I Search for the NCAA Men's Final Four for Free, as in the "Old Days" and find no one standing up for "the public interest." And no games for free. Part II
Who gets represented in the sports part of the Public Square, and has abandonment of the old free "Broadcast" model been an improvement? Some reflections on what I found that go beyond sports...
Dear Citizens and Elected Officials:
Instead of just doing an update on my previous posting, I decided that Update was long enough to be a posting in itself. Here it is:
Image from the Bill Bradley papers, Princeton University Collection.
Update, Thursday, April 11, 2024 Here’s a report on where I am on my understanding of what’s happened to the tradition, if not the “right” of the average American and especially now poor American media consumers to view for free the major “rites of season passage” of our major sports culmination events. It’s a story, as I’m finding out, of the power of the electronic and broadcast networks - the declining but not totally eclipsed three old reliables, the TV networks of CBS, ABC, NBC and the relative newcomer Fox - the older cable TV franchises like Comcast, and the newer specialized sports networks like ESPN which now partners with Disney and two others, and the Turner Broadcasting Network to give us their TBS, TNT and True TV. I may not have all the constant evolution down entirely, but I think you get the idea. It was the old traditional big three whom I watched throughout my life for the NCAA playoffs, and not just the Final Four and the Championship game of Monday night fame, but I clearly remember watching Princeton and Bill Bradley play Providence College on the way to the final four in 1965, scoring 41 points. For free. No special subscriptions of any kind required. Kind of a citizen right hand in hand with the understandings of the public obligations of the broadcast media of the day. (With the American Right in revolt starting around if not before Reagan, with Goldwater’s supporters and Rick Perlstein’s tale in “Before the Storm.”
But much has changed in American capitalism since then as I indicted at the start here. I went to two articles after getting an Email back from Wall Street Journal reporter Rachel Bachman, who had co-authored a story about the rise of woman’s college basketball and its media impacts on these markets with Isabella Simonetti. Ms. Bachman Emailed me that
As we wrote in the story, the NCAA negotiated different TV deals for each tournament. The men's deal was extended in 2016, a time when there were millions more cable-TV subscribers than there are now. That contract runs through 2032, and stipulates that the men's final be on TBS and CBS in alternating years.
And here’s the link to that excellent story, helping explain all the package deals, new coalitions, how many watched women’s vs men’s finals and the earlier tournament games, and something I didn’t know: that cable subscribers have been falling away from the industry over the past decade - down 25%: https://www.wsj.com/business/media/the-womens-ncaa-tournament-outshone-the-mens-but-it-got-99-less-tv-money-74806707?mod=basketball_news_article_pos2
What really caught my attention was the length of the men’s basketball contract for the NCAA tournament - 16 years - and the alternating year sequencing between a “broadcast” station, CBS, and a Turner cable one TBS. My personal situation was that my Comcast “contract” was bare bones on TV, with no sports channel, and even though CBS kind of steered viewers to test to see if your cable server authorized you to view TBS, of course my answer was no. How many other tens of thousands - was it possible millions - were thrust into the same situation? Does anyone know, or care, least of all a “public watchdog”?
I also did some further reading here with a contemporary story from Feb. 1, 2024 “What you need to know about U.S. Sports TV Contracts” by Anthony Crupi at Sportico which ran through the domination of NFL football as having 95 of the 100 highest rated viewer programs in 2023, with 2 for college football, one for politics and one for the Academy awards. That tells you where the billions in revenue come from for any of the broadcast/internet players, now being joined by Apple, Amazon and “the younger, TV-eschewing fan base.” This is also a good informative read: https://www.sportico.com/feature/sports-television-contracts-media-nfl-nba-ncaa-rights-1234764931/
And then to a much earlier, 2012 story at Foxsports: “NCAA Tourney no longer fee online for all.” https://www.foxsports.com/stories/college-basketball/ncaa-tourney-no-longer-free-online-for-all - that introduced the 14 year contract between the NCAA and CBS/the Turner system (TBS, TNT, true TV) carrying the arrangements we’re under until next year, 2025.
