Page 116 - Sport Culture and the Media

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USA, with its much weaker commitment to non-commercial broadcasting,
the sports media market developed much earlier (Wenner 1989), although this
did not destroy network free-to-air sports television, which has survived and
prospered through a combination of anti-trust legislation, broadcast synergies
and the economic power of the networks deriving from television audiences
captured for mass advertising rather than targeted for subscription and pay-per-
view. There is, then, a complex intrication (that is, perplexing entanglement)
of the economic, the political and the cultural in the determination of how
televised sport is to be delivered and to whom.
In Australia, for example, the belated introduction of pay TV in 1995 enabled
the (then Labour) national government to avoid what was seen as the folly of
Britain’s Conservative Thatcher regime, which (as was noted above) had
allowed its political ally, Rupert Murdoch, to rescue his BSkyB satellite tele-
vision venture by ‘capturing’ English Premier League soccer (Goodwin 1998).
Australia embarked on what has been called ‘the bravest effort at an effective
anti-siphoning regime in the world’ (Grainger 1996: 25) by amending in 1994
(just before the arrival of pay TV) Section 115 of its Broadcasting Services Act
1992. This law allowed the relevant minister (then for Communication and the
Arts) to, in the words of the Act, ‘by notice published in the Gazette, specify
any event, or events of a kind, the televising of which, or the live televising of
which, should, in the opinion of the minister, be available free to the general
public’. Hence the Minister may list any event deemed to be of national
importance or cultural significance that is usually broadcast on free-to-air tele-
vision. The listed events exclusively involved sport, including horse and motor
racing, soccer, tennis, basketball and golf, and covered events staged both in
Australia and overseas. The provisions also allowed the minister to ‘de-list’
events if: ‘satisfied that the national broadcasters and the commercial television
broadcasting licensees have had a real opportunity to acquire, on a fair com-
mercial basis, the right to televise the event live [and] that none of those persons
has acquired that right within a reasonable time’.
This was a stronger regulatory regime than was devised in Britain, where the
Blair government, elected in 1997, undertook to review and tighten up the weak
anti-siphoning regulations of the Thatcher and Major regimes. The eventual
framework of listed events created a hierarchy with full protection for ‘A Level’
sports events and diminished rights to watch sports events on the ‘B’ list ‘live’
and in full. In the European Union, a combination of general exemption and
member state implementation has created a televisual patchwork of listed
sports events (Roche 2000: 178–81; Rowe 2002). In all such cases there is
direct intervention by the state in the workings of the sports television market,
ostensibly in the interests of promoting the rights of cultural citizenship. As
Law et al. (2002: 299–300) argue, without such ‘national as well as international