Page 117 - Sport Culture and the Media

98 || SPORT, CULTURE AND THE MEDIA

regulatory policy . . . sport spectacle consumers will remain . . . easy targets for
those gradually filling in every moment of their attention’. In this case there is
an assumed public right to watch major sports events free and ‘live’ as part of
established national cultural heritage. This political determination, however,
was not entirely immune from economic influences. The long-delayed intro-
duction of pay TV in Australia has been attributed to the political influence of
free-to-air broadcasters (Cunningham 1992), while the anti-siphoning regime
may be seen as giving an unfair market advantage to the established free-to-air
television sector over the fledgling pay sector. Indeed, criticisms of anti-
competitive behaviour by government are not made only by pay TV broad-
casters: netball, the only women’s sport on the Australian list, quickly asked
to be removed from the list because, as the National Executive Director of
Australian Netball argued, ‘it has not taken into account the fact that we
have had to pay to get on free to air’ (Smith 1996: 69), and pay TV held out the
prospect, paradoxically, of being ‘free’ (even remunerable) for the sport and
‘chargeable’ for the viewer. As noted above, this has been a vain hope for most
sports that were not already dominant. Furthermore, the Australian political
apparatus did little more than watch from the sidelines while the sport of rugby
league (as discussed above) disintegrated in the mid-1990s as Australia’s two
most powerful media barons, Rupert Murdoch and Kerry Packer, fought over
free-to-air and pay TV rights to the sport.
Throughout the struggle (which ended in a truce in 1998 after two years of
hugely expensive court action, a massively inflated and unsustainable rise in
players’, coaches’ and referees’ salaries, and a disastrous split competition
in 1997) each side tried to win the mythological war, with the Packer camp
stressing class, loyalty, tradition, nationalism and ‘blokeish’ masculinity,
and the Murdoch camp promoting values of upward mobility, flexibility, pro-
gressive change, globalism and a more sophisticated, even glamorous appeal
(McKay and Rowe 1997). Broadcast and print journalists and presenters
charged with the responsibility of reporting these events with objectivity and
fairness tended, if employed by the contending parties, to report from behind
their own battlelines (Packer TV versus the Murdoch press, with the rival
Fairfax newspaper company revelling in the role of ‘neutral’ umpire and honest
broker). The tragi-comedy (Rowe 1997b) dragged on for several more years,
though, with the iconic South Sydney Club (the ‘Rabbitohs’) being first expelled
in a blaze of anti-Murdoch publicity from the new National Rugby League
competition on economic grounds, and then re-admitted after a court decision
that their treatment had been unfair (Moller 2002). News Corporation was
legally vindicated in 2003, but the ‘Rabbitohs’ club stayed in the league. The
‘Super League’ saga lost the various combattants a great deal of money – an
estimated AUS$600 million for News Corporation alone (Eckersley and Benton