All right fans and readers, now for the political analysis under Neoliberal late Capitalism and the fate of the electronic/digital commons - which is really the issue here - any provision for protecting what I - silly me - thought had become a national fan right to the climax biggest games - football, basketball, baseball, hockey, Olympics - from the “commons of the airwaves” whatever the electronic evolution of the different “broadcast” then “digital” forms.
I have yet to see my initial gut reaction discussed much less refuted, that something important for a “national sense” of belonging was disappearing into the pure economics of how many are watching and how/where, because there always seems to me to be the possibility of requiring, even in these 14-16 year contracts with the sports network conclomerates, that there be provision for the old free broadcast networks (CBS, NBC, ABC and now Fox) to carry the games for all, and also for meeting the technological changes - free streaming for those on cable services even if the viewer’s basic package didn’t include these ever evolving new arrangement. Keeping up with what’s free and what cost’s via what memberships is becoming like a modern day “spin the wheel,” better check for each sport and event. Just who is “being served” under these arrangements?
Is that too much to ask? Yes of the current policeman-state absent wild frontier - no enforcement of any notion of the commons, and the national “morale” interest, much less the poorer folks nostalgia - but of course, first we would need any sense of a defensible commons, which we have lost in politics and public affairs as well with the response and answer being that all viewpoints are expressed somewhere in the electronic universe of the internet, maybe in the “ethernet,” the old broadcasters and the new cable conglomerates, even though no federal agency seems to have legal jurisdiction and as I’ve written in my long piece about the drift to American fascism, (World on Fire: Domestic Politics, Jan. 21, 2024) for decades Rush Limbaugh’s conservative views never got answered, much less refuted to his huge audience, in our value measuring world I guess, size of audience for contracts, like NFL football rights, and in the political spectrum, is the sole measure of the truth, if not the soul measure of it.
It takes me back to the reading experience of Stuart Jefferies “Grand Hotel Abyss,” (2016) which is a long historical review of the lives of dissident Frankfurt School from Germany’s Weimar Republic, their comfortable material lives allowing them the luxury of viewing the collapse of civilization in one of the West’s most advanced, educated countries, the Germany of 1919-1933. And the author feels, their relevance once again, after the Great Financial Crisis, 2008-2009, the Occupy Wall Street Movement (2011) and the challenge posed by Bernie Sanders in 2016-2020.
Well, they had some inherited material comforts from their businessmen fathers, but they still had to, by 1933, begin running for their lives as the Nazis took over. The Frankfurt School continued on first in the U.S. during the war, then in a return home to West Germany in the 1950’s, with Herbert Marcuse being a legend and bete noire of the American Right for his iconclastic books and political stances, and especially One Dimensional Man which appeared in 1964, suggesting that Western Capitalism had swallowed up all forms of significant dissent with its consumerism and practices, the book following in the wake of “The Dialectic of Enlightenment,” in 1944, by Theodore Adorno and Max Horkeimer, two of the other most famous names of the Frankfurt School (along with the sometimes in, sometimes out Erich Fromm) which saw the Western tradition falling under the sway of “instrumental reason.” That was the application of science and reason inside the specialized channels of the economy and the mass culture which emerged, but lacking any application of reason’s judgement on the resulting whole civilization - its inability to stop the rise of Nazism and the irrationality of Hitler’s racism and imperlialism in a country widely admired for its advanced educational system. Enlightenment’s mistakes had led to barbarism.
I can’t do justice to the school, or the Grand Hotel Abyss in this setting, this “update,” but let me just say that the developments here in the coverage of sports in the culture, on the verge of disappearing outside of paying media subscriptions, marks for me a continuation of some of the major observations if not themes of both the “school” and the book about it. And for younger readers, it’s hard to read them and not think of the Hunger Games and The Matrix. And, it seems to me, the rise of Trump flows right out of these concerns and failure of the public square to give enough time to debates where you have to defend your ideas in a long series of “dialectic” exchanges - a word which carries very heavy historical weight and baggage too, from the greatest Greek thinkers to proud late 18th and early 19th Century - Germany’s own Hegel…and right on up to the Frankfurt School.
