FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Contact:
Christopher Martin, associate professor, Department of Communications (319) 273-2788
Gwenne Culpepper, University Marketing and Public Relations, (319) 273-2761
CEDAR FALLS --Although the National Football League hypes the Super Bowl as the greatest one-day sporting event around, with worldwide audiences of nearly 1 billion, there is almost no data to support such claims, says Christopher Martin. Martin, an associate professor in communication studies at the University of Northern Iowa, recently researched the significance of the Super Bowl in the sports world.
"The audience size claims for the Super Bowl are more super-hype than reality," he said. "The NFL wants us to believe this is the biggest and the baddest of them all, not that it's only the third- or
fourth-most-watched sporting event in the country."
According to Martin and his research colleague Jimmie Reeves, assistant professor of mass communications at Texas Tech, to suggest that the Super Bowl is the top sporting event in the world is to ignore the counter-evidence of several other major sporting events.
For instance, the estimated audience for the soccer World Cup is more than 2 billion viewers worldwide for the single-day championship match. Cricket's World Cup has an estimated 2 billion viewers worldwide, but receives scant attention in the United States. The Rugby World Cup claimed 2.5 billion viewers for its 1995 broadcast from South Africa.
“In America, we tend to wear blinders when it comes to international sporting events,” Martin said. “We see the Super Bowl as the greatest thing, and ignore other sporting events that aren't important here but are important elsewhere -- sports like cricket and soccer.”
According to an NFL public relations official who spoke with Martin during the research, the figure for the Super Bowl's global audience is an estimate based on ratings company data from the United States, and the estimates of potential audiences in each of the 180 other nations and territories that carry the game. Yet Martin and Reeves were unable to find any verification of those numbers after last year's Super Bowl aired.
Martin and Reeves also noted that Super Bowl Sunday in the United States is Super Bowl
Monday for the bulk of the world's population, which would contribute to small audiences outside of the United States. With a kickoff time of approximately 6 p.m., Eastern Time Sunday, game time for European viewers ranges from midnight to 2 a.m., Monday. Kickoff is 7 a.m. Monday
in Beijing, 8 a.m. in Seoul, and 9 a.m. in Brisbane, Australia.
Continuing the research, Martin and Reeves investigated the complete archives of the CNN World Report (CNNWR), and determined that the Super Bowl is a relatively minor blip on the global sports scene.
In fact, the keywords "super" and "bowl" produced only one result – from 1989. That story was prepared by CNN's own staff and reported on riots that broke out in Miami when the city hosted the Super Bowl. The key word "football" produced 37 results, but only seven of those stories made reference to American football. The other 30 were about soccer.
The key words "world" and "cup" and "soccer" produced 18 results from 12 different countries.
“The NFL wants us to believe their hype, of course,” said Martin, explaining that the NFL is actively seeking international audiences, but having a difficult time doing so. “But it's just not true. Part of the purpose of the hype is to make us think that literally the whole planet is watching the broadcast, so we can't miss it. But the reality is that we can safely say at least 90 percent of the world population isn't watching the Super Bowl."”
Martin's and Reeves' research will appear in a forthcoming book, Sport, Image, and Memory in North American Society.
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FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Contact:
Willie Barney, instructor, Price Lab School, (319) 273-2754
Vicki Grimes, University Marketing and Public Relations, (319) 273-2761
CEDAR FALLS, Iowa — Representative Wayne Ford of Des Moines, the only minority member of the Iowa legislature, will speak on the topic “Can Iowa Be the Field of Dreams?,” at 7:15 p.m. Thursday, Jan. 25, in the Schindler Education Center. His address is free and open to the public.
Ford also will speak at 9:40 a.m. Friday, Jan. 26, to Malcolm Price Laboratory School students in grades 7 to 12, on Martin Luther King Jr., to kick-off the school's February Black History Month celebration. Following the assembly, Ford will meet with members of P.R.O.U.D. (People Respecting Our Unique Differences), the Price Lab student organization that brought him to the Cedar Valley.
Once voted “most likely not to succeed” by his classmates in an inner-city Washington, D.C., high school, Ford credits a football scholarship and subsequent move to Rochester Community College in Minnesota with turning him from the negative lifestyle he had been living. He continued on a football scholarship to Drake University, from which he graduated in 1974 with a bachelor of science in education degree. He has done graduate course work in the fields of public administration and social work.
He is head of his own consulting firm, based in Des Moines, Wayne Ford & Associates. The firm deals with minority employment facilitation, youth and gang intervention, life skills training for minority college athletes, and community empowerment.
Among his many accomplishments, Ford founded the Concerned Citizens for Minority Affairs, an umbrella organization of minority groups which stimulates minority political involvement; the Brown and Black Coalition Presidential Forum, the only minority presidential forum in America; as well as Urban Dreams, a United Way Agency that works to serve the needs of Des Moines inner-city residents.
For more information on his visit to the area, contact Willie Barney, an instructor at Price Lab School and P.R.O.U.D. advisor, at (319) 273-2754.
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