Is It Over? Part 2

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On Monday I began talking about endings, and how I feel that, more and more, we are seeing a difference between endings and conclusions. I started out by examining long-form magazine and newspaper articles and how not all of the reading public continue past the bump. Then, I examined the small-bits-after-the-credits trend for big budget films, and how only an informed, insider audience would be able to take advantage of the added information those scenes provide. Today, I’m going to talk about this phenomenon in relation to America’s two favourite things to talk about these days: sports and politics.

I love sports. In fact, I’m enamored with them—I can’t get enough. Sports are the purest form of competition, and have a tendency to explain complex sociological, cultural societal narratives in very simple ways. In fact, Soccer is how I live my life. Yesterday, after a shockingly bad performance by the English soccer team I support, I had to take a short nap to keep myself from exploding. All of that because of a draw. That’s right, the result that got my grits enough to force me to slumber wasn’t even a loss.

And it’s the idea of the draw that brings me around to sports today. In what would be considered “regular season” soccer games, if the teams are level on goals scored after 90 minutes, the game is over. A draw is the result. In the sports we most covet here in the USA, a draw is almost never the case; American sports fans simply do not accept a draw as an ending nor conclusion. On Sunday, while at the gym, I became enthralled by the Oakland Raiders vs. Kansas City Chiefs NFL game. It was the 4th quarter and Oakland made some great plays and a field goal to even the score at 20.  I knew NFL games had overtime rules—as all USA sports leagues do (except for MLS, the soccer league)—but I didn’t know what they were. I was expecting some more excellent back and forth excitement! Instead, since the NFL’s rules are simply “first to score wins”, overtime amounted to simply trying to get a field goal. I was disappointed, but remembered a sports story from a little while back about draws in the NFL.

In 2008, the Cincinnati Bengals and Philadelphia Eagles played out the 17th tie in NFL history, a history which began in 1922. In 86 years of football, only 17 draws. And, apparently, fans hated it. To quote the author of the above-linked article:

Needless to say, ties are the worst and football fans detest them. NFL fans want a winner and a loser. There’s no solace in tying, only frustration. (http://bleacherreport.com/articles/82672-eagles-bengals-its-like-kissing-your-sister)

In case you’re wondering what the deal with the sister kissing is, that quote is attributed to Navy-team coach Eddie Erdelatz in 1953 after Navy and Duke drew a game (source).

The intense distate—hatred, if you will—of the draw game in American sports is at an odd contrast to the way people interact with their other media. Instead of simply accepting the ending (the end of regulation time), American sports viewers demand a conclusion. The same people who don’t read to the conclusion of newspaper or magazine articles and don’t sit through the credits for the conclusive scene simply cannot accept an a tie game. The difference has to do with equality. It seems to me that Americans simply cannot accept equality as an ending; one side simply, as a rule, must be better. One team or the other must be better for a conclusion to be acceptable.

And that brings us to politics—more specifically, the mid-term elections. Just as with the reader/viewership pool when it comes to media, there is a voter pool when it comes to the political landscape. According to Pew Research, 63% of Republicans and Republican-leaning news consumers use Fox News as their primary source of news information (in the interest of fairness: the report states “insufficient number of cases to profile MSNBC audience”). If we compare hearing a news story to reading a magazine article, that 63% are a portion of the voting pool who are not reading after the bump, not fact checking, not investigating on their own. Whenever there is a situation wherein a single pool of listeners, viewers or readers can consume the same media but have a different sense of the ending, there is an information flow problem.

Fox News is in the position of controlling the non-bump readers, and can not only give them a false conclusion, but can do so so convincingly, its viewers think they’re getting an ending. This last mid-term, Fox and its on-air endorsements and fear mongering convinced that 63% that they had heard all they needed to hear. To them, the conclusion to the story was to vote out the Democrats. And that’s exactly what they did.