Let me close with a long paragraph from someone I turn to for clarifications to the obfuscations of our age, and previous ages, J.S. McClelland’s “A History of Western Political Thought,” from the sections on Socrates and Plato at the beginning of the work, and of Western Political thought, and from the Chapter importantly entilted “The Guardians of the State and Justice”:
Dialectic works through statement and contradiction. A position is stated by one speaker in the dialogue, and somebody else offers qualifications or objections. These qualifications or objections can be of two kinds: either they can hold that the originally stated position is unclear, perhaps because it contains contradictions, or objections can be raised to a stated position on the grounds that it is inadquate because it leaves something out. The original position is then restated by ridding itsef of its own contradictions and by taking into acount the objection that it was inadquate. The process is one which produces increasing coherence both in the sense of what is being proposed becoming internally more coherent as the contradictions are ironed out and in the the sense that it incorporates what seems sensible from the criticisms which are offered aginst it. It is easy to see that this is ideally how ordinary argument should proceed. It is essentially co-operative despite the dialectical form the argument takes.
Is it going too far (yes, probably) to say that the process ends with a rational case for justice in the matter at hand…and if you get to the concluding sections of the Grand Hotel Abyss that will sound familiar in the hands of the inheritor of the Frankfurt School, Jurgen Habermas, as he argues for the necessity of the process in the public square, in trouble in the 1990’s already.
Of course, the evolution of this tradition by the time we get from the Greeks, Hegel and yes, Marx to the Frankfurt school - gets quite a bit more complex with the school’s “negative dialectics” as the task of criticizing the modern techno-rational capitalist state and its state of democracy and its all encompassing mass media including domination of, very arguably, the arts, high, middle and low brow - requires some mental effort well beyond the sketch here by McClelland.
But let me say this nonetheless: our current “debates,” the vast majority that appear in the major media, do not take even this rather obvious form, neither right wing talk radio, our major party clashes, with only the old “Firing Line” and episodic and non-mainstream debates you can find with some effort on YouTube beginning to meet even the basic outlines - almost the common sense method sketched out in this quoted paragraph.
And certainly, in the matter I began with: who represents the general public interest, the poor, the old traditions of major events free to all - no one apparently, there is no state or public watch dog guardian, the private sector, all hail THE MARKET, has taken a near absolute form - unless you believe everyone’s right have been represented by their registering in the silent passive polls of who watches what and when.
To me, in this sense of the Frankfurt School, “instrumental reason” in the form of “rationality” applied by each of the market players, but not consciously by the public itself or any guardian for it, has come to dominate, and therefore choice has become entirely a question of “dollar democracy” in the free market, with the free market itself dominated by larger and larger conglomerates - the new alliances being their own remedy to greater and greater fragmentation.
Therefore: I conclude something profound is missing. Yes American is one of the world’s most capitalist countries. Yet 80-90% of the public do not own businesses and are not capitalists themselves - they work for others “above them” in business, government and the non-profit sector. I suppose in the spirit of the “Dialectic Method” I just wrote about above, I should ask myself whether the 80-90% who are not capitalists want to be and therefore are hard to convince about measures that point to a new version of the old mixed economy of the original New Deal. I wrote about this at length in the online version of Tikkun magazine, which I just learned from Michael Lerner is going to cease publication very shortly. My essay was called “When Market Man Consigns the Common Man to the Dustbin of History.” Here’s the link:
https://www.tikkun.org/when-market-man-consigns-the-common-man-to-the-dustbin-of-history/
It was posted on July 28, 2011. Here’s a paragraph from the Introduction, taking on the work of celebrated globalizer Thomas Friedman:
When the French Revolution lost its mind, Edmund Burke gave the world a deep explanation for why it happened with his Reflections on the Revolution in France, and when that proved to be too much of an apology for the Ancien Regime, Thomas Paine gave him, and all of us, a spirited reply with The Rights of Man, just one year later, in 1791. What we claim in this essay is that Mr. Friedman has been celebrating the emergence of a “Market Man” who has been “designed” to meet a new revolutionary situation: the frantic demands of globalization and the utopian effort to construct one giant “free-market.” If one pays close attention to Friedman’s metaphors and parables for this “new man” caught up in the “revised” labor markets, as well as his prescriptions for pushing the older human types out of the way – as suggested by his remedy for unemployment – that we all become “start-ups” – it will become apparent that this is going to be more of a nightmare than a dream about human fulfillment.
Best to us all in very troubled times
William R. Neil
Frostburg, MD