stony Brook University and author of A History of Private Policing, disagrees. They complain about the black helicopters coming down and taking away their guns and the tyranny of the federal government, all that sort of crap, Miller said. Theyre never rebels. Its hard to disagree with Miller as the police gave out water to Rittenhouse and his group fifteen minutes before the shooting.

The legality of militias and vigilantes have shifted over time, as Black slaves were emancipated in the nineteenth century and the Second Amendment changed to support individual gun rights in the twentieth century. The Klu Klux Klan and groups like it could have been a vigilante group one year and a militia the next. For these groups, the lines between public and private sectors blur as well. San Francisco created a private vigilante committee in 1851 that was more concerned with politics than crime, and eventually ceased operations permanently after 1856. Nearly twenty years later, in 1879, the San Francisco Police Department assigned vigilantes to crack down on criminals in Chinatown without bothering to get warrants. The Chinatown Squad rounded up people simply for looking suspicious.

As San Francisco law enforcement lived in a void between the public and private sectors, the KKK did too. Started by ex-Confederate soldiers, it still exists in a militia-vigilante limbo: it is only considered a terrorist group in local towns or cities, and theres no federal law against lynching. Ida B. Wells spoke at a forerunner NAACP conference in 1909 about lynching in America. She talked about the end of lynching in the West and its rise in the South: This was wholly political, its purpose being to suppress the colored vote by intimidation and murder. Thousands of assassins banded together under the name of Ku Klux Klans, Midnight Raiders, Knights of the Golden Circle, et cetera, et cetera, spread a reign of terror, by beating, shooting and killing colored in a few years, the purpose was accomplished, and the black vote was suppressed. These were the beginnings of systematic racial violence in America.

As Black Lives Matter protests erupted in late May to end police brutality, Blue Lives Matter counter-protests became a breeding ground for militias. Rittenhouses group, the Kenosha Guard, wanted to be deputized by the Kenosha Police Department before the counter-protest. They so desperately wanted to be vigilantes. If it were truly a rebelling militia, what was the supposed oppressor the Guard was rebelling against?

Donald Trump and his administration supports white supremacist ideology, not only refusing to denounce it, but even telling the Proud Boys to stand back and stand by. The police support them. Internet subcultures support them. Facebook struggled to remove misleading campaign ads, let alone fact-check them. The company has recently tried to prevent misinformation and disinformation on the site after the 2016 presidential election by removing disinformation networks and now plans to ban political ads after the 2020 presidential election.

Banning political ads wont remove social medias stain on democracy. Since its invention, the Internet has become a public resource. Almost everyone has a social media account, but private internet companies are not required to hold people accountable. Russias Internet Research Agency, or troll factory, is credited to spread disinformation in memes, ads, and conspiracies. Russia isnt alone in this. Andrew Marantz wrote Antisocial, a book in which he describes how white supremacists push disinformation to their advantage. Rittenhouse is no different from others radicalized by 8chan, 4chan, Reddit, or Facebook. What about the supposed lone wolves that commit shootings at malls, schools, and places of worship?

Early in 2019, Brenton Tarrant emailed his manifesto to New Zealands prime minister and media outlets, drove to the Linwood Islamic Centre in Christchurch, and broadcasted himself gunning down mosque attendants over Facebook Live. Just a few months later, Patrick Crusius drove 11 hours to an El Paso, Tex. Walmart with the goal of shooting and killing members of the Hispanic community there. In his manifesto, Crusius wrote that his actions would be a catalyst: The Hispanic population is willing to return to their home countries if given the right incentive. An incentive that myself and many other patriotic Americans will provide. Cassius wrote in his own manifesto that he was inspired by Brenton Tarrants killings.

Rittenhouse was supposed to be an impartial medic that night, but the usernames that fed him conservative memes and talking points incited him to shoot three protestors. If other armed people werent walking around Kenosha that night, would Kyle Rittenhouse still call himself part of a militia in those interviews? White supremacist shooters are not lone wolves at all; they have people like Rittenhouse touting support in likes, comments, videos and presidential tweets. Rittenhouse did not stand alone when he shot those protestors.

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The Popular Justice of Online Culture Wars - The Stony Brook Press

Im sad for my country. For its divisions and alleged culture wars. Do we really hate each other in Nevada County? Thats not what I have experienced these past 33 years. This is the one place Ive lived where I felt at home in an awesome and caring community.

I think the hate and anger have been imported into Nevada County by television, news and social media. If we didnt voluntarily subject ourselves to the clamor of this national dysfunction to this pettiness and nonsense if we werent connected I think there would be very little divisiveness in the place most of us love and call home.

