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posted by martyb on Wednesday November 01 2017, @11:58AM   Printer-friendly
from the American-game-of-FOOTball-which-is-played-using-your-HANDs dept.

Is ESPN done for?

ESPN pays $2 billion a year to the NFL for Monday Night Football and one NFL wild card playoff game. I've written for the past couple of years that as ESPN's business collapses that ESPN's decision on whether or not to bid to keep Monday Night Football would be the first big test of how rapidly that business is deteriorating.

What's a deteriorating business look like? In the month of October ESPN lost over 15,000 subscribers a day in October per the latest Nielson estimates.

15,000 a day!

Losing 15,000 subscribers per day is a lot, but is that because of the NFL anthem protests or because cord-cutting has finally reached a tipping point?


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  • (Score: 2) by edIII on Wednesday November 01 2017, @09:26PM (1 child)

    by edIII (791) on Wednesday November 01 2017, @09:26PM (#590775)

    My point wasn't about Rodney King, and the circumstances are irrelevant to my argument. I stipulate to the facts you provided, and as you noted, the media offered information only from one side at the very end. I do not hold him as a martyr. Rather that the public at large immediately empathized with Mr. King to such an extent, that their anecdotes of routine oppression needed more serious attention as they heavily rioted. People don't riot because they are just a little angry, but because they feel there is no other expression left except violence.

    That's all I meant to say. Mr. King introduced video to the equation, which made the facts very unambiguous (as presented). After the strength of their riot (a protest gone wrong), I opened my mind to the possibility that instead of the average black person's story of abuse being untrue, to maybe it is true. In the years since, so many, many, many more videos have surfaced. Where there is smoke there is fire as the saying goes.

    I wish these protests focused on genuine injustices like that instead of police going too far with genuinely awful people whose existence most certainly is not making this world a better place.

    I agree, but somebody has to start the conversation. Rodney King really started the conversation for the first time because the other side saw evidence. After that it makes it easier for good people to come forward too.

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 02 2017, @09:07AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 02 2017, @09:07AM (#590937)

    The question is whether the "conversation" is actually something that is being had with any actual understanding on what is being said.

    Imagine the media leaned a different direction and they decided to start collecting instances of white individuals being assaulted, murdered, raped, etc by minority individuals. Here [bjs.gov] are the bureau of justice statistic's most recent figures. This happens extremely regularly and disproportionately. For instance even though blacks make up less than 13% of the population, they commit more than 50% of all murders. And then you can get to crimes that tug on the heart strings like rape. Rape is one of the most grievous crimes and there are thousands of black on white rapes and sexual assaults per year. By contrast, the converse of white on black rapes/sexual assault are statistically nonexistent.

    Take these things out of context, as the media is currently doing with other types of crime, and you've have riled up mobs looking for vengeance forming. Ready to drag an innocent individual out of a truck and beat him to death simply because of the color of his skin. Or, in a very recent incident an a group gang raped a woman and urinated on her with one calling it punishment for her for "400 years of slavery". These are consequences of the completely reckless behavior of influencers, including the media. And they're completely predictable.

    What I'm getting at here is that anecdotes of crime of any particular sort does not mean there is a problem beyond the act itself. What you want to do is to try to see where we're most likely to be able to effect change, and work from there. Instead what we seem to be doing is having a media that determines crimes most likely to provoke an emotional (and even better, physical) response and then blare it on a loudspeaker 24/7 while sitting on the roof, with a fiddle and bag of money in hand, watching the chaos they instigate burn civilization, or at least civility, to the ground.

    And while it's certainly debatable, there seems to be some argument that said influencers are intentionally doing this. Why in the world is media holding up these sort of awful people as martyrs while ignoring people like the aforementioned Charles Kinsey? There's not a single objective mind in this country that wouldn't feel for Kinsey. Take the current version of the Black Lives Matter wiki page [wikipedia.org]. I can find no fewer than 17 instances of "Michael Brown." Charles Kinsey? Not a peep. He is a good productive member of society who did everything right, yet was nonetheless unreasonably victimized. Yet the media mostly ignored his case, while they continue to hold people like Michael Brown as their martyrs. That is inflaming, and I think intentionally, racial tensions.