World Cup Broadcasting Rights Pay Off For ESPN, Univision

July 11, 2014 5:00 AM ET Listen to the Story Morning Edition

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Renee Montagne talks to John Ourand of the Sports Business Journal about the business of watching the World Cup. It's been a boon for ESPN and Univision even with limited advertising during the games.

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RENEE MONTAGNE, HOST:

And this Sunday, Germany and Argentina play the final game of the World Cup. If the last few weeks are any guide, a record number of Americans will be tuning in both on television and online. To hear more about the business of broadcasting soccer, we reached John Ourand, the media reporter at the Sports Business Journal. Good morning.

JOHN OURAND: Good morning Renee.

MONTAGNE: Now, ESPN and Univision have the exclusive rights in the U.S. to broadcast the World Cup. Univision has the Spanish-language rights - ESPN, the English language rights. And they must be very happy on this World Cup, given how popular it is.

OURAND: You know, I'm running out of superlatives to describe the television interest and the digital interest in these games. ESPN paid about $100 million for these games and the ones four years ago in South Africa. And Univision paid 325 million for them. And judging by the amount of people that are watching - 4 million, 5 million viewers for soccer in America - these games are really hitting the casual fan and bringing the casual fan in to watch more than ever before.

MONTAGNE: And people would be watching, not just on television, but also on what? - phones and tablets.

OURAND: For me, that's a big story of these games - is the amount of people that are streaming the games live via the Watch ESPN app or via Univision Sports app. ESPN says that if you aggregate the number of people that are watching online, you can add 10 percent to their TV viewership figures, which is a number that's really almost unheard of in the digital space.

MONTAGNE: Is that partly because a lot of the games are during the time when people can actually watch them - like here in California, the games at one o'clock - you can almost get away with a lunch-hour viewing.

OURAND: That's what you would think, and that's the way, historically, people have been streaming games during work hours. But now ESPN and Univision both say that on weekends, when presumably, people are in front of their TVs, they're not seeing much drop-off in terms of the number of streams coming in, which suggests to them that more people are streaming and becoming comfortable with streaming games.

MONTAGNE: One way broadcasters make money off events like this is selling advertising, and this is something interesting about the World Cup. The World Cup, unlike other big sporting events like the Olympics or the Super Bowl - there is not a constant stream of advertising breaks. So how have ESPN and Univision been making money?

OURAND: Well, they still sell advertising. They sell advertising in the pregame show and halftime show and the postgame show, but a lot of where ESPN and Univision are making money is because more people now are downloading the app. So they're able to bring in that bigger audience. More people are stuck on ESPN and watching the shows that precede it or follow it. Univision said in the first twenty days of the 2014 World Cup, they recorded the 20 most trafficked days in Univision Digital's history. So that - there's just a lot of activity and they're able to make a lot of money off that.

MONTAGNE: So the World Cup has done great for ESPN and Univision, but they're not going to have the next couple of World Cups.

OURAND: No. And that speaks to the popularity of the World Cup. Fox and Telemundo are going to carry the next two World Cups, one in Russia and one in Qatar. Fox and Telemundo ended up paying double in terms of a rights fee from what ESPN and Univision paid. So they see a real growth potential within the World Cup, which is almost amazing when you take a look at some of these numbers that are coming out.

MONTAGNE: What does this World Cup mean for the sport of soccer?

OURAND: I believe that the sport of soccer's doing very well in America. I believe that the success of the World Cup this year shows that the World Cup is a big event along the lines of the Olympics or along the lines of the NFL playoffs. In 2010, when the World Cup was in South Africa, ESPN set ratings records, but as soon as the event ended, the major league soccer in America - their TV ratings gained only slightly. I think it was less than five percent. Every four years, swimming on NBC at the Olympics brings more than 30 million people coming to watch it. But nobody ever suggests that swimming is going to be a big prime time show for a network. It's just an event that Americans like to rally round and cheer for their countrymen. And I do believe that soccer is on the Ascendancy in the U.S. But I think that has almost nothing to do with the interest in the World Cup.

MONTAGNE: John Ourand is a media reporter at Sports Business Journal. Thanks very much.

