“Stick to Sports”: Evidence from Sports Media on the Origins and Consequences of Newly Politicized Attitudes

ABSTRACT

Politics now intrudes into many aspects of social life. How does this occur and what are its consequences? We study the sources of politicized attitudes toward ESPN, a sports media outlet involved in controversies where politics and sports intersect, and consider their implications for sports news use. We assess two potential contributors to politicized attitudes toward ESPN: exposure to political media criticizing the network and encounters with its sports coverage. In survey-linked web browsing data and a survey experiment, exposure to political media led the public to evaluate ESPN in political terms, showing messages from political elites can affect opinions of entertainment media. In contrast, exposure to ESPN’s typical sports coverage failed to alter views of the network. We also find these newly politicized attitudes do not reduce use of ESPN, demonstrating the intrusion of politics into a seemingly apolitical setting may not displace other considerations underlying behavior.

KEYWORDS:

• Politicization
• sports
• selective exposure
• elite influence

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Supplementary Material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed on the publisher’s website at https://doi.org/10.1080/10584609.2022.2039979.

Correction Statement

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

1. The two authors separately evaluated each reference to ESPN in the transcripts to determine if it invoked political considerations when discussing the sports network. We count only those cases in which we agreed. Appendix B.1 discusses this process in detail.

2. In this content analysis, and a similar one used to select the treatments in Surveys 2 and 3, we consider an article political if three or more coders responded “maybe” or “yes” to the perceived political question. See Appendix B for more information.

3. See Appendix A for the demographics of each survey.

4. We view this measure as capturing overall sentiment toward the outlet. While we cannot perform this analysis for ESPN, as only the trustworthiness measure was included on the survey, in Appendix E1 we find a strong correlation (0.88) between trustworthiness and feeling thermometer ratings for news outlets where both measures are available.

5. While Table 1 displays unadjusted estimates, these partisan differences remain similar when conditioning on demographics and interest in sports (see Appendix D).

6. Appendix A contains more information about the web tracking data collection procedure.

7. Sample sizes are smaller than Table 1 as not all respondents visited political websites.

8. Appendix Table E3 displays these interactive model results.

9. In Appendix Table E2 we report similar findings using different operationalizations of political and sports media exposure.

10. In Appendix E we see similar patterns when only considering 2016 ESPN exposure.

11. We select several articles for each treatment category and randomly assign respondents to see one of them, ensuring the effect of a treatment category does not hinge on idiosyncratic features of a single article (see Appendix C for information on these articles).

12. A balance test in Appendix Table A3 reveals no significant covariate imbalance between those randomly assigned to different treatment conditions.

13. We formally test for heterogeneity by party with an interaction model in Appendix E and do not see statistically significant differences in treatment effects by party.

14. To measure sports interest, respondents indicated their primary interest among nine nonpolitical areas of online news. These were: Arts and Culture, Business, Entertainment News, Health and Wellness, Science, Sports, Style, Tech News and Travel.

15. Appendix Figure F1 shows results are similar when we separate out each choice task based on which political media source was available as an alternative.

16. There are some outliers (e.g., the most frequent visitor saw an average of over 60 pages on ESPN per day). To pull in these outliers, we re-code extreme values that exceed the 97.5 percentile of the visit distribution to the value at that point (5.2).

17. These other websites are seven high-traffic alternatives to ESPN: Yahoo Sports, Bleacher Report, CBS Sports, NBC Sports, SB Nation, Sports Illustrated and Fox Sports.

18. Measured browsing activity of the long-term panelists declined after March 2018 due to increased noncompliance with the toolbar, so we omit consideration of later months.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Erik Peterson

Erik Peterson is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at Texas A&M University

Manuela Muñoz

Manuela Muñoz is a graduate student in Political Science at Texas A&M University. The authors thank Allison Archer, Johanna Dunaway and Maxwell Allamong for their comments and Texas A&M’s College of Liberal Arts, the Bill Lane Center for the American West, the Hoover Institution, and the Knight Foundation for financial support.