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| Ted Cruz Still Bitter For Being Repeatedly Picked Last During Recess Basketball |
Imagine a world in which a U.S. Senator deliberately goes
out of his way to announce, with a stroke of glee, that because an organization
chose to stand against racism, it drove away its American viewership. This
synopsis is exactly what the Texas Republican Senator, Ted Cruz, blasted on
Twitter when Cruz tweeted, “Not surprising. Personally speaking, this is the
first time in years that I haven’t watched a single game in the NBA Finals.
#GoWokeGoBroke”. Mark Cuban, the owner of the NBA’s Dallas Mavericks, responded
to Cruz’s tweet with, “A US Senator with 3 @NBA teams in his state, employing
thousands of people and he is rooting for their business to do poorly. This is
who you are @tedcruz. Every minute of your life, this is exactly who you are.”
In a year in which mass protests erupted across the U.S.,
primarily due to multiple innocent unarmed black people being killed by police,
the NBA chose to be a guiding light. After Jacob Blake, an unarmed black man,
was shot by Kenosha, Wisconsin police, the Milwaukee Bucks boycotted their NBA
playoff game which resulted in the rest of the NBA following as well as
additional sports across the nation. The players did not choose to cancel the
season, but rather worked with the owners to devise a three point plan to help
bring an end to police brutality and a greater awareness to systemic racism,
which included NBA arenas to be used as polling stations for the 2020
presidential election. The arenas would be utilized as a safe polling place for
communities that were significantly hit by COVID-19. In addition, several
players conducted their own initiatives to increase civic engagement, such as
Lebron James who created the organization “More Than a Vote” that is ensuring
there are enough poll workers.
In light of these great initiatives that both the NBA and players are making to guarantee that people’s votes are able to be made and to be made safely, it’s bewildering that Cruz would find this sort of “wokeness”, a term used, according to dictionary.com, “to describe a person who is alert to injustice in society, especially racism”, to be the sole reason that the NBA Finals had low ratings.
To Ted Cruz’s misfortune the demographics between the 2020
NBA Playoffs and the 2019 NBA Playoffs hardly changed. According to SportsMedia
Watch, in 2020 45% of viewers were white and 55% were nonwhite, while in 2019
the percentages were 46% and 54%, respectively. This is hardly an indicator
that a certain population was turned off due to the NBA standing against racism
(just writing that sentence seems so odd).
There is a much more obvious and substantiated reason for
why the NBA playoffs had low ratings – COVID-19. The pandemic forced nearly all
major sporting events, apart from the NFL, to alter their seasons. The NBA
canceled their regular season in March after Rudy Gobert, a player for the Utah
Jazz, tested positive for COVID. Many
other leagues followed suit or postponed the start of their seasons, like Major
League Baseball.
The NBA Finals typically has the month of June to themselves,
other than regular season baseball. However, with the NBA Finals being
conducted four months later, the NBA faced off against Major League Baseball
playoffs, NFL, and college football. Yet despite this added competition and
despite the 2020 NBA Finals being the lowest rated Finals in NBA history, its
first three games rank among the five most watched non-NFL live sporting events
since the wave of cancellations took place due to COVID.
Additionally, the NBA’s downturn was a symptom that all
sporting events felt. While the NBA Finals had a 49% decrease in viewership
compared to last year, the Stanley Cup Finals saw a 61% decrease and the final
round of golf’s U.S. Open had a 56% drop off. MLB’s divisional round of their
playoffs saw a decrease of 40% compared to the year prior. While the NFL has
seen a decrease, it’s only 10%. College football finally had its first game
that reached a 3.0 Nielsen Rating when Tennessee faced Georgia this past
weekend.
The 2020 presidential election has also lent a hand in
decreasing sports viewership. MSNBC, CNN,
and the fascist news network – Fox News – have all seen a rise in viewership.
Ted Cruz’s illogical fallacy that the NBA Finals’ lack of
viewership was a direct consequence of the NBA’s stance against racism, is
wholly disproved. The irony is that Ted Cruz’s racist dog whistling is a
strategy that his entire Republican Party has been using in 2020 to maintain
its slipping hold on power. Rather than face the obvious facts – such as
climate change is real - they choose to use baseless premises as the sole reason
for certain results. Donald Trump does this better than anyone, especially when
he insists that should he lose the election it is because of ballot fraud, not
the simple fact that the majority of Americans dislike him.
Ted Cruz represents a state that reelected him by only a few
percentage points in 2018 and it is quickly becoming a minority-majority state. It would be prudent of him to recognize the
obvious fact that it is wrong to stand on the side of racism.
References
https://www.sportsmediawatch.com/2020/10/mlb-postseason-ratings-alcs-record-lows-nlcs/
https://www.sportsmediawatch.com/2020/10/college-football-ratings-sec-season-high-viewership/
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