The Caitlin Clark effect: TV audiences

The viewership for WNBA games so far in the 2026 season -- up to the break for the World Cup -- is 3 times the number of viewers of non-Fever games. I asked ChatGPT for the figures, and here's the reply:

1. One important caveat: the 2026 season is still in progress, so these are season-to-date figures, not final-season numbers. Also, the WNBA's media measurement isn't perfectly uniform across platforms—Nielsen TV audiences and NBC/Peacock's Total Audience Delivery, for example, aren't identical methodologies.

   2026 viewership picture

   As of early August, the league was averaging about 776,000 viewers per nationally televised game, up roughly 15% year over year.

   But the distribution is extremely uneven:

   Category	Approx. average viewers
   WNBA games overall	~776K
   Games involving Indiana Fever	~1.2M
   Games not involving Indiana Fever	~400K–450K
   Fever premium vs. non-Fever	~3×

   The ~1.2M Fever figure and roughly 3× differential are consistent with the publicly reported league-wide comparison.

   The interesting part

   The Fever aren't simply responsible for a handful of outlier games. Their presence substantially changes the average audience of a typical nationally televised WNBA game.

   There have nevertheless been some very strong non-Fever audiences. For example, the Minnesota Lynx–Las Vegas Aces game on CBS averaged 1.62 million, which Sports Media Watch described as the largest audience of the season at that point for a game not involving the Fever.

   Other non-Fever games have also crossed the million mark, so "non-Fever" definitely doesn't mean "nobody is watching." But the typical non-Fever national audience is dramatically smaller.

   How big is the Fever effect?

   The contrast becomes particularly striking when you look at individual broadcasts:

   • Fever–Liberty, June 6: 2.557M on CBS.
   • Fever–Lynx, Aug. 2: 2.5M on ABC.
   • Fever–Dream, Aug. 16: 2.58M on ESPN.
   • Fever–Aces, July 12: 2.64M combined NBC/Peacock.
   • Fever–Sky, Aug. 23: 3.31M, the biggest WNBA regular-season audience since the league's inaugural weekend in 1997.

   And that's before mentioning the 1.07M Fever–Wings game on Prime Video, which was the largest WNBA Prime Video audience ever measured.

   So, in plain English

   I'd characterize the 2026 season so far as roughly:

   ~1.2 million viewers when the Fever are involved vs. ~0.4 million when they aren't.

   That's an enormous difference—roughly 800,000 incremental viewers per nationally measured game and around a 3× audience multiplier.

   The important qualification is that the exact non-Fever number depends on which networks/platforms and which date range you include. The ~400K–450K figure is therefore better treated as an estimate of the underlying nationally televised audience than as an official WNBA-published "non-Fever average."

 

Want to watch a good horror movie?

 Click here for a Democracy Now YouTube video (playing time 34:04) entitled "The Nerd Reich": Author Gil Duran on Big Tech Fascism, Peter Thiel, J.D. Vance & the War on Democracy." It's frightening.

The tech bros, led by Peter Thiel, following the ideas of Curtis Yarvin, founder of the Dark Enlightenment, an anti-democratic philosophical movement. They believe that democracy is a failed program -- and one of their horsemen is vice president J.D. Vance. 

 

The Moose That Roared

Click here for Paul Krugman's Substack article on August 24, 2026, entitled "The Moose That Roared."

It's a discussion of the Canada-U.S. trade war. I particularly like the graph entitled "Canada's Liberals are on track to victory," which shows estimated probability of Liberals and Conservatives winning the most seats in Canada's April 2025 federal election.

 Conservative support was around 90% when the unpopular Justin Trudeau resigned and Mark Carney became the Liberal leader. From there, although Conservative support steadily diminished, it was still around 60%, with Liberal support at 30% and 10% undecided -- until Trump made his inflammatory remarks about making Canada the 51st state. Overnight, the situation switched to 60/40 Liberal over Conservative, and support for Liberals continued to grow.

Until Trump opened his mouth and stuck his foot in it, the question Canadians were asking was: Will the Conservatives, under Pierre Poilievre, win a majority or just a simple plurality -- something like 45% Conservative, 35% Liberal, 20% NDP? Thank you, Donald Trump, for delivering the victory to Mark Carney's Liberals. 

Thank you, Patricia!

This is copy-and-pasted from Patricia Nilsen's (aka the world's best court reporter) Facebook page. Much appreciated, Patricia, and right back at you!

"This is a Ralph Sproxton appreciation post. I met Ralph on my 25th birthday in Ireland, when he was checking it out as a potential place to work. He did eventually work there after I left. Ralph also traveled the world as a reporter back in his day, working all over Asia as well. When I moved to Nashville, he reached out to me to see if I needed a scopist, as he was retiring from reporting. It remains my luckiest break as a freelancer to this day. The same way there are elite reporters, there are elite scopists, and Ralph simply is the best of the best. Having him as a part of my team allows me to take the most complex jobs and know that we are giving the attorneys the most well researched transcript. In the last month he and I have taken several depositions in an extremely difficult patent case with crazy terminology and foreign experts with accents, and then he hopped into a property trial with me this past week. The attorneys continue to request me on this patent case, but Ralph is the invisible man behind the scenes helping me get them their rough draft shortly after the proceedings end, as well as helping me spontaneously get to one of Jackson's basketball games in Smyrna that I thought I would in no universe be able to make. I could not handle the workload I handle without him. So even though this picture was taken in 2017 and was only probably the second time I've seen him in the past 20 years, he is undoubtedly one of the most important people in my life. And I already share him with one other reporter, so any of you looking for another scopist, keep looking!"