NCAA should have stopped when ahead
OMAHA, Neb. – Recently there was another hubbub about the web.
Another battle, seemingly, between those who control the information and those who want to disseminate it.
But actually it’s a battle over the essence of the Internet. Is it a broadcast medium or a print medium? Or is it both?
In this brouhaha, how you define the Net defines the conflict.
A quick, simple summary: A reporter for the Louisville Courier-Journal, Brian Bennett, was posting a live blog during the Cardinals’ Super Regional game. Included in the blog posts was play-by-play of game action. The NCAA, having been told of Bennett’s blog, ordered him to stop. He wouldn’t. The NCAA, adamant Bennett was violating the conditions of his media pass, ejected him from the press box and took the pass.
The NCAA’s argument is the organization owns the broadcast rights to events, it sells them to the networks – in this case ESPN – and any real-time play-by-play could devalue those rights.
Scott Bearby, associate general counsel for the NCAA, told the New York Times the dispute “doesn’t really have a First Amendment angle to it” and the NCAA had to protect contracts established with television networks and its Internet providers.
“It’s a logical extension of the rights that have been around for years and years,” Bearby told the Times.
That makes sense.
If you define the Internet as a broadcast venue. And, because the posts, whether they are written or spoken words or images, are almost instantaneously available throughout the world, such a definition fits. At least it fits the NCAA purposes.
When an organization sells the broadcast rights to a network or station, other networks or stations are usually allowed to tape highlights of the game but they can’t run out and show them while the game is going on. It’s a trade-off for getting in the building and standing on the baseline shooting video.
A long-standing trade-off that’s been litigated and decided by the courts in the favor of the rights’ holders.
So the NCAA feels it has legs to stand on, though it remains to be seen if the courts agree. The Courier-Journal, which at its heart remains a print organization, is still contemplating a lawsuit on First Amendment grounds, sacred ground for newspapers, but a lawsuit may be Quixotic.
“The law is clear that there is no First Amendment right of access to sporting events, and leagues have the right to impose these kinds of restrictions as conditions of access to the press box,” veteran New York attorney Jeffrey Mishkin, who successfully represented the PGA Tour when it wanted to keep control of real-time scoring, told the Courier-Journal.
There may be an opening, however.
The NCAA is not stopping with press box bloggers.
Bearby told the New York Times the NCAA is within its rights to revoke event credentials from media outlets that post any Internet accounts of NCAA events, even if done by other employees outside the press box or if they are watching on television at the office.
Once again the organization can’t stop itself. It happens when it comes to eligibility rules, recruiting rules, any rules the NCAA writes. Have you ever seen its books? They all are heavy enough to give Kevin Durant a hernia.
Instead of stopping in the arena it controls, it is trying to stretch into the newsroom as well. That’s a place where the First Amendment actually is well established – and still respected. Such overreaching quite possibly could force a court to find in favor of news organizations.
Because if the courts don’t, where does the NCAA’s control stop?
If the NCAA – or any other organization that holds events in publicly financed venues – can limit when the news media can disseminate information, what will stop it from limiting what can be disseminated? By saying notes about the fans, the weather, the food are OK but game action isn’t (and that’s been the organization’s stand), isn’t that what the NCAA is doing now?
The next step: Only positive stories and video will be allowed. No game accounts that shed negative light on the kids – or the NCAA.