Sports rights disputes restricting media access

Posted by Martin Stabe on 27 June 2007 at 09:08
Tags: Journalism

In the latest row between a sports league and journalists seeking to cover it comes from Down Under, where the Australian Football League is refusing to accredit the global news and photo agencies to cover Aussie Rules football.

As Philip M. Stone rightly argues in Follow the Media, there can be no doubt that this is part of an important trend. Stone congratulates the World Association of Newspapers for fighting the AFL ban and notes that the important thing here is to prevent a precident from being set that could be replicated by other leagues around the world.

But, he argues, “nothing is really going to happen until the world’s media as a whole stop accepting bad accreditation rules”.

No doubt, this will not be the last time something like this happens. Disputes between journalists and sports leagues will continue to occur as the leagues try to balance the lucrative exclusive live transmission rights packages they have with broadcasters and sports data services against other news organisations’ increasing ability to publish in real time from the field.

Recently, of course, an American journalist was barred from blogging from the press box at a college baseball game because the NCAA said this violated the exclusive live transmission rights that it had sold to a broadcaster. That dispute had echos of the dispute between British newspapers and the ICC over over-by-over cricket blogging. Similar restrictions on photographers have been attempted by the governing bodies of international football and rugby as well.

These are all predictable cases of disruptive new media technology coming into conflict with existing business models and legal structures that were designed for another age. The leagues’ attempts to protect their existing exclusive transmission deals, however, are clumsy and threaten journalists’ ability to report freely.

Tags: Journalism