OURAND: Thanks Renee.

Copyright © 2014 NPR. All rights reserved. No quotes from the materials contained herein may be used in any media without attribution to NPR. This transcript is provided for personal, noncommercial use only, pursuant to our Terms of Use. Any other use requires NPR's prior permission. Visit our permissions page for further information.

NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by a contractor for NPR, and accuracy and availability may vary. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Please be aware that the authoritative record of NPR's programming is the audio.

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This Week In Politics: Sebelius, Civil Rights And Immigration

by NPR Staff

April 11, 2014 4:00 PM ET Listen to the Story All Things Considered

8 min 18 sec Playlist Download  

Regular political commentators, E.J. Dionne of The Washington Post and David Brooks of The New York Times, discuss Kathleen Sebelius' resignation, Jeb Bush's immigration comments and the civil rights anniversary.

Copyright © 2014 NPR. For personal, noncommercial use only. See Terms of Use. For other uses, prior permission required.

MELISSA BLOCK, HOST:

And now we turn to our Friday political commentators, E.J. Dionne of The Washington Post and David Brooks of the New York Times. Welcome back to you both.

DAVID BROOKS: Good to be here.

E.J. DIONNE: Good to be with you.

BLOCK: And David, we just heard President Obama say about the Sebelius resignation, the final score speaks for itself, talking about the 7.5 million or so people who signed up, ultimately, for health insurance. Is that how you see here legacy or how overshadowed is that by the botched rollout of healthcare.gov.

BROOKS: It's pretty overshadowed. She definitely leaves under a cloud. I've never been sure how much to blame her. There's a lot of passive-aggressive behavior in government. It's very hard for a cabinet secretary to really run their department. You got to be a super bulldog and she was not that. And they brought in this outside team to actually get some change going there.

I do think, you know, they did recover. I give them all the credit in the world about that. I think the one thing that's been the tragedy of the whole government - the website fiasco is that it's distracted attention from what really is the crucial and core issue with the health care, is what about costs. During the recession, the health care cost inflation was on the way down.

Now it's spiking back upward again. And so we - she and the whole success of Obamacare really depends on bending the cost curve, and all the attention has been taken off that and I think she's part of that problem.

BLOCK: E.J., could you make the case that Kathleen Sebelius really should have resigned when the launch was so badly bungled, take responsibility for that?

DIONNE: I think, actually, that would've made things worse at the time. I think the administration didn't want her to resign because it would be a kind of admission of failure. I think they're much better off that she left now after the good news was in and I'm not sure prices are spiking quite the way David said.

She's a very interesting person. I mean, when you go back, she lead a Democratic era in Kansas. That takes more doing than a Democratic era in Maryland or New York, for example. And she did fight hard and effectively to get the Affordable Care Act passed. There was the website disaster for which she bears some responsibility. I agree with David, I want to know someday exactly how this mess happened.

But she gets to go out war-weary, as Scott Horsley rightly said, but having the Affordable Care Act on a pretty good track so it was a good day for her to leave.

BLOCK: Well, we heard Kathleen Sebelius referring to President Obama's speech yesterday at the LBJ Library in Texas talking about the upcoming 50th anniversary of the Civil Rights Act and in the context of doing that, talking about Medicare, which her father helped to pass. President Obama said in that speech yesterday, the office of the presidency humbles you and he compared himself to a relay swimmer in the currents of history.

PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA: But the presidency also affords a unique opportunity to bend those currents by shaping our laws and by shaping our debates, by working within the confines of the world as it is, but also by reimagining the world as it should be.

BLOCK: And E.J., without specifically talking about the health care overhaul, that did seem to be the clear echo that the president was reaching for there.

DIONNE: Right. And I think it's fair enough to say that Medicare itself was passed as part of a long democratic effort to get some sort of national health insurance passed. Lyndon Johnson settled for a very expansive program for the elderly and Medicaid for the poor. And so this is an effort to finish that job. So I think that's legitimate.

There were a lot of comparisons of LBJ and President Obama and why can't he be the schmoozer and arm-twister that LBJ was, and I think one of the things we forget - we forget a lot of things - but one of them is that LBJ governed in a much more consensual time, when the parties were less polarized. There was much more diversity in each party.

