"GOOOOOOALLL!" for the Press

By: Mark Fitzgerald This summer, most of humanity will hang breathless on the fate of World Cup match-ups like Cameroon vs. Portugal while we Americans chuckle at their baffling passion for an excruciatingly dull game, and wonder if there's anything in the morning papers about the condition of Cubs pitcher Kerry Woods' knee.

It's a sports-mad world, and increasingly a maddening sport world. The World Cup provides the latest example of how bullying sports autocrats try to shake down news organizations while dictating how journalists should do their jobs -- and how the press can successfully fight back.

As planning for the World Cup began in earnest last year, the international soccer governing body known as FIFA imposed some intolerable restrictions on press coverage of Germany 2006 matches. Newsrooms would be forbidden from posting on Web sites more than five photos of action from each half of the game -- and only two photos taken during overtime (or whatever they call it when regulation ends with one of those riveting nil-nil scores).

Oh, and one more thing -- until the final whistle is blown on the game, nothing can be published from inside or even around the stadium, FIFA decreed. The soccer gods apparently believe journalists would agree not to publish such breaking news as soccer-hooligan rioting or terrorist disruptions until those men in shorts who run around the field waving yellow cards have sorted everything out.

At first there was just some low-key back-and-forth about these ludicrous media rules between FIFA and the two press representatives, the Paris-based World Association of Newspapers (WAN) and the wire service Agence France-Presse (AFP). This is just about protecting the licensing rights of the radio and TV broadcasters, FIFA insisted. Nothing at all to do with newspapers.

But in March, when WAN and AFP went public with their fight against the restrictions, FIFA president Joseph S. Blatter immediately responded with some not-so-subtle threats against newspapers.

Print journalists, he wrote in an open letter to WAN, have never been charged a fee, but, gee, we spend "millions" to accommodate reporters and "we hope that we will be able to continue this practice in the future and not be forced to review this policy."

With its attempted intimidation, FIFA was working from an American playbook. Only a few weeks ago at a Hawaiian women's pro golf tournament, the LPGA refused to credential journalists who would not agree to its astonishing demands. The LPGA not only wanted to set severe limits on how news photos and articles could be republished after a tournament. It also wanted the right to use that material itself, at no charge, for its own commercial purposes.

The demands were particularly audacious considering that LPGA pros take their swings in front of shrinking TV and gallery audiences. But as San Antonio (Texas) Express-News Sports Editor Richard Oliver wrote at the time, it is part of a growing trend by pro sports to control how their games are reported.

"From the NFL to the NBA, including our beloved [San Antonio] Spurs, the evolution in recent years has been to marginalize the mainstream media by limiting access, filtering the news and carefully scripting the allowed contact," Oliver wrote.

The press is not helpless against this trend, though -- as the Associated Press quickly demonstrated. Fine, AP said, we just won't send any reporters or photographers to the tournament. Honolulu's two dailies, The Honolulu Advertiser and Star-Bulletin, also pulled their reporters and photographers, an action that must have been particularly chilling to the LPGA considering that both were tournament sponsors.

The LPGA quickly backed down, insisting it was all a misunderstanding. The NBA similarly retreated in 2000 when The New York Times stood up to its ludicrous contention that newspaper photos become pro basketball's "intellectual property" after they've been published once.

Big Sports needs reminding from time to time that it's the news media that keeps them big. After all, it wasn't all that long ago in the scheme of things that the NBA had to be content to base its teams in towns like Syracuse, N.Y., and Ft. Wayne, Ind., and pro football in Newark, N.J., and Canton, Ohio.

WAN and AFP did a great service not only for the billions of people around the world who actually care about the World Cup, but for the baseball nuts and football fanatics here in the US of A. That's why it was good to see the American Society of Newspaper Editors join the fight over the World Cup with an open letter from its president, Sacramento Bee Executive Editor Rick Rodriguez, plainly labeling the proposed restrictions for what they were: "an arbitrary hijacking of the editorial process."

Soccer lovers like to call it The Beautiful Game, but what FIFA tried to pull with the World Cup is nothing but the same old con game.