News broke last week that former San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick’s national anthem protest was a primary reason behind the decline in NFL TV ratings last season. A J.D. Power poll found that 26% of viewers said that the anthem protest dissuaded them from watching NFL games.
However, the media pushed back against the headlines, claiming that a small percentage of a percentage actually cited that as their reason to turn off NFL games.
The Big Lead’s Jason Lisk (employed by USA Today) broke down the numbers in the poll and said that the media’s initial conclusions were flawed:
…it is more accurate to say that 3%–a small subset of respondents–said they watched fewer games because of anthem protests.
On the flip side, ProFootballTalk’s Mike Florio (employed by NBC) said the poll was flawed to start with, but ESPN misinterpreted it to protect themselves.
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