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PaperclipPerfector  9mo ago (text post)   18982 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 29, 2024

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I know nothing about gridiron football or Taylor Swift but it seems obvious that it was an ad. I can point to the fact that during the entire NFL season the entertainment news site Deadline (which doesn't do celebrity gossip) ran a weekly story basically about Taylor Swift sitting in the stands during the games. It had the same vibe as these SNL ad stories they do every weekend where they basically describe the opening monologue from SNL and two sketches as if they need to be covered and are part of the zeitgeist but it's just another crappy sketch from a show that hasn't been relevant in years. I mean it's likely a circle of different media companies (Taylor, NFL, entertainment media) feeding and trying to broaden all their fanbases. Like a car commercial inserted into a TV show that's handled clumsily. Even people that don't realize it's a commercial can recognize that something is inauthentic about it. Maybe there's nothing intentional on either Taylor (probably impossible to tell) or the NFL (I haven't seen any of the broadcasts with her) about this but the entertainment media is absolutely using this, stoking it, and reveling in it when it might not even exist as a thing if they didn't.

My thought was, at first, that it must be a huge spectacle style distraction for them to run a news story about it. But the consistency of the articles and lack of any substance made it obvious it was an ad. The complaints make sense to me "Why do you care they're cutting to Taylor three times a game?" Because it's an ad and ads are annoying. Ads recently have an ideological bent which makes conservatives especially wary of them. Conservatives, to some extent rightly, see weird astroturfed media shit all the time dedicated to hating/destroying them because the media is mostly their enemy. The fact that they decide to create a conspiracy because the astroturfed weirdness of this is obvious and they're just making the mistake of thinking that this is political because most of the weird astroturfed stuff from the NFL in the past years has been political is understandable. And the fact that conspiratorial complaints get platformed to discredit real complaints is just business as usual for the media.

This is probably a large part of it. The NFL has for a long time been trying to appeal more to women. Taylor Swift fans are mostly women. Thus, more Taylor Swift = more interest for the women in the audience. Of course, that doesn't excuse this from being part of the Culture War. Why is the NFL, whose audiences were long a bastion of couch-locked junk-food-eating cheap-beer-swilling men, concentrating on attracting women? The innocent explanation is they are (or were, when this started) an untapped audience. But that doesn't really hold up; neglecting your core audience to attract a new one when your core is that big and that dedicated doesn't really make sense. You don't see soap operas adding car chases to get men interested! So I think there's quite a bit of "women are a more acceptable audience" mixed in.

How does it neglect the core audience?

It's usually an active rejection rather than neglect. "Expanding the audience" is just what they say to the moneymen. In practice, it's always about rejecting an audience who don't deserve to have nice things. I used to be more charitable about this, but fool me once and twice and all that.

It doesn't. Until it does. See: Marvel and Star Wars for increasingly bad pandering and weaponization of victimhood against the toxically masculine audience when the old audience complains.

Of course, sports doesn't need writing so it may not lead to any difference in this case.

But I get why people in the culture war are suspicious.

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