Do commentators influence close fights?

They clearly do, people even cite them sometimes. Lederman's card is cited all the time.

 

They influence the unofficial judges.. the official judges should not be able to listen to the commentating at all.. I doubt it. They do influence the viewers obviously.. for a close fight I usually have a totally different opinion once I score it muted. But who knows... Any judge that gets influenced by that is a garbage judge..

 

They only influence the ignorant spectator. If you are live at the match you can't hear them and you have to judge for yourself until the match is over.
People under estimate the power that TV has over their thinking. Research Edward Bernays and Ivan Pavlov.
Some of you hate people you never even have contact with and you don't know why.

 

I think it sways even us hardcore fans SLIGHTLY even if mostly sub conscious... Sure we're able to zone in on bias and shrug most of it aside, but some of it definitely influences our perception. Enough to matter? Maybe not... But still has SOME influence. For that reason I chose to watch controversial fights on mute when scoring.

 

Commentators had Meldrick Taylor landing the more damaging blows through the whole fight until they noticed that Meldrick was beginning to resemble a gargoyle while Chavez only had a slight scratch on the bridge of his nose. They also are able to describe fights where the audience is cheering as boring and declare HW title fights as meaningless. Sometimes they totally ignore punches being landed by one fighter while celebrating all the punches missed and landed by the opponent. They also suffer from selective blindness when convenient by declaring fouls as legal blows. In fact, even when shown by replay that the blow is below the belt they will stubbornly insist that it was legal.

Can all that BS influence the audience? Sure it can. It convinced me that Horn was outpointing Pac until I watched the replay. It shouldn't swerve the judges though. Are any of the judges near enough to hear all that garbage is the question.

 

I'd say they don't as I regularly laugh at/disagree with a lot of the nonsense spouted by these 'experts' as they either inadvertently misread a fight due to incompetence or wilfully do so to push their network's agenda. Either way...

 

Major influence. Especially to casual minds and people who aren't consistent in the way they score fights, nor with the criteria.
The PacHorn fight exemplifies this. I didn't score properly but I had the impression Horn won. I take what Teddy Atlas says with a pinch of salt all the time, and Stephen A Smith is a casual.

 

And the results after the fight of so called Pacquiao fans making internet threats to Horn and is pregnant wife is a prime example of how commentators mouths are dangerous. If I was Horn I would sue guys like Atlas for mental and emotional pain and suffering just to make and example out of some of these talking heads and internet dummies.
If you really want to hurt someone hit them in the wallet ,not the face.

 

Yeah, they should be somewhat careful with the words they pick because tards always interpret it the worst possible way. No one tards quite like a *******, though - the most vicious I've ever encountered (I'm not a ******* contrary to what some people believe). Creatively vicious with their words over the internet.

 

Corbyn is a commie

 

Workers get paid a wage.

Nothing is free in life. Socialism fails. Corbyn sounds good but is an idealist and that is the problem.

 

If you don't check yourself while scoring then absolutely, any and everyone gets influenced by everything and doesn't even know it. It's too easy to get caught up in commentating and score based on what they say. Sometimes by the end of a round, or like 2 minutes in, I've already forgotten who was winning.

 

I'm not influenced by the commentators. If they dont think the same way I do, I dont think that I'm wrong, I think that they are idiots.

My biggest enemy when watching a fight (in terms of bias) is me myself. I can perfectly see how biased I can be when I really want a fighter to win, even though this situation doesnt happen very often because I usually dont care about who wins.

The commentators? most of them have no F clue about boxing, sometimes I even wonder if they are blind.