Executives at NBC Sports, CBS Sports, Fox Sports, and ESPN are all debating how their networks will handle player protests in the NFL. According to a report from Front Office Sports’s Michael McCarthy, says that all of the NFL’s TV partners are torn on what the right approach is.
Colin Kaepernick began kneeling during the National Anthem in 2016 to protest police brutality against minorities. During that season, all networks showed the pregame playing of the anthem as a news event.
Since the murder of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer, many NFL players have pointed to Kaepernick’s protest and the reaction of the League and team owners to say that the NFL’s goal was always to ignore and discredit the issue by focusing on the action instead of the message. In a powerful video, some of the NFL’s biggest stars demanded commissioner Roger Goodell acknowledge the league was wrong. He did and also said that he would not have a problem with players kneeling in 2020.
On a recent episode of her podcast Jemele Hill is Unbothered, Hill said that protesting racial injustice and kneeling during the playing of the national anthem before NFL games have become so linked that for it to happen again would be “too big to ignore.”
“They have to make the connection between the unrest and the protesting – and the fact that racism has become the No. 1 emphasis in America right now,” she said. “There is a heavy interest in seeing how athletes respond at this moment. George Floyd does not have had to have died a week before to make it newsworthy.”
An anonymous network executive told McCarthy that he expects networks will cover any protests as news events.
“I would say with Roger Goodell and the NFL itself saying they were wrong to stand in the way of silent protest, I believe that gives the networks the freedom to show kneeling if that takes place – and possibly interview the player later in the locker room,” the source said.
Michael McCarthy raises the possibility that the NFL may try to ban its TV partners from showing the protests or from showing individual players wearing particular messages calling out the NFL. Multiple PR/marketing executives told McCarthy that would be a mistake. Such action would likely create more stories that make the NFL look bad.
One PR executive pointed out that ratings for the three largest cable news networks in the United States were up across the board in May. That means there is interest in the protest. Allowing TV partners to show players kneeling could actually result in higher ratings.
