[quote=CA renter]BTW, don’t think for a moment that basketball fans are the ones paying the bloated salaries of these athletes (and entertainers of any kind). It’s the consumers who buy the products that are being advertised during the games, and those who buy the products being advertised by the athletes, themselves. If athletes (and everyone in the entertainment industry) were dependent only on fans who bought their tickets or who paid for exclusive channels, they would make a tiny fraction of what they do under the current model. And don’t say we have a choice to not buy the advertised products. I’ve actually tried to list all the advertisers during games, to see how easy it would be to avoid them, and it would be almost impossible. Try it sometime.[/quote]

And many of the products we buy come from a consortium of companies owned by one or a small number of mega-corporations. Does anyone remember the Beatrice adds, where virtually every product imaginable is flashed on screen with the nice lady’s voice repeating “Beatrice.” Anti-trust doesn’t seem to appy. P&G owns a ton of brands at the grocery store, so while the array of goods is mind-boggling (most being things that people don’t really need) there are only a handful of owners of those brands and the decisions they make are hard to avoid (see thread on “Whole Foods”). So choices are limited in that regard.