Comment by CptJamesCook | Hacker News Reader

Comment by CptJamesCook | Hacker News Reader

On every comment thread about ESPN's subscriber losses, I see comments like these, which are attached to this Post story:

"I stopped watching both ESPN and the NFL because of their liberal politics."

"What a shock.ESPN pushes it's liberal agenda at every turn alienating half your audience and are suprised subscribers are canceling in droves."

"Way more than half. Most ESPN viewers are/were male. You'd expect common sense to prevail at some point and lead them to restrain themselves from committing ratings suicide, but leftists just can't seem to help it."

"ESPN has driven millions of viewers and subscribers away because of their incessant shoving of their leftist politics in our faces. Whenever I want to watch a game on ESPN, I'm instead subjected to lectures about gay "marriage," Castro, alleged "police brutality," and Bruce Jenner's constitutional right to shower with other people's teenage daughters. ESPN can now be easily mistaken for a rerun of the Democratic National Convention, why bother to watch it?"

"Amazing, not one single word about what is by far the biggest reason for ESPN's current demise. It has become PMSNBC. Every talking head, show host, etc. knows that if they do not toe the Liberal fascist party line, they will be Schillinged."

"ESPN has become a liberal voice in politics. I no longer listen but on watch sports. It has failed its mission."

The conservative half of our country is not happy with ESPN.

I don't think the kind of person that says things like that are cord cutters (which you have to be to stop subscribing to ESPN). These are just run of the mill assholes trying to make a point. The real reason ESPN is losing people is young people just aren't signing up for cable anymore.

EDIT: I should point out that WaPo is pretty much a magnet for right-wing trolling b/c of election and being Bezos-owned. Incendiary comments from the right are par for the course on every WaPo article.

Michael Jordan once said that the reason he doesn't talk about politics is that Republicans buy sneakers too.

He seems to have changed his mind in recent years:

http://theundefeated.com/features/michael-jordan-i-can-no-lo...

He never actually said it. A myth.

I agree that people won't cord cut over this issue. Cord cutting is about saving $1000/year and still being able to get 90% of the content online.

Still, I don't see how it does ESPN any good to be so liberal. The powers that be at the network must see this criticism in every story and consider the option of becoming less political. I expect this to happen in 2017.

What political stances have they taken?

AFAICT, the way these sorts of internet conservatives see it is if you don't spend the majority of your time complaining about Obamacare, claiming climate change is a hoax, and calling for the end of all government regulations, you're a heavily biased far-left liberal socialist.

http://www.espn.com/blog/ombudsman/post/_/id/767/inside-and-...

ESPN's own public editor stated that the company has alienated consumers with its move to the left.

Is it just me, or does it feel like "conservatives" have finally discovered the internet? Over the last few months, it feels like friggin everything has become Obama's fault, or suddenly "leftists" are responsible for X.

I'm not trying to be combative, or start a political argument. I have my own political leanings, sure, but I derive no joy from bitching about it on the internet. I just know that everything I read on a daily basis has veered to the right in the last few months.

Is this a cultural shift, or a demographic that was relatively unheard in this medium asserting itself for the first time? I'm not making a value judgement either way, just wondering.

(Don't get me wrong, shit like Conservapedia has been around for years now. But most of the stuff I read, for better or worse, has been pro-social justice, pro-multiculturalism, etc. until now. Do fewer people buy into that nowadays? Or is what I'm seeing the result of more people participating?)

DT's "victory" has encouraged a lot of folks to feel like they can speak their mind freely. For many, the "victory" is a symbol. It says "you are not alone." It's not that there's any more of them than there were last year; now they feel like they're on the right side of things and are feeling confident.

In hindsight, I observed the same thing with Obama's two terms. A lot of talk about rape culture, safe spaces, etc. Everyone who didn't agree was out of step with where America was really going and was gonna be left behind. So they thought...

That side felt really emboldened and overplayed their cultural hands. Now it's the right's turn to over estimate how much everyone agrees with them.

It's almost certainly multi-faceted, but I don't think it's just "conservatives discovering the internet," or at least anymore than it was 4 years ago.

Two things that I think contribute heavily to the phenomenon you're seeing:

1) We've had 8 years of a democratic president. People were similarly fed up with conservatism at the end of GWB's presidency. If things haven't been going well for you for the past 8 years (and for most Americans, they haven't been going great), it's easy and common to blame the president for those troubles. And by extension, the president's party and theoretical political ideologies.

It's much easier to have strong feelings after such a long time with one political party in charge (theoretically).

2) I'd wager a large sum that most of those comments come from white males who earn at or less than the median income, who previously may not have felt that strong of a political ideology or at least not enough to comment on an internet forum.

