Rate This! Why Ratings Don’t Matter as Much as We Might Think

Let me explain.

The sports media is there to show me a game or talk about a game. If there is some analysis, fine. Especially when it’s Charles Barkley or Charlie Sheen doing the analysis, and especially when they’re analyzing the game itself. The media should be, well, the media – a conduit – through which sports can be transmitted to my eyes and then into brain.

Charlie Sheen’s Baseball Analysis pt. 1

Charlie Sheen baseball analysis part 2

Love when Barkley’s on TV.

Sometimes, though, the media forgets their role. Sometimes they think they ARE the story. Sometimes, unfortunately, they report on themselves.

For people with dissenting opinions, there is one main time that it is OK for the ratings to be reported on—the Super Bowl. The Super Bowl is an event bigger than just the game, so reporting on how many people watched it (over 100 million this year, according to Yahoo! Sports) is fine. The ratings for the Super Bowl are a newsworthy story.

Here is another example of where reporting on ratings is OK—in a magazine in the Business section. Ratings affect the business of advertising, and so it would be appropriate to have an article in the Business section of, in this case, Time Magazine.

Let’s look at inappropriate places to report ratings. The first, is on a sports page of a newspaper or a sports website. In this case, Yahoo! Sports reported on ratings like it’s something that should matter to me as a sports fan. In the story, they give the facts, that the viewership for the World Series was down this year. Great. What the hell am I supposed to do with that information? How should I interpret it?  Should I feel bad because I did not watch it (and am still trying to forget)? Should I feel badly for Major League Baseball? Should I have a worse impression of the sport because other people do not watch it? Should I be worried for the players? The owners? The network that carried that sport? Should I watch a certain network more, to make up for the guilt I feel from knowing that their ratings weren’t good?

Like everything else, there are shades of gray when it comes to reporting on ratings. A blurb like this one in the LA Times probably wasn’t in the Sports section, so might pass my litmus test of being OK. But again, it’s borderline. Crossing that border here, a Times blogger talks all about the ratings for Game 7. I like Diane Pucin and the Fabulous Forum, but it’s inappropriate.

The NCAA Basketball Tournament is reported-on, non-stop, for the revenue it makes the NCAA. If it is reported on as part of an illustration of the effect gambling has on viewership or to illustrate why NCAA players should be paid for their services, then that is fine. When it’s reported on just to be reported on, then we have an issue.

Print media reports on the ratings, but sports radio may be the worst of all offenders. When I hear someone making a point about sports by using the ratings that particular sport gets (here’s looking at you Herd), I can’t stand it. It is almost instant cause for station surfing. For someone to make the point, for instance, that College Football is better off without a playoff because regular season games get more viewers, is like saying it is better for someone to be heinously injured in a car accident because it causes more people to slow down and look.

If my career was in advertising, information about ratings might be meaningful and useful to me. I would consume it, then I would move on. If I was an “Advertising Fan” and not a “Sports Fan,” then I might even need the information about the World Series ratings or NBA Finals ratings, or overnight ratings after a big Sunday in the NFL. But I’m not an advertising fan. I am a sports fan.

Side note- I would love to see something along the lines of Terry Tate—Office Linebacker for fans of advertising… but I digress…

Ratings can be a good way to tell which sport is most popular. Here is a blog from the Washington Post talking about whether the Capitals or the Wizards get better ratings. Again, unless you’re trying to decide where to advertise, why would it matter?

As a fan, I either like the team/sport or I do not. I watch the team/sport or I do not. I will follow the team/sport or I will not. The more important question than ratings, is whether a sport is on TV and in this day and age, the answer is usually that it is. If not, I can probably find it online.

As a consumer of sports, I do not need ratings to tell me what to do. I will not watch sports based on its high ratings, nor will I not watch it if because other people don’t. This is not a popularity contest. It makes no difference to me and (for me) makes the sports websites that feature ratings articles, the equivalent of 24-hour news networks: in other words, media diarrhea. And media members that continue to spout out ratings stats to back up their opinions about sports either a) have an all-advertising industry audience or b) are narcissists. What other conclusion could I come to for a media that uses its power of reporting to report on… itself.

As I conclude, I wonder to myself, “If I hate media talking about ratings, isn’t my blog (when I post this) going to be media talking about media talking about the ratings?” We need to stop the madness. Please.

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1. -Fansmanship says:

   03/02/2011 at 6:58 am

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