This article examines how broadcast television redefined professional basketball to target mass and quality audiences, highlighting implications for race and class.
This article examines how perceptions of basketball as the "sport of the seventies" altered broadcast television's approach to sports during the waning mass network era. Drawing on archival research and discourse analysis, I demonstrate that the television, sports, and advertising industries reimagined professional basketball to attract both mass and perceived quality audiences from 1970 to 1978. To do so, the National Basketball Association (NBA) and its network partners capitalized on shifting understandings of the sport. Analyzing how race and class factored into these recalibrations reveals how this TV-sport relationship is founded on the industrial pursuit of white audiences and the strategic transmission of mediated Blackness.
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Timothy J. Piper (2026) studied this question.
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