And I was thinking a lot about LBJ this week. His favorite passage in the Bible was from Isaiah: Come let us reason together. That was actually possible in 1964. There really isn't much coming together to reason these days.

BLOCK: David Brooks, your thoughts on the LBJ legacy and in particular, the social safety net and where we are now.

BROOKS: Yeah, I'm really struck by the way the president emphasized the limits of the office and we imagine LBJ as this all-powerful president. But in fact, he was riding social movements, and some of the reflections on the Civil Rights Act Memorial - I think too much attention has been given to LBJ and not enough to the movement that created it. It's worth remembering the year before when Bayard Rustin and Philip Randolph wanted to have a little march on Washington. Most of the major civil rights groups were against it and they had to fight some real resistance to actually have that march, affected by events in Birmingham. And it was that march, and it was the social movement behind it, that allowed LBJ and the politicians to be the icing on the cake. I think it's very hard for a president to really start something that big unless there's a groundswell underneath it.

DIONNE: I just want to second David. I think the social movement was very important, and there hasn't been quite the same kind of social movement behind progressive change in this era.

BLOCK: A question about 2016 presidential politics, if I might. I know it's only 2014, but I'm going to go there. There does seem to be building Republican buzz around Jeb Bush, former governor of Florida, as a presidential contender, and he made some news this week. He was speaking at his father's presidential library in Texas, and he talked about illegal immigrants crossing the border to provide for their family or to put food on the table.

JEB BUSH: Yes, they broke the law, but it's not a felony. It's kind of a - it's an act of love. It's an act of commitment to your family.

BLOCK: David Brooks, are you hearing much enthusiasm for a Jeb Bush candidacy among Republicans?

BROOKS: Not among those earning under a couple million dollars a year. You know, among the donor class, among some of the richer, more moderate, frankly, Republicans there's an idyllic sense that he'd be a good candidate. Most people don't have that, and I assume he's not going to run because he's never shown the desire.

You've got to have this intense desire to want to traipse around Iowa and New Hampshire and all these states, put your family through it all. James Carville used to joke once you have the desire, it never goes away. It's like sex; nobody ever had sex once and said, OK, that was fine, I'm done with that.

(LAUGHTER)

BROOKS: Once they get the desire to run for president, they want to do it forever. But if they don't have the desire, they really don't run, and Jeb Bush has never shown that fire to run for office. So until I'm proven differently, I assume he's not going to be running for president.

BLOCK: E.J., top that.

DIONNE: I'm not going to top that, the Carville comment. But, you know, first of all good for Jeb Bush for speaking that way about immigrants. There was another Bush who spoke that way, and his name was George W., and he got elected, and he got elected because he got 40 percent of the Latino vote.

I think David may be right that Jeb isn't running, but he's making an awful lot of moves that suggest he would like to run, and he is filling a space left by the decline of Chris Christie. A lot of the people who are moving to Jeb, particularly in the donor class, were Christie people.

There is one thing he has, and I think it's a problem that it's the past, and running against Hillary Clinton, you know, time for a change, so let's have a Clinton-Bush race, again that is problematic. But he's got a kind of optimism when he speaks. I heard him speak about a month ago, and the Republican Party these days is very gloomy about the state of the country, about where we're going. And at least he speaks optimistically. So I think there are problems with a candidacy, but I think that optimism is something some Republican has to pick up on.

BLOCK: And Jeb Bush's mother, Barbara Bush, has now backed off her comment from last year, where she said we've had enough Bushes. She's now...

DIONNE: It's hard when you have to spin your mother's comments.

(LAUGHTER)

DIONNE: That's a real sort of barrier there.

BLOCK: I think we'll leave it there for today. Have a great weekend.

DIONNE: Great to be with you.

BROOKS: You, too.

BLOCK: E.J. Dionne of The Washington Post and Brookings Institution, and David Brooks of The New York Times.

