Abstract
ABSTRACT On September 22nd, 2017, President Trump described any National Football League (NFL) player who protested during the national anthem as a “son of a bitch” deserving to be fired. In response, during the broadcasts of the following games’ anthems, entire teams linked arms, knelt, or stayed in the locker room. This was a problem for the NFL’s multi-media entertainment brand. Normally a broadcast of a spectacle that associates the NFL with the U.S. military and that attaches a sense of patriotism to the association, this weekend’s performances of the national anthem instead became intertwined with player activist expression. This paper will explore how the NFL protected the portrayal of its media brand. Without its ability to shape how athletes represent the league through labor policy, the NFL had to recast the athletes’ activism into messages consistent with its brand in a post-hoc fashion. Through a close reading of the televised broadcasts of the various pregame actions that followed Trump’s comments, as well as accompanying online statements from NFL management on social media, this case reveals alternative methods deployed by the NFL brand to obscure and rewrite the intentions and impacts of athlete activist expression about racism and social justice.
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