#3: Who Mediates the Media Men?

World Cup, Elon Musk, and Why We Can't Have Nice Things

NONSENSE

While the US Women’s National Team might have been eliminated from the World Cup on Sunday, the biggest losers of all were the viewers, because for the 5^th straight time, we had to suffer through Fox’s coverage of the event.

While admittedly I was always going to watch less of this World Cup than previous editions given the time zone challenges, Fox’s presentation turned me off thanks to its general contempt for its audience. Just a quick recap of Fox’s media atrocities from this, and previous, tournaments:

·      For its studio coverage, Fox brought back professional windbag Alexei Lalas from the Men’s World Cup and repeated their strategy from that tournament of simply signing the highest-profile recently retired US player (Carli Lloyd). Luckily for Fox Lloyd is able to string more than one coherent sentence together that isn’t generic homerism, unlike Clint Dempsey or Landon Donovan, but she was still asked almost exclusively about the US team.

·      Even though games were mostly taking place in the middle of the night US-time, Fox insisted on promoting false “start times” to try and inflate viewership averages. For example, Fox repeatedly advertised coverage beginning at 2am for the crucial US-Portugal group match, but kickoff wasn’t until 3am. Some might call this cynical, I just call it a dick move, especially when a significant portion of your audience are young kids setting their alarms to wake up in the pre-dawn hours

·      In last year’s Men’s World Cup, Fox scheduled their nightly “World Cup Tonight” studio show at Midnight EST, while at the same time promoting a 4am start time for the next day’s first game. (Which, obviously, actually kicked off at 5am) Either Fox just can’t do math or doesn’t respect the audience enough to think they might want to sleep.

·      The most egregious of all: Ignoring literally anything that even sniffs of geopolitics, to the point of ignoring what was interesting about many of the games.  While one might be able to excuse (not really) their turning a blind eye to Qatar’s human rights issues in 2022, covering that year’s US-Iran match without discussing the tension between the nations and protests in Iran would be like ignoring the historic rivalry between the Celtics and Lakers if they met in the finals.

The magic of the world cup is that it’s a global coming-together. Almost every country in the world competed in the qualifiers for a chance to be among the last 32 in Australia/New Zealand. And through that coming-together comes a chance to recall or learn about the intermingled and messy history of the world (this year’s round of 16, for example, featured three African nations playing against their former colonizers). The World Cup is inherently political, but Fox can’t help but disproportionately (and generically) center the US at the expense of interesting stories.

By designing their coverage for the most-casual, least-invested fans, Fox treats the World Cup (and thus soccer in general) as an “other” phenomenon, a lesser thing, a short-term diversion like the when middle school teams play at half-time of professional basketball games and the only people paying attention are the parents.

Now Fox is fucked because the US is out and they are stuck with no excitement for three lame ducks rounds of games, all because they couldn’t step outside of their own narrow world view to explore the hundreds of interesting storylines beyond “USA! USA!”

This leads to the big question: At what point does a media property become so important that it needs to be taken out of the hands of individual decision makers and made open source?

How do we curb or eliminate irresponsible stewardship of powerful events and properties? Where is the incompetency equivalent to anti-trust regulations? And what would an open source World Cup look like?

It’s not just Fox and the World Cup, of course. Twitter, similarly, is being destroyed by Elon Musk’s own narrow perspective: he believes his experience of Twitter is the truest (or he might believe that Twitter is the internet) and has been comically reshaping it in the image of its darkest corners, systematically (is there a word for systematic ineptitude) eliminating all its positive attributes and its revenue generating potential. All because he didn’t think he was popular enough on the platform. He vowed to make Twitter a beacon of free speech, but buying Twitter because you think there was too much moderation is like buying Disneyland because you think the lines aren’t long enough.

But Twitter’s founder Jack Dorsey himself advocated for Twitter as a utility when he tweeted “In principle, I don’t believe anyone should own or run Twitter. It wants to be a public good at a protocol level, not a company” (He subsequently pushed through the sale to Elon). Twitter had its issues, clearly, but it also played a huge part in the Arab Spring, the #MeToo movement, and #BlackLivesMatter. But now any positive potential of Twitter (I refuse to call it anything else, btw) must give way to the whims of a billionaire crackpot.

This isn’t some anti-capitalist rant; Fox has left money on the table by ignoring the international storylines of the World Cup as fans switch to Telemundo, use VPNs for international feeds, or abandon the later rounds altogether. Twitter’s revenue and long-term viability is tanking under Elon and dozens of big and small would-be competitors are popping up. Ignoring the public good is bad business.

In a far smaller (but no less important corner of the cultural world), a model emerged for how participants can take control of a properties narrative (literally): in January Hasbro placed the basic rulebook for Dungeons & Dragons under an irrevocable creative commons license (backtracking after earlier trying to take a cut of third-party created D&D content). Dungeons and Dragons is now in a sense co-owned by Hasbro and a legion of third-party creators of varying sizes.

Obviously the hubristic executives of Fox or Twitter would never take learnings from a geeky world like D&D, but I wish they would. At least dungeon masters are honest about what time the game is really starting.

& SUCH

Ryan Broderick does a great job of unpacking the one mistake Barbie’s marketing team made, but this line is the real winner of the piece: “But brands still don’t understand that memes are large-scale inside jokes and are, more often than not, making fun of them.”

The success of Barbie prompted me to revisit this long Matthew Ball essay from 2021 titled “What is an Entertainment Company in 2021 and Why Does the Answer Matter,” which is probably even more relevant today.

I love this piece and the way it ruthlessly dispels the notion that execution is all that matters: “In Defense of Strategy”

This episode of the always-great Sports Media Podcast features Caitlin Thompson (founder of Racquet media) talking about how tennis media can be improved, but it’s also an interesting commentary of the state of niche-sports media consumption in general

A useful history and status report on Large Language Models