It’s bigger than the beer.
“Bud Light’s business has collapsed since April,” explains sports commentator Clay Travis in a recent column for Fox News, “plummeting 30% in consumption, the result of the company putting a trans influencer on a can to celebrate the NCAA’s March Madness basketball tournament.”
Travis calls it “the most crushing boycott of a large consumer product brand in modern history,” adding that Bud Light “might be finished as a popular beer.”
However, Travis also rebutted “many in the media” for “proclaiming Bud Light as a unicorn, the first of its kind conservative boycott that has obliterated decades of goodwill for a company.”
Not true, he argues: “The most consequential consumer boycott of the 21st century didn’t come from drinkers’ rejection of a beer, it came from sports, in particular the NBA, which has destroyed its brand with a large percentage of the American sporting public by embracing woke, political, far-left-wing messaging in its games.”
Travis informs that, since the 1998 NBA Finals, when superstar Michael Jordan sank a late jumper to win, there has been a 75 percent drop in viewership of the National Basketball Association’s championship. “Indeed,” he offers, “four of the five lowest-rated NBA Finals of the past 30 years have occurred in the past four years.”
Count me as one data point: I watched that great 1998 NBA Final and yet, today, I do not tune in. Why? I disagree with the NBA’s political bent and its repellent propaganda.
“More people were interested in watching” the Women’s NCAA Basketball Championship “in 2023,” reports Travis, “than the NBA Finals in 2020 and 2021.” (I saw that women’s championship game and declined both NBA Finals.)
But … why has the NBA’s nosedive in popularity not been news until now?
Mr. Travis says it’s because “the media loves the NBA embracing woke politics” and, therefore, “refused to share the data right in front of their eyes.”
Another case of so-called journalists deciding they like their readers and viewers less informed.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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