Much of the current liberal discourse in America is focused around historically oppressed groups, e.g. black Americans, or people who don't fit into classic gender identities. This comes at the expense of ignoring (or in some extreme instances, trivializing) the struggles of the working class or middle class who may not necessarily fall into one of those historically oppressed groups.

I think it's easy to imagine that if you're a white, poor male you might not feel like American liberalism in its current state really cares about you or your problems. Not that I think Republicans really care about their problems either, but at least they pay them lip service.

Remember where conservatives tend to live. Getting anything better than a 28.8 kilobit/second modem isn't easy. Eh, for you city folk, that's a 0.0288 megabit connection. The decimal point is 3 or 4 places to the bad side of what you are used to getting.

As tolerable internet makes it's way out to rural America, you can expect to see a change in the average political view on the internet.

ESPN is cable, right? Don't most (if not all) cable providers have internet packages? If that's the case, anyone who's getting EPSN is surely has access to connectivity greater than 28.8 kbps.

In the late 90s I lived in a little town (though it was the biggest in the area) in Oklahoma. They had cable internet there before many other areas, due to the simpler infrastructure.

Your view is accurate. As of 10 years ago.

I think if you chose a random red state area, you would find that they have high speed Internet access there.

For instance Atlanta Georgia has a huge concentration of datacenters, went heavily for Trump, and there is high speed Internet all over the state.

Georgia went nominally Trump. Atlanta, Savannah, and smaller cities are still predominantly blue.

[0] http://www.nytimes.com/elections/results/georgia

I've found that most comment sections in so-called MSM is filled with conservative flames, and has been for years.

I've also found that the sources as a developer I (and I suspect you as well) find the most interested seem to be heavily liberal. In such environment I see a ton of what I'd call "SJW bullies" - even hinting at a thought that violates the groupthink there quickly devolves.

In that environment, what has changed? Are conservatives becoming thicker skinned? Is "me too" SJWism being replaced with a more mature version of online liberalism? In any event, I think conservatives are speaking up more in those environments.

The mystery to me is why sites like the Washington Post have a comments section at all. Think of the time and money they spent implementing and running it, possibly requiring the most technical effort out of their entire publishing endeavor.

All to get tons of horrible garbage dumped at the bottom of their pages every minute of the day.

Tons of high traffic sites have these wild west zones at the bottom of their otherwise tightly controlled articles. They have next to no oversight, there are barely any technical barriers to prevent abuse, and yet they still command a significant portion of the main content's reach.

This is absolutely not lost on people who want to promote certain views loudly, quickly and cheaply. I really doubt that all (or even most) of the comments on a site like the Washington Post's are actual people who actually think those things.

But somebody does, and some people will start to find those views more acceptable when they see them everywhere at once.

I figure for most of them it came with their CMS anyway or it was sold as "just add this piece of JS" to increase engagement by some 3rd party. People sign up with their mail in a fit of "someones wrong on the internet" and you can effortlessly spam them.

Having a comment section feels right on the internet, particularly for sites that religiously avoid using any sort of links, at all.

NPR ditched comments this year for the very reasons you cite.

Nice. Now to uncomment the rest of the Internet!

I think it's fantastic that some companies use their platforms to help the disadvantaged—it's a good use of their resources, in my opinion.

Sometimes platforms and politics don't mix, though. I don't watch ESPN because I want to hear about politics, I watch it because I want to veg out and hear about sports.

Even if I agree with their politics it becomes grating to hear about it 24/7.

As someone without cable what liberal agenda is ESPN pushing? I haven't watched in years. What politics do they cover?

A lot of athletes are black. They are becoming more vocal about the racism and brutality in this nation. This is causing a lot of white conservatives to feel uncomfortable. Who'd rather they shut up and continue to crush in each other's skulls.

The conservative half of our country is not happy with ESPN.

It's not only conservatives, there are more people who want sports prioritized over social politics.

But it is only conservatives voicing specific comments like that. Because they don't have to risk looking like a heretic. If someone has preexisting allegiance to the social positions the coverage framing is aligned with, it's more complicated for them to dissent. Or they might even feel compelled to watch by the fraudulent implecation that ESPN's editorial decisions are made on importance, not that human interest stories are cheaper and easier to produce and can stir up a segment of the audience.

NFL is a joke. It has more ads than any other sports in this world.

Which is why I love RedZone :-)

I don't think internet comments are a useful survey of opinions.

Good, now we have one internet data point about that.

Sounds like somebody just figured out that most of the people inside the helmets and pads are black.

A comment like this takes us even further away from civil, substantive discussion. The guidelines ask us not to do this:

> Please avoid introducing classic flamewar topics unless you have something genuinely new to say about them.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Reply on news.ycombinator.com