Was the NBA too black for NBC?

A September 25, 2001 piece by Variety writer John Dempsey on the upcoming NBA television negotiations featured a stunning series of quotes:

“The overall ratings decline of the NBA is bad enough, but NBC is particularly concerned about the way the demographic has skewed over the past few years toward blacks.

The Peacock, for example, averaged a 2.9 rating for its regular-season games in 2000-01, but within that total, the black average was a 9.2 rating, a staggering 317% above the statistical norm. By contrast, the black audience for CBS’ Sunday-afternoon regular-season pro-football games last season was a 10.0 which, at 125%, is higher — but not eye-poppingly higher — than the overall average rating of 9.5.

The bottom-line problem with this disproportionate percentage of blacks is that most advertisers won’t pay a premium for them, even when they cluster in the hard-to-reach 18-to-34 category.“

Dempsey is not being racist, but instead realistic. Mainstream advertisers can live without the aid of African American consumers. More importantly, mainstream advertisers are loathe to market to a virtually all-black audience. The fact is, African Americans are of little value to many corporations. If all the black people in America stopped drinking Bud Light, Budweiser would not go out of business.

Just as in many other corners of America, in the advertising world, African Americans are grudgingly tolerated — a necessary evil.

And if Dick Ebersol decided against ponying up big money for a league with an unappealing demographic, then so be it.

Less shocking, but more bold than Dempsey’s quote was this statement:

“But Jerry Solomon, a TV sports consultant and former president of SFM Media, says, ‘White people are increasingly turned off’ by players with gangsta-rap images like Allen Iverson of the Philadelphia 76ers, who sports more tattoos than Ray Bradbury’s “Illustrated Man” and had to be admonished by Stern last season for recording an album filled with profane, derogatory lyrics.“

That statement is not false. However, there are exceptions — after all, nearly all the broadcasters for NBA games are white and over the age of 35. The majority of fans in NBA arenas are white. In fact, a sizable number of NBA fans, bloggers, and personalities in general are white. That being said, no matter how large the percentage of white fans the league has, that percentage is rather small when compared to all of white America. The exceptions are widely drowned out by people like Gary Thorne and Ken Levine.

It is going on six years since that article was written, and it is more obvious than ever that this issue has been eating at David Stern. The dress code, the musical acts at recent events, “NBA Cares”, and the no-tolerance rule have all been put into place to convince America that NBA players are not the violent, fan-punching brutes that they are perceived to be.

And granted, the perception has no connection to reality, and is popularized by uneducated closet racists who are then validated by self-hating bigots like Jason Whitlock and others of his ilk. But the source of perceptions no longer matters once it starts eating away at the only demographic that matters. When ‘white flight’ results in an all-black audience, the league loses its value. The smaller the percentage of African Americans in the NBA and its fan base, the better for business and the future of the league.