The Kansas City Royals may have won Major League Baseball’s World Series, but the World Series lost when it came to network news coverage of professional sports championships.
MRC’s analysis of the three evening news broadcasts shows that in 2015, ABC, CBS and NBC overwhelmingly favored coverage of the NFL Super Bowl, with 59 minutes of coverage (this includes all coverage up until the Super Bowl, but not the continuing coverage of the “Deflate Gate” scandal afterwards). The next-most-covered sports championship was soccer’s FIFA Women’s World Cup which received 31 minutes, more than twice that of the NBA Finals (7 minutes) and the World Series (6 minutes) combined.
The MLB World Series between the Kansas City Royals and the New York Mets received just six minutes, while the NHL’s Stanley Cup received no coverage at all.
