Sports, Controversy, and the Court of Public Opinion in the Digital Age

As a fan of the New England Patriots, I feel compelled to think about (if not to speak about) the current kerfuffle regarding improperly inflated footballs. From what I gather, it is the general consensus that the footballs that the Patriots were playing with were not properly inflated, and that this gives the team an unfair advantage (hence, the existence of official rules regarding the proper inflation of footballs). It is not known (or not agreed upon, anyway) who, if anyone, is responsible for the fact that the footballs were not properly inflated. If the coach or the quarterback were aware of this or caused it, then that would be a big problem for the team. If it was an equipment manager who was responsible for the misdeed, that would be a much smaller problem.

I am well aware of the way in which my fandom biases everything I might think or say on the matter. So it seems uninteresting to offer any opinion regarding the guilt of the parties involved. But the whole incident did cause me to reflect on the nature of controversies and how we, the public, judge whether or not someone is guilty based on information we received through the media. I'll offer three factors which play a role in this process. Note that none of these three factors has anything to do with determining what actually happened. That is, they should not matter, but they do.

1. Having something that is easy to make silly jokes about changes the tenor of the conversation about the controversy. In this case, we have the word "balls" and sentences describing how "balls are perfect". Even if this incident did involve a breach of rules which compromises the integrity of the game (which I would take to be a relatively serious thing), the fact that people keep saying "balls" keeps it from being very serious. Comedians have a field day with it, as does meme culture on the Internet, which tends to silly-fy everything. This got me thinking about news events in general and how the presence of any potentially silly element can change public perception of an issue. Let's say someone tried to assassinate a head of state and the assassin shot him/her in the leg. Now imagine that the assassin shot him/her in the ass. In the first case, the public's discussion would contain little if any humor. In the second case, it would probably contain a lot of humor, leading people to take the whole thing a bit less seriously. I have to wonder how the discussion around something as deadly serious as Eric Garner's homicide would have been different if his name was Ha Ha Clinton-Dix.

2. Breaking the rules matters more when it may have affected the outcome of something. Most people (Pats fan or not) seem to agree that the improper inflation of the footballs did not cause the Patriots to win the game in question (which the Pats won 45-7). I seem to recall reading somewhere that the improperly inflated footballs were swapped out for properly inflated ones at halftime. After halftime, the Pats continued to dominate the other team. The circumstances under which cheating takes place shouldn't matter when judging guilt, but in the court of public opinion, they clearly do. And it certainly matters when you discuss proper punishments. To punish the Patriots by banning them from the Super Bowl would seem a bit much, given the fact that no one argues that they would have achieved that goal regardless of the inflation status of the football. But imagine if the same controversy had occurred in the other conference final playoff game, which went into overtime and hinged on a handful of key plays. Any minor change to the catchability of a football could have easily swayed the outcome of that game. The tenor of the discussion, again, would be more serious if the circumstances were different.

3. We live in an era of amateur forensic detectives. This, to me, is the most interesting thing to reflect on, and to consider how it may apply not only to this incident, but to all kinds of controversies in the era of digital media. My hunch is the increase in the ease with which we can record things and spread them around the world instantly has given people the expectation that if something occurred, they should be able to see visual evidence of it. They should not have to rely on the word of others, or trust in larger organizations, to determine the truth. Consider other recent sports controversies: L.A. Clippers' racist owner Donald Sterling was caught on tape saying racist things; Ray Rice was caught on tape punching his fiance. The presence or absence of this kind of evidence does not determine whether or not someone did something wrong, nor does it necessarily determine whether the person will be punished either by their employer or by the law. It does, however, play a huge role in determining whether the public feels that you are guilty and, again, affects the tenor of the discussion. When visual evidence is absent, as is the case with the Patriots' purposely deflating footballs (at least as of 1/25/15), then people are less willing to assume guilt. This expectation of visual evidence has troubling consequences for victims of domestic violence and sexual assault. By their very nature, these acts occur in private and are not recorded easily (while virtually everything that takes place in public is recorded, whether we like it or not). Our waning trust in authorities coincides with our need (and our ability) to "see for ourselves". We need to at least see the evidence, even if we can't agree on how to interpret it.

We do love a good controversy, and there is clearly an agenda setting effect present in this case, whereby ESPN analysts spend lots of time discussing this aspect of the sport and the Internet follows (though I wonder about the backlash against ESPN's tendency to beat a dead horse, as seemed to happen when Tim Tebow became popular). So it is unlikely that we will stop talking about improperly inflated footballs until after the Super Bowl. But I'm interested to see how the tenor of the discussion plays out.

The Pros and Cons (mostly cons) of Satire

Last week in our news literacy class, we had a great, thought-provoking guest lecture by Dannagal Young. Young’s work is part of a growing body of research providing evidence of the benefits of watching satirical news programs such as The Daily Show.

