It’s a trend that has been ongoing for years, but November 5th, 2024 was nitrous oxide injected straight into its engine.
The trend is our ever-polarizing media environment. And election day proved a spark that has since sent an already fractured media into its deepest fissure yet.
Since Americans went to the polls and selected a new president just a few short weeks ago, the makings of an even more divided media landscape are beginning to take shape. Millions have abandoned Elon Musk’s X (formerly Twitter) in what is being dubbed the great ‘Xodus,’ and are seeking refuge on Bluesky — a more establishment-friendly space rid of engagement farmers and porn bots but with decidedly less right-wing presence.
Over on cable news, it’s more of the same. MSNBC’s flagship morning show Morning Joe has seen its left-skewing audience dwindle after co-hosts Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski visited President-elect Donald Trump in his Mar-a-Lago resort last week. It’s one data point in an alarming trend that sees left-wing news consumers increasingly flocking to places that more enthusiastically reaffirm their priors, or have them opting out of news consumption entirely.
Right-wing media has undergone similar trends in the past. Following the 2020 election and its aftermath, Fox News viewers turned to networks on Fox’s right flank like Newsmax, where pundits were more willing to adopt positions in line with the median right-wing cable news consumer. And much has already been said about the right’s so-called “podcast bros” that get their news from Ben Shapiro, Joe Rogan, and the like, with little dissent.
But cable news and podcasts can be their own animal. They aren’t always (or even usually) indicative of what everyday people think.
For the most part, X, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, Reddit, etc., have served as our modern-day town squares since their widespread adoptions in the 2010s. On the whole, these social media networks are a marginally better indicator of what people think than cable news, but they’re still far from perfect.
Crucially, however, these social media networks have always included people of all political persuasions. No doubt, users will find like-minded people on these platforms and create their own echo chambers, making one person’s experience vastly different from another’s. But both users were at least in the same town square, where occasionally you might overhear what someone else had to say whether you liked it or not.
That type of cross-pollination is happening less and less as people continue self-sorting into their own media silos, which makes for an interesting reality when it comes to sports media.
Sports is one of the last remaining institutions in America that is truly bipartisan. As such, figures like Mike Greenberg or Colin Cowherd, or Scott Van Pelt are among some of the only individuals in the entire country that regular people on both sides of the aisle actually listen to together.
And strangely, that means these figures are held to account in ways that partisan media types often aren’t. Let me explain.
News consumers have long revealed their programming preferences that is light on facts and heavy on opinion. Just compare how many people watch the PBS NewsHour on any given night to the audiences that Jesse Watters Primetime or Alex Wagner Tonight pull.
On the contrary, what has the trend been in sports media? More and more, fans are looking towards fact-based analysis, even if it’s packaged in the form of a hot take.
Let’s start with a show like NFL Live. The Orlovsky-Kimes school of hot taking is perhaps one of the best examples of analysis that cooks up broccoli but serves it to you like it’s cake. Take last week, when Dan Orlovsky spent nearly five minutes breaking down every player’s responsibilities on a key play in the Chiefs-Bills game. Sounds pretty dry right? Not what you’d expect in the Stephen A. Smith era of ESPN? Wrong. Orlovsky, in his virtual reality headset, put on a virtuoso performance to explain in detail exactly why the play worked for the Bills. He was widely praised for the segment.
One of the coolest things I’ve ever been a part of at @ESPNNFL @Hawk @NFL @NextGenStats @BuffaloBills pic.twitter.com/suijIFIgAw
— Dan Orlovsky (@danorlovsky7) November 19, 2024
But how about a program like First Take, where the entire point of the show is to argue? Even in the debate-style format, sports media finds itself more fact-driven than its cable news and political podcast counterparts. When Stephen A. does battle with Ryan Clark over Dak Prescott’s performance in last week’s game, he’s armed with a dozen different factoids and statistics found by an army of researchers to defend his point. When Stephen A. goes on Sean Hannity’s show to talk politics, the debates are decidedly of the “vibes only” variety.
So why do these two staples of media consumption, news, and sports, find themselves on such divergent paths? Because what a sports pundit says carries more reputational and career risk than that of a modern-day news pundit.
In today’s news environment — where consumers are sorted into their own silos and have made clear their preference to hear commentary that reinforces their own views — the person delivering those views suffers little consequence whether they are right or wrong about a given opinion. On the other hand, sports media pundits are very much in the right or wrong business. Fans care deeply about whether their favorite (or least favorite) talking heads fall on the right side of any given sports debate. There’s literally an entire community dedicated to clowning Bill Simmons when he spews a bad take and blogs that track every single pick that pundits make during studio shows.
Of course, no one is going to be driven off the air for being wrong a handful of times about sports. But the modern sports media business is cutthroat in a way that the modern news media is not, and being wrong persistently has consequences. Look no further than Skip Bayless, who now finds himself without a television show. When your reputation becomes stained in such a manner that viewers lose confidence that your opinions are coming from a place of knowledge and authority, like Bayless, you become unemployed.
It’s completely antithetical to the incentive structure of modern-day news media, where being wrong consistently can actually be beneficial to one’s career, as long as they’re being wrong in front of the right audience.
Look at the “rising stars” in sports media today. Ben Solak: film grinder and numbers cruncher. He recently hopped from The Ringer to ESPN in a sign that fact-based analysis has gone mainstream. Chase Daniel: also a noted film guy who went from breaking down plays on social media to having a show on FS1. Or how about the so-called gambling experts? They’re literally in the business of being right, or else they lose their viewers’ money.
It’s the small details for The Chiefs that the TV copy can’t show!
Creed Humphrey & Justin Watson are the epitome of what it means to be a Chief.
Let me break it down for you in the simplest way. pic.twitter.com/zTitHRWbxT
— Chase Daniel (@ChaseDaniel) November 25, 2024
Is there any comparable figure in today’s news media? Is someone on the rise because of their facts-based reporting? Perhaps Alex Thompson of Axios with his well-sourced news breaks during the Joe Biden dropout debacle. Maybe CNN’s Kaitlan Collins who rose from White House correspondent to anchor of the network’s primetime lineup (and as of Tuesday will reportedly return to the White House during the second Trump administration, in addition to her nightly show).
But these individuals may be more exception than rule. CNN’s ratings are nothing to call home about, and one would be hard-pressed to find Axios enthusiasts outside of the Beltway.
The point being that the audience for fact-forward news analysis is dwindling, while sports fans seemingly want more of it.
Is that a concerning trend? That’s likely a question for another column. But there’s certainly an irony to sports fans — you know, famously rational people with even-keeled opinions — demanding a higher standard of analysis than news consumers.
We can all probably agree that wars abroad are of far more import than whether the Jets should bench Aaron Rodgers. But the media coverage of one issue will have much more of a basis in fact than the other, and that alone should say a lot about the state of media consumption in this country.