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Austin Hosts Presidents Past And Present To Honor Civil Rights

by Don Gonyea

April 10, 2014 4:08 PM ET Listen to the Story All Things Considered

3 min 49 sec Playlist Download  

President Obama is in Austin, Texas, honoring the legacy of President Lyndon Johnson and the Civil Rights Act of 1964. He's one of four U.S. presidents to appear at a civil rights summit this week.

Copyright © 2014 NPR. For personal, noncommercial use only. See Terms of Use. For other uses, prior permission required.

MELISSA BLOCK, HOST:

President Obama honored the legacy of President Lyndon Johnson and the 1964 Civil Rights Act signed 50 years ago this summer at the LBJ Library in Austin, Texas, this afternoon. Obama's speech came at a three-day civil rights summit the library is hosting this week, which also featured remarks from Presidents Bill Clinton, Jimmy Carter, and George W. Bush.

NPR national political correspondent Don Gonyea was there for the speech and he joins me now. And Don, this was a full-throated burst of praise for Lyndon Johnson's legislative talents and the legacy of the act that he signed.

DON GONYEA, BYLINE: Absolutely. And a legacy that is not about Vietnam because that has been talked about for decades and decades and decades, that that failure on Lyndon Johnson's part. This is about the legislative record, civil rights and more. This speech was in praise of a man who, despite a Southern upbringing where he was steeped in segregation, who, once he became president, he immediately saw civil rights as a cause he needed to pursue.

President Obama talked about that meeting with President Johnson and his advisors right after President Kennedy had been killed and some were urging caution on civil rights. Give a listen.

PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA: And one particularly bold aide said he did not believe a president should spend his time and power on lost causes, however worthy they might be. To which it is said President Johnson replied, well, what the hell's the presidency for?

GONYEA: And he noted that President Johnson didn't stop there. What followed were landmark pieces of legislation on voting rights, fair housing and Medicare.

BLOCK: Right. And as you mentioned, Don, it was not hard to find echoes in the president's remarks, thinking back 50 years to Lyndon Johnson, echoes of the battles that he's fighting now and his own presidency.

GONYEA: Absolutely. And he didn't get into much detail on the battles he is facing, but he said that we can't just be nostalgic for a time when Congress and Washington and a movement could do big things, important things. The president talked about how we should be careful about how we look back. We can't assume that these games are won forever, for example.

And he said it's also worth noting that we can't just say, well, Dr. King and the civil rights movement and Johnson, these were giants so we can't accomplish something this big. He called for big dreams, but he also said that we can't assume that everything stays as it has been. Give a listen.

OBAMA: But we are here today because we know we cannot be complacent. For history travels not only forwards, history can travel backwards. History can travel sideways. And securing the gains this country has made requires the vigilance of its citizens.

BLOCK: Don, it's interesting to think of these two presidents, because President Obama has heard the criticism, why can't you just be more like LBJ? Why can't you bend lawmakers to your will, force things through Congress?

GONYEA: This is a conference and that has come up at virtually every panel in some form. Now, a lot of Johnson supporters here, but they cite the long experience Johnson had in the Congress and in the Senate, how he knew everybody in those chambers for having worked with them so long. That gives him an advantage in things like this.

His personality was also very different from President Obama's. Congress itself was very different. There were more moderates from each party that Johnson could reach out to and deal with. But again, it is kind of a lingering question, how difficult it is for a president to kind of impose his will on a Congress today.

BLOCK: That's NPR's Don Gonyea at the LBJ Library in Austin. Don, thanks very much.

GONYEA: Thank you.

Copyright © 2014 NPR. All rights reserved. No quotes from the materials contained herein may be used in any media without attribution to NPR. This transcript is provided for personal, noncommercial use only, pursuant to our Terms of Use. Any other use requires NPR's prior permission. Visit our permissions page for further information.

NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by a contractor for NPR, and accuracy and availability may vary. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Please be aware that the authoritative record of NPR's programming is the audio.

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Obama, Bush Mark Passage Of 1964 Civil Rights Act

by Don Gonyea

April 11, 2014 6:43 AM ET Listen to the Story Morning Edition

4 min 14 sec Playlist Download  

Barack Obama and George W. Bush, two U.S. presidents with little in common in terms of policy, personal style and politics, each paid tribute to the legacy of President Lyndon Johnson.

