I’ve been thinking a lot lately about why we have so many channels and daily talk/review shows on TV & Radio devoted to sports, while having practically zero devoted to science. Don’t get me wrong, I love me some good sports ball, but damn if I don’t love science more, and I think it’s fair to say I’m not alone. Here are some rather unscientific number comparisons looking at the sports industry in North America and science funding. 

2014 Revenue/Budget (via various budget reports & financial disclosures)
Sports League Revenue

MLB   $9,000,000,000.00
NFL   $9,200,000,000.00
NBA   $5,000,000,000.00
NHL   $3,700,000,000.00

Science Funding Agency Budgets
NSF   $7,626,000,000.00
NIH   $29,900,000,000.00
DOE   $28,400,000,000.00
NASA   $17,647,000,000.00
NSERC (Canada)  $1,000,000,000.00
CIHR (Canada)   $970,000,000.00

Assuming that the 4 major sport associations are getting almost all of their revenue from North American fans, then on average each citizen in North America spent $75.98 supporting their major sports team of choice in 2014. By comparison, each citizen in North America paid $241.60 supporting scientific research (again, acknowledging the massive over-simplification about this number because of corporate taxes & tax brackets, and also because I’m not taking into account all the government agencies that fund science. There’s a lot of wiggle room here). That’s more than 3x more coming out of each citizen’s pocket going towards science than sport, even by this extremely rough estimate. 

The easiest explanation is that people are obligated to pay taxes and fund science, while they choose to buy sports tickets & memorabilia, and thus there’s more money to be made in tailoring TV & Radio programming to things people are choosing to spend their money on. But what if we look at another way of measuring public interest in sports vs. science, specifically magazine subscriptions for popular science magazines & sports magazines?

Magazine Subscribers (via Wikipedia)
New Scientist: 150k
Discover Magazine: 580k
Popular Science: 1.3 million
National Geographic: 6.8 million (4 million US subscribers)

Sports Illustrated: 3 million
ESPN Magazine: 2.1 million

I have to admit, these numbers are a lot closer than I was anticipating, especially considering the market plunge that the magazine industry has been experiencing*. Clearly there’s a lot of public interest in science, with as many people doling out their money voluntarily for updates about science as for sports. 

So, why don’t we have (more) nightly shows dedicated to the science news of the day, or talk radio stations devoted entirely to science? Tradition? Unrealized market potential? I have no idea, but I can’t shake the feeling that the sports media model could (and should) be adapted & adopted for science.

*One possible explanation for why these magazine subscription numbers are so close is that sports news is so much more readily available in other media that fans don’t need to subscribe to magazines, while science news & reporting is less available making magazines a more important source of information. Chicken, egg, repeat.