Reading the Election through Football

Michael Oriard spends a lot of time discussing the ways in which various newspapers presented football games to their intended readers in the last decades of the nineteenth century. His meticulously researched history of football in the media is interesting, but I repeatedly found myself wanting to find modern day instances of sports writing targeted to a specific demographic. Curiosity drove me to this Tuesday's National Edition of New York Times where, unsurprisingly, I found a story on the Steelers-Redskins game played the night before. What proved arresting about the story, however, was its utter lack of football. There isn't even a mention of the final score. The whole of the article is dedicated to the three-minute interviews of Barack Obama and John McCain featured in ESPN's "Monday Night" coverage of the game, and it says a lot about the implied readership of the Times.

Oriard, I think, would have had a field day with this article, because it seems to fit harmoniously with his emphasis on audiences in media coverage of sporting events. In discussing the role of football in the explosion of newspapers in the late 1800s, he bases his argument largely on the assertion that football had a broad appeal, from the New England gentility of Harvard, Yale, and Princeton to the hordes of working-class crowded along the fences. Since football was tremendously popular, including it in the newspaper was a way of marketing to a larger audience. The candidates' appearances on ESPN is striking because, on the eve of one of the most important elections in history, when campaigning and media coverage was at a frenzied pitch, the largest available television audience was watching football. Both candidates agreed to do the interviews because it gave them an opportunity to piggyback on the 12 million viewers tuned in to ESPN. I would offer as a comparison the second presidential debate, in which the network with the highest ratings, ABC, managed to wrangle 13.2 million viewers.

This unprecedented (never before has a candidate for president appeared on "Monday Night," let alone two) and somewhat uneasy blend of politics and sport was conceived in a spirit of pragmatism. The success of the program would suggest that, though the combination of the two is unusual, more unusual is the fact that "Monday Night" had not done it before, considering it has been on the air for 10 previous elections. If one measures the success of these interviews by the size of the audience they reached, then it is not hard to assume this will mark the beginning of a trend in eleventh-hour campaigning in the elections to come. And if Oriard can read the Civil War into newspaper coverage of a Harvard and Princeton game, it is no stretch of the imagination to see the epic struggle for the White House as analogous to the clash of the Steelers and the Redskins. But if Princeton is the South, unable to break the adamant defensive line of the North, it seems moot to assign a candidate to a particular team (and hopefully one would cringe at the possibility of the Redskins as representing Obama). Neither Washington nor Pennsylvania went McCain, so no matter who wins the game, Obama's team comes out on top.