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Media
WNBA viewership hits high largely without Clark, but with caveats, Jon Lewis, Sports Media Watch, September 2025 0.50
| Where to find it | Sports Media Watch | |
| Belief Y | Caitlin Clark is the main reason WNBA attendance and television ratings rose sharply in 2024 and 2025. | Truth 0.50 |
Beliefs this work bears on
| # | Belief | Bears | Belief's truth |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Caitlin Clark is the main reason WNBA attendance and television ratings rose sharply in 2024 and 2025. What it shows: Lewis reports that the 2025 regular season averaged 969,000 viewers across ABC, ESPN, CBS and ION, the highest since 1998, in a year Clark played only 13 of the Fever's 45 games, while warning that Nielsen's switch to Big Data + Panel measurement could account for the 3 percent year-over-year rise. | weakens | 0.50 |
The beliefs that cite this work, which way it bears on each, and what it shows there. A work earns its place by what it changes; whether it deserved to is argued below.
Quality ArgumentsHow media is scored →
Reasons to agree that the work makes its case well
| # | Reason (pattern) | Truth | Conf | Link | Imp | Uniq | Score |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Nothing here yet. Starter patterns: Accurate, Well reasoned, Well made, Primary sources. | |||||||
Reasons to disagree
| # | Reason (pattern) | Truth | Conf | Link | Imp | Uniq | Score |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Nothing here yet. Starter patterns: Errors of fact, Weak reasoning, Poorly made, One-sided. | |||||||
Total agree 0.00 · total disagree 0.00 · quality score 0.50
Quality is craft: is the work accurate, well reasoned and well made? Reasons here are about the work itself, never about whether the belief it speaks to is true.
Impact Arguments
Reasons to agree that the work has shaped the debate
| # | Reason (pattern) | Truth | Conf | Link | Imp | Uniq | Score |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Nothing here yet. Starter patterns: Widely cited, Changed minds on record, Reached a broad audience, Shaped policy. | |||||||
Reasons to disagree
| # | Reason (pattern) | Truth | Conf | Link | Imp | Uniq | Score |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Nothing here yet. Starter patterns: Rarely cited, Preaching to the converted, Small audience, No trace in policy. | |||||||
Total agree 0.00 · total disagree 0.00 · impact score 0.50
Impact is reach: has the work changed what people think, say or do about the topic? Reasons here are about influence, never about quality; a bad book can be influential.
Check table
| 1 | The work | WNBA viewership hits high largely without Clark, but with caveats, Jon Lewis, Sports Media Watch, September 2025 |
| 2 | Type | Article |
| 3 | What it claims about the belief | Lewis reports that the 2025 regular season averaged 969,000 viewers across ABC, ESPN, CBS and ION, the highest since 1998, in a year Clark played only 13 of the Fever's 45 games, while warning that Nielsen's switch to Big Data + Panel measurement could account for the 3 percent year-over-year rise. |
| 4 | Computed quality | 0.50 from 0 reason(s) to agree and 0 to disagree |
| 5 | Computed impact | 0.50 from 0 reason(s) to agree and 0 to disagree |
| 6 | Bottom line, typed by the author after the tables above | Deserves heavy weight: it is the most direct evidence that the league's audience held without Clark, and it is honest about the measurement change that makes the comparison inexact. |
The five steps, answered from the pages above. Only the one-sentence bridge and the bottom line are typed.
DefinitionsThe full explanation →
- Quality: this page's truth score. Impact: the second score below. Y's page shows both on the work's row and multiplies them by Bears (a Type Media linkage page) and Imp (the work's importance page).
- Truth of what the work says is not scored here: each finding it reports gets its own page in the Evidence Ledger.
Where This Page Is Used
| Page | Table | As | Its truth |
|---|---|---|---|
| Caitlin Clark is the main reason WNBA attendance and television ratings rose sharply in 2024 and 2025. | media | a row | 0.50 |
Every page that reads this one. One claim, one home, every use visible.
Scoring EngineTruth scores →
| Quantity | Value | How |
|---|---|---|
| Reasons to agree, total | 0.00 | sum of the agree side |
| Reasons to disagree, total | 0.00 | sum of the disagree side |
| Quality score | 0.50 | (agree + weight x starting point) / (agree + disagree + weight), starting point 0.50, weight 1.00 |
| Impact score | 0.50 | the same rule applied to the impact table |
| ReasonRank | 0.0001 | how much of the site depends on this page: rank 1712 of 2173. The share of a walk that starts at the 162 beliefs and steps to the pages they read, with a 0.85 chance of stepping on each time |
| Work value | 0.0001 | ReasonRank x (1 - confidence): how much settling this page would be worth to everything above it |
| Completeness | no | at least one scored reason on each side (an importance page: at least one interest; an interest page: both readings filled) |
Cite this page WNBA viewership hits high largely without Clark, but with caveats, Jon Lewis, Sports Media Watch, September 2025. Idea Stock Exchange, media page wnba-viewership-hits-high, truth 0.50, confidence 0%, revision 42c8344 of 2026-10-04. The revision is what makes this quotable: these numbers move as the argument is worked on, and rebuilding that revision reproduces them exactly.
Every number on this page as data: wnba-viewership-hits-high.json. Constants: K = 1 · UNARG = 0.5 · DEFLINK = 1 · DEFIMP = 0.5 · DEFUNIQ = 1. A reason placed under a conclusion is presumed relevant until a linkage page says otherwise; the burden is on the challenger. The neutral start for importance, the wiki's own rule.
Every value here is computed from the tables above at build time. Nothing is typed.