Page 99 - Sport Culture and the Media

80 || SPORT, CULTURE AND THE MEDIA

cricket, alongside a host of other ‘players’ like Telstra (the partially privatized
national telecommunications company), Optus (whose major shareholder is
the British-based communications company Cable & Wireless), the publicly
funded ABC, Networks Seven (partially Murdoch-owned) and Ten (whose
largest shareholder is the Canadian CanWest company) and many other inter-
ested organizations, has seen a story of almost medieval intrigue unfold.
Notoriously, this epic narrative of communications and commerce involved, as
is discussed below, unarmed combat over pay TV rights to the key Australian
sport of rugby league that created a schism in the game from which it is yet to
recover. Under circumstances in which a new conservative federal government
was elected in 1996 on a platform that promised to reform the Australian
system of media regulation (especially rules that restrict foreign ownership and
prevent organizations having substantial holdings in both the print and the
electronic media), sports television has been a cauldron of competing policy
recipes and conflicting economic ingredients. Paul Sheehan, in surveying the
global media sports scene, sees the Australia context as particularly chaotic and
vulnerable to the domination of Rupert Murdoch:
Strategic chaos is the one area where Australia is ahead of America. There
has been a bloody insurrection against the old order financed by media
money (Murdoch and Super League). There has been a horrendously
expensive cable war (Murdoch/Foxtel v Optus) and there may be about
to be a virtual merging of media and sport product if Seven and the AFL
[Australian Football League] complete their mega deal [a free-to-air, cable,
radio, Internet and foreign rights agreement until 2011].
. . . In the biggest game of all, global TV sports, it is already game, set,
match, Murdoch. Thank you, players, thank you, ball boys.
(Sheehan 1998: 5)
In the ensuing shakedown of television ownership, control and regulation,
Murdoch and Packer have both done well by cooperating rather than com-
peting. Packer came to an accommodation with Murdoch over rugby league
and took a stake in Foxtel. He (in cooperation with Ten) then successfully
outbid Seven for the rights to Australian Rules Football. The failure of Seven’s
pay TV arm C7 (Eckersley and Benton 2002), the deep financial difficulties of
the regional provider Austar and the capitulation in 2002 of Optus to Foxtel in
the sharing of a common platform, ended significant pay TV competition
in Australia. For all the political rhetoric concerning new players entering the
media market, its two most powerful media barons retained and extended their
influence. Sheehan’s assessment of Murdoch’s inevitable triumph in TV sport is
not, however, universally shared – the Los Angeles Times in 1997, for example,
described Murdoch’s expensive attempt to control the sport of rugby league