An aspect you don’t touch on is that familiarity is really valuable. Literally nobody tends to like new play-by-play until they reach a point where their voice starts to become familiar, and announcers tend to hold their jobs for a very long time. So any change is going to come very slowly. Nobody is going to replace a well-liked, longtime play-by-play guy for a new, unfamiliar one unless they need to. So turnover in this industry is really, really slow.

And it’s not a skill you can just step into, you need to have experience at it in the minor-leagues or other sports. But minor-league gigs tend to not pay well-enough to be a full-time job, so you have people who split their time between multiple minor-league teams and other broadcast gigs. Minor league teams generally don’t have the luxury of trying different voices or letting an inexperienced commentator take time to learn the ropes. A lot of these guys have experience doing play-by-play for their university teams in one sport or another.

So to address that, you have to get right down to the roots: are sports broadcast journalism programs fair in their admissions? The journalism school I went to in Canada was probably about 65% white overall, but the sports broadcast journalism stream was almost exclusively white male, and I’d wager that’s overwhelmingly the largest applicant group for US colleges as well. And there’s all the complexity that is the debate over affirmative action in the US.

But then how are university sports programs choosing who gets the plum gigs of doing the college sports play-by-play, which are the best way to break into the industry? And is it fair to do anything other than a meritocracy at this point? And how do g-league and other minor-league teams handle choose their broadcast teams, and is it fair to require them to risk what precious little radio/TV viewership they have for experimenting with other voices? If so, who decides which g-league teams have to exercise this sort of affirmative action? And if you can manage all of that so that there’s an actual pool of diverse candidates with quality abilities and experience, how does the NBA tell networks that they need to make certain hiring choices, when ultimately the NBA works in service of the networks to allow the networks to create the product that the networks feel is going to work for their audience?

In short, I don’t think it’s a solvable problem, especially when a lot of people seem fine with the black colour-commentator as a workable solution. It’s certainly not solveable on a scale other than decades, and who knows what nba broadcasting is going to look like by then… you’ll probably be able to have your favorite ai personality do entirely believable custom play-by-play with the personality you want before that point, customized how you want. Sexy korean girlfriend voice who gives you whatever the popular advanced stat of the 2050s is in actual conversation, can give you parlay tips and place them for you, and spends time-outs telling you about her day (including a suspicious number of mentions of mountain dew)? Yeah, that’s probably closer in the future than a big change in the racial ratio of play-by-play announcers.

Relating the percentage of black players to announcers doesn’t really work because most announcers aren’t former players. Now color commentators is a little different, but announcers usually come from Communications/Journalism backgrounds.

It probably should be higher just in general based on general demographics, but like most things there’s a whole lot of factors that play a part, not just related to race.

Why does race matter? What’s wrong with more white people announcing games? There are more white people than black people in America. Obviously at almost every job, there will be more white people than any other race. Why do you want to divide everyone?

Find other pearls to clutch.

Please learn how to troll better, OP.

The website reddit dot come will definitely be receptive to this.

There definitely won’t be any immediate lashing out from white people about their potential biases.

Nope.

Why was this post deleted?

Most of the black people who commentate games are color commentators rather than play-by-play.

• Former players provide insight and knowledge over the game. That leads directly to color commentary, not play-by-play.

For some reason, the voices of Kevin Harlan, Mike Breen, and Marv Albert feel right to us.

• Because they are great at what they do. There are plenty of white play-by-play commentators that get hate.
  • see: Chip Caray, Joe Buck, Kate Scott, Doris Burke, Sean McDonough, Joe Tessitore, Steve Levy

But do we realize that when we imagine the “right voice for announcing” it’s basically always a white cis-man’s voice in our head? That’s what represents gravitas and dignity for us

• the voice of James Earl Jones represents gravitas and dignity
• the voice of Keith David represents gravitas and dignity
• people often seek out Idris Elba even for voice-only roles.
• even tho you probably don’t know their name, Phil LaMarr & Kevin Michael Richardson are some of the most-used voice actors in animation
• Done well people do not care about the skin color of a voice.

​

There are arguments to be made about representation in the media. This isn’t one of them.

Nah makes sense, most of the audience is white, need relatable ways of talking and connecting. It’s pure business.

It’s unlikely to see 2 black commentators as well, unless they were players. And even then, only certain kinds of players get the call. The media trained types. It’s a black league, and to make money the nba needs to make it as palatable as possible to non blacks, so everyone makes money.

To make this easier for everyone who’s interested in this question.

look at

https://www.statista.com/statistics/1098410/interest-level-nba-ethnicity/

If 54% of whites are not interested and THEY HAVE THE MOST MONEY, most efforts should be focused on making the people with money interested.

Aka white commentators, hyping up white players etc. So everyone makes more money.

Damn, just looked it up…you’re right.

We need to reduce the amount of black NBA players to restore league balance.

Alright well I’ll respond fairly since most people aren’t.

If we’re all willing to accept that the reason black people are disproportionately represented in the league because they’re simply better at basketball, is it unreasonable to say white people are disproportionately represented in announcing because they’re better at announcing?