Two things.
1. Sports ratings are down across the board. The collapse seemed to seriously take off with the anthem protests and turn even more catastrophic with the pandemic. Professional sports have alienated a big chunk of their male audience and that doesn’t leave much. The lack of audiences and the pandemic gimmicks have really undermined the entire big business model of the NFL, NBA, MLB, and so forth.
2. Americans don’t like Communist China. And they have little interest in a cheerful brotherhood of nations routine in a Communist dictatorship that originated the pandemic and has profited massively from it.
Combine these two and the genocide games are predictably not doing very well.
NBC is facing a cataclysmic loss of audience for the 2022 Winter Olympics as viewership tanked for Friday’s Opening Ceremony, averaging just 16 million.
It is a record low for the Opening Ceremony (20.1 million for 1988 in Calgary was the previous record) and a whopping 43 percent below the 2018 Games in South Korea that notched 28.3 million viewers despite also dealing with a less than advantageous Asian time zone for American audiences.
It comes on the heels of Thursday’s ratings disaster that saw just 7.7 million people tune in, dramatically below same-night audiences of 2018 (16 million) and 2014 from Russia (20.02 million).
NBC said the 16 million is a “total audience delivery” and includes all of its networks and streaming. The television-only average audience was below 14 million for the day, per the preliminary data released by the network.
NBC has lost a lot of money. And it means that going forward the IOC may have to learn to expect less cash for the viewing rights to the Olympics. Until at some point Netflix or Amazon Prime just outbids one of the traditional free networks.
While China is a huge deal-breaker, Americans in the past have been motivated to compete with adversaries, but we also don’t feel united as a country. Americans these days hate each other more than any external enemy. Even Communist China.
China doesn’t summon up pure enmity so much as general disgust. Much as professional athletes. While the winter games are less likely to have the sort of political tantrums that women’s soccer inflicted on us, or Simone Biles, a lot of Americans are burned out.
Finally, people have too many other things weighing on their minds. Viewership for escapism is booming, but organized sports may not be far enough away from the real world.
The genocide games are politically toxic and they represent a sphere of activity that Americans are increasingly leaving behind.
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