Our burgeoning nonprofits (a large number per capita) and local government have created a supportive, vibrant community. Do we even need labels like Republican, Democrat, capitalist, socialist? These are very simplistic boxes.

California has been intelligent enough to provide for non-partisan elections for the Board of Supervisors to help minimize local conflict and knee-jerk voting. Generally what Ive experienced as a commercial property and business owner in Nevada County is a generosity of spirit with the businesses and contractors I rely on daily. I dont experience people here as greedy, selfish or hateful.

We sell ourselves short in Nevada County by buying into the greed and corruption in the financial markets and the pettiness and intentional manipulation in national politics. Too many Americans are controlled by fear and its destroying our national fiber. We are all Americans. It pains me to see Nevada County buy into Americas dysfunction. Arent we worth more than this as a community?

Kent Gallagher

Grass Valley

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Kent Gallagher: Culture wars imported by the media - The Union of Grass Valley

Democrats look well poised to beat President Trump and the Republican Party in this fall's election. There are some observers who hope that a good electoral thrashing will bring Republican leaders to their senses and cause them to steer a course away from the party's unofficial platform of revanchism, culture wars, and white identity politics toward a less-alarming path.

But defeat no matter how large or ignominious probably won't redeem the GOP, nor cure it of its Trumpist excesses.

A landslide victory for Democratic candidate Joe Biden "would turn the Trump era of nihilism, tribalism, and cruelty into a cautionary tale of extremism, illiberalism, and, above all, failure," Andrew Sullivan wrote last week. He added: "And a landslide is the only thing that can possibly, finally break the far right fever that has destroyed the GOP as a legitimate right-of-center political party, and turned it into a paranoid, media-driven, fact-free festival of fear and animus."

This might sound familiar. Sullivan made a similar case in 2007, arguing in The Atlantic for the candidacy of Barack Obama as a means of repudiating the Boomer-driven culture wars that had culminated in the multiple disasters Iraq, Hurricane Katrina, the Great Recession of George W. Bush's presidency.

"At its best, the Obama candidacy is about ending a war not so much the war in Iraq, which now has a momentum that will propel the occupation into the next decade but the war within America that has prevailed since Vietnam and that shows dangerous signs of intensifying, a nonviolent civil war that has crippled America at the very time the world needs it most," Sullivan wrote. "It is a war about war and about culture and about religion and about race. And in that war, Obama and Obama alone offers the possibility of a truce."

Obviously, that's not how things actually worked out.

Republican leaders did distance themselves from Bush, but Obama's landslide election victory sparked a backlash that ushered in the Tea Party, Glenn Beck's ugly heyday, GOP intransigence, and birtherism.

When Obama won big again in 2012, there was a moment when the party's leaders appeared ready to set a new course. The Republican National Committee produced a postmortem report that proclaimed voters perceived the party as belonging to "stuffy old men." The RNC vowed to plunge its resources into reaching out to minority voters. Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) eyeing a 2012 run for the presidency even took the lead on crafting a bipartisan immigration reform bill as part of an effort to soften the GOP's image.

The bill never gained traction. Conservatives bludgeoned Rubio for his perceived softness on immigration. Republican voters chose Donald Trump and his border wall in the 2016 primaries, despite the obvious agitation it caused the party establishment. But when Trump was elected, that establishment including Rubio fell in line.

So even if Trump loses the election by double-digit margins, as several recent polls have indicated he might, recent history doesn't augur Republican repentance. The party's Trump-loving base voters aren't going anywhere. Neither is Trump. It is doubtful he would follow the lead of his predecessors and recede into the background after leaving office instead we probably can expect a Mar-a-Lago tweetstorm to keep the former reality star in the spotlight and stirring up trouble for as long as he is able.

One big election defeat, or two, might not convince Republicans of the errors of their ways. It might take a generation of losses, of being deprived of power, to do the trick. Republicans were locked out of the White House for 20 years starting with Franklin Roosevelt's election in 1932, and only reclaimed office after Dwight Eisenhower a hugely popular war hero whom Democrats had also tried to woo as their candidate took office and governed as a post-New Deal moderate. Similarly, Democrats spent most of the post-Richard Nixon era in the wilderness, given a break only by the Watergate-driven election of Jimmy Carter, and getting relief only when Bill Clinton arrived on the scene in 1992 to steer the party toward the center.

Maybe this time will be different.

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Can the GOP ever redeem itself? - The Week