Copyright © 2014 NPR. For personal, noncommercial use only. See Terms of Use. For other uses, prior permission required.

DAVID GREENE, HOST:

Happy Friday to you. This is MORNING EDITION from NPR News. I'm David Greene. Two presidents with little in common in terms of policy, personal style, and politics each paid tribute to the legacy of President Lyndon Johnson yesterday. Barack Obama and George W. Bush were at the LBJ Library in Austin, Texas for a conference marking the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act.

On the topic at hand, their words were in complete agreement, but their speeches also contained hints as to how they would like their own legacies to be judged. NPR National Political Correspondent Don Gonyea reports.

DON GONYEA, BYLINE: When President Bush left office he pledged to keep a low profile and he has. He's taken up painting and rarely gives public speeches. Yesterday was an exception. His opening banter was light and included what he said was one of his favorite Lyndon Johnson quotes.

PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH: If one morning, he said, if I walked on the water across the Potomac River, the headline that afternoon would read "The President Cannot Swim."

(LAUGHTER)

GONYEA: The line speaks to a fellowship former presidents share - frustration when the public doesn't see their records the way they'd like. Then Bush got to the topic at hand.

BUSH: The real influence of a president is not found in the headlines. It can only be judged with time and at the distance of a half a century we know with complete certainty that America is a more just and generous country because LBJ set his mind and will to the cause of civil rights.

GONYEA: The former president praised LBJ for having the courage to step beyond his own roots in the segregated South and to challenge others from the region to see that the country needed to take Abraham Lincoln's words and actions to heart. Bush also noted Johnson's outreach to Republicans.

BUSH: He made one principle clear for all time. A segregated society can never be a successful society because the only success worth having is achieved together.

GONYEA: George W. Bush talked about education as an important component of civil rights. He said LBJ, once a teacher at a Hispanic school near the border with Mexico, understood that. He defended his No Child Left Behind program. He urged that achievement standards not be eroded and bemoaned too little progress in closing the reading gap between white and African-American students.

Still, much of Bush's speech echoed President Obama's remarks from earlier in the day. Where Bush, still relatively new as an ex-president, looked at how history judges leaders, President Obama - still struggling with a very divided Congress - looked at another aspect of LBJ's long career.

PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA: No one knew politics and no one loved legislating more than President Johnson. He was charming when he needed to be, ruthless when required.

GONYEA: There's been talk as to whether president needs to be more like Johnson in dealing with Congress. The White House says the times are different, the Congress is different. Others simply point out the very different backgrounds and personalities of Obama and Johnson. Yesterday the president described the cynicism that creeps into today's politics, saying it's the enemy of the kind of difficult achievement the Civil Rights Act represents.

OBAMA: Because of the Civil Rights Movement, because of the laws President Johnson signed, new doors of opportunity and education swung open for everybody - not all at once, but they swung open. Not just blacks and whites, but also women and Latinos; and Asians and Native Americans; and gay Americans, and Americans with a disability.

GONYEA: He then touched on his own personal connection as an African-American president.

OBAMA: They swung open for you, and they swung open for me. And that's why I'm standing here today.

(APPLAUSE)

OBAMA: Because of those efforts, because of that legacy.

GONYEA: President Obama and President Bush, each at the LBJ Presidential Library yesterday. Don Gonyea, NPR News, Austin, Texas.

Copyright © 2014 NPR. All rights reserved. No quotes from the materials contained herein may be used in any media without attribution to NPR. This transcript is provided for personal, noncommercial use only, pursuant to our Terms of Use. Any other use requires NPR's prior permission. Visit our permissions page for further information.

NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by a contractor for NPR, and accuracy and availability may vary. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Please be aware that the authoritative record of NPR's programming is the audio.

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Obama marks 50th anniversary of Civil Rights Act

President Barack Obama pauses while speaking at the LBJ Presidential Library, Thursday, April 10, 2014, in Austin, Texas, during the Civil Rights Summit to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the signing of the Civil Rights Act. (AP Photo/Carolyn Kaster)

Associated Press April 10, 2014 Comments SHARE

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