So far, we have evidence suggesting that Daily Show viewers vote more than non-viewers, participate more in political campaigns, score higher on political knowledge, and consume more news from other news sources. This seems to answer the critics who worry that satirical news programs might lead to cynicism. But perhaps it doesn’t.

There is an assumption that cynicism would manifest itself as (or co-occur with) apathy. If The Daily Show made viewers cynical, then we wouldn’t expect them to be more civically engaged than non-viewers.

Cynicism or Being Principled?

I’d critique the assumption that cynicism’s connection to apathy is the real worry. I’d define and measure cynicism as negativity about something combined with an inability to respond to evidence. So, would a liberal person acknowledge evidence that, say, unions make countries or states less competitive, or would a conservative acknowledge evidence that gun control laws dramatically reduce injury and deaths. Would they just say "you're misinterpreting the evidence" or "you're not looking at the evidence in proper context" or "you're ignoring this other important piece of evidence". An inability to change one's view based on new evidence is, to me, a problem.

But other people (highly partisan people) might refer to this orientation toward new evidence as “principled”: you think that unions are good no matter what, military intervention is bad no matter what, corporate mergers are bad no matter what, government regulation is bad no matter what. So, are you being cynical or are you being principled? In either case, I suspect that exposure to certain kinds of satire news (The Daily Show, or Rush Limbaugh, who could be understood or defended as a satirist) increases the frequency and intensity of this orientation. Meanwhile, websites that present information on the same topics but do so through presenting evidence in a more-or-less straight-faced manner, like fivethirtyeight, might decrease the frequency or intensity of this orientation.

Dannagal Young pointed out, rightly, that getting people to really consider evidence that contradicted existing beliefs would be pretty hard. In some sense, we are “hard-wired” not to do such a thing. There’s plenty of evidence to suggest that the resistance to certain kinds of evidence is a matter of identity preservation. But it seems worth considering the extent to which media can reinforce this instinct to preserve one’s identity.

Angrier Candidates

Consider the difference between the rhetoric and reputation of two candidates: Bill Clinton vs. Elizabeth Warren. Or, if you’d prefer to compare conservatives: George W. Bush as a presidential candidate in 1999 vs. Ron Paul. In both cases, the former candidate runs a campaign based on a kind of compassionate rhetoric while the latter candidates run based on distrust and anger at established authorities. Which of these candidates’ rhetoric resonates with voters? I’d argue that the satire of Michael Moore and perhaps that of Jon Stewart cause viewers to favor rhetoric that is based on anger against the status quo rather than rhetoric of compassion. Is this necessarily bad? I’m not sure. But it certainly doesn’t move us any closer to a world in which an informed electorate is selecting a candidate based on evidence as to who might be the most effective candidate. It’s just survival of the angriest.

Increasing skepticism, but of whom?

As Young pointed out during her guest lecture, humor and satire have been used to prompt audiences to question authorities since the days of ancient Greece. But the humor also stops the audience from questioning the arguments made by the comedian (or to view the evidence differently). Humor prompts audiences to let their guard down and cultivate a kind of affinity for the comedian and his.her views. Humor is an effective way to stop people from questioning the authority of the comedian. It reduces people’s ability to counter-argue. Again, will this help people select the best candidate? I think it just makes people less likely to consider evidence that is inconsistent with the worldview implicitly endorsed by the satirist.  

Hard-wiring is not fate

So, can media challenge our existing worldviews by cultivating mindful consideration of the issues of the day? Last week, I hosted a symposium on media choice at Drexel University. One of our guest speakers, Talia Stroud, had an argument similar to Young’s about how we are “hard-wired” to defend our ideological in-group or “tribe”. We are predisposed to political or ideological polarization. The instinct to read other viewpoints and arguments as somehow biased and flawed reflect deep-seated, automatic way of acting and thinking. Stroud presented the results of years of research that, I thought, reflected a terrific persistence and a refusal to accept hard-wired predispositions as unchangeable. She presented the result of study after study in which she and her colleagues tried to reduce ideological polarization when people are exposed to viewpoints that differ from their own. Time and again, the interventions not only didn’t work, but often made people more polarized! Finally, she had seen evidence of reduced polarization when she presented news website users with a “respect” button alongside the ubiquitous “like” button. When people are prompted to respect a viewpoint other than their own along with the ability to endorse it through a comment or a “like”, some of them will do so. This subtle change to websites can affect discourse, and I think this change in discourse could potentially reduce ideological polarization.

Even if a large number of people weren’t ever oriented toward objectively considering evidence for or against a politically-charged topic (e.g., man-made climate change, effects of reducing unemployment benefits) in the past, are we to let this dictate what we’re capable of? Are we mistaking predispositions for unchangeable fate? Are we not to even explore the possibility of change? To do so would seem, well, cynical. And Stroud's research shows that there is already evidence that simple tweaks to the media choice environment cause changes in behavior and, perhaps, thinking, despite whatever hard-wiring we have.