The Values of the Super Bowl

CBS has come under fire recently for its Super Bowl advertising policy.  This year, the station rejected an ad from ManCrunch.com, a gay dating site.  CBS does, however, plan to run another ad paid for by Focus on the Family which chronicles football player Tim Tebow’s mother’s decision to give birth to her child in spite of doctors’ misgivings.  CBS has deemed other “political” ads unsuitable in the past, such as a United Church of Christ ad in 2004 and a MoveOn.org commercial in the same year.  What is CBS’s rationale for accepting some advertisements and rejecting others?  One spokesperson explained:

We have for some time moderated our approach to advocacy submissions after it became apparent that our stance did not reflect public sentiment or industry norms on the issue…At CBS, our standards and practices process continues to adhere to a process that ensures all ads—on all sides of an issue—are appropriate for air.

With regard to the specific ManCrunch.com ad:

After reviewing the ad—which is entirely commercial in nature—our Standards and Practices department decided not to accept this particular spot. As always, we are open to working with the client on alternative submissions.

These statements explain little and raise even more questions.  It seems that it is entirely at the discretion of CBS which ads are “appropriate” and which ads are not, and therefore completely within the station’s capacity to promote some values at the expense of others.

However, I feel that the hand-wringing over “left-wing” vs “right-wing” favoritism, while important, is missing a larger point.  The Super Bowl telecast, by its very nature, already conveys powerful messages to the viewer about value systems.  That is, whatever the NFL, CBS and the advertising industry think is important is already on full display, regardless of what exact ads happen to grace the airwaves.

The core value of the Super Bowl is undoubtedly relentless consumerism.  The game is interrupted every few minutes to remind you, the consumer, to buy, buy, buy.  In this way it is not so different from any other televised sporting event; it’s just that the stakes are much higher.  The Super Bowl is the most-watched annual sporting event with around 100 million watching.   Buying an ad during the game can cost around two and a half million dollars for 30 seconds.  Many marketing strategies revolve around a marquee super bowl ad.  Hell, there’s a non-negligible amount of people that watch the Super Bowl purely to witness the new round of advertising campaigns.

Another undeniable feature of the Super Bowl is militarism.  The armed forces seem to be involved in every part of the game.  First we begin with the Air National Guard jet flyover.  “The flyover is just part of the military support being provided as the New Orleans Saints and Indianapolis Colts do battle during Super Bowl XLIV,” the Department of Defense website crows (note the football / war analogy, we’ll get back to that later).  The site also notes that the Armed Forces Color Guard from the Military District of Washington will also be involved in the opening ceremony.  And don’t forget who flipped the opening coin in last year’s super bowl — none other than United States Central Command General David Petraeus.  No telling if any features are planned for this year’s event, but in other prominent football games it is not unusual for television commentators to offer gratitude and respect to “the troops” or even have a segment on the subject.  Lastly, I would be remiss to deprive the reader of the observations of the late, great George Carlin regarding the inherent similarity of war and football.

The Super Bowl also features a healthy dose of patriotism.  Note the respect to the mother country that everyone within earshot is compelled to pay before the commencement of any American sporting event.  A more subtle form of patriotism is embedded in the game itself, according to Noam Chomsky:

For example… take the emphasis on professional sports.  It sounds harmless, but it really isn’t.  Professional sports are a way of building up jingoist fanaticism.  You’re supposed to cheer for your own team.  Just to mention something from personal experience, I remember very well myself when I was, I guess, a high school student — a sudden revelation, you know, when I asked myself, “Why am I cheering for my high school football team?”  I don’t know anybody on it; if I met anybody on it we’d probably hate each other; why do I care whether they win or some guy a couple blocks away wins? … This idea of cheering for your home team … [is] a way of building into people irrational submissiveness to power.  It’s a very dangerous thing.

Whether or not one agrees with Chomsky’s assessment, it should be clear that it is impossible for the Super Bowl, or any other mass media event for that matter, to avoid the conveyance of a certain value system to the viewer.  Whether or not CBS is attempting to avoid “political” content in showing one ad or another is irrelevant.  There are much more powerful, implicit messages that get transmitted from CBS headquarters, ones that some viewers may not even be aware they are absorbing.

On an unrelated note, if I don’t see the cybernetic sheep ad run during the Super Bowl commercials, I might throw a beer at the television in disappointment.