All the Kings Horses and All the King’s Men Finally Made the International Rugby Board See Sense Again

Philip M. Stone September 10, 2007

The ball was deep in International Rugby Board (IRB) territory. The opponents, the world’s news media led by the international news agencies, were in hot pursuit. Finally the referees, France, the EU, and sponsors, called for a scrimmage – a banging of heads. Suddenly the IRB’s forward line collapsed, out came the offer which the media ran with for the winning try. Or put the American way, the bad guys blinked first.

Now for those of you who have little understanding of the game of rugby here’s a rough translation of the above paragraph. The world’s media and the International Rugby Board have been locked in confrontational negotiations for several months over coverage restrictions for the Rugby World Cup that has now started in France. The IRB wanted to impose severe restrictions on what the world’s media place not only on their own Internet sites but also on what third party sites can publish that buy agency coverage. There had been some progress in recent talks, but not enough for the media, so two days before the event began they imposed a coverage boycott. Alarm bells rang at French government ministries and at the EU and with sponsors and they urged further negotiations, and just two hours before the first game the IRB backed down on how many pictures could be shown on web sites and the confrontation was over. For now.

The basic view is that the media may have won this particular battle but the war is still very much on with rights owners the world over who want to squeeze every last dollar/pound/euro/yen etc. for their digital media offerings and they don’t want the world’s media competing. The IRB is not the first to try this – FIFA tried it for last year’s World Cup but capitulated before any boycott took effect. In the US the National Football League has imposed stricter rules for this year’s upcoming season.

In this case the IRB pounded its chest tough, but the media flexed its collective muscles, too, and acted as one and that pressure saw the IRB back down at the last moment. But there will be further fights before this war ends.

What is amazing in all this is how one-dimensional rights owners have become, merely seeing currency signs in their eyes as they think up ways of stopping media competition for their own digital offerings and those rights they have sold directly to other organizations. Do not the rights holders understand how much they depend on the media for normal coverage of their events that is worth so much in free advertising that is incalculable?

But the IRB didn’t see it that way so the world’s media had to show what it could do. The England rugby team, for instance, made an emotional stop on its journey to the Cup by stopping at the World War I killing fields of northern France where so many young British soldiers lost their lives in the trenches of World War I. The British take their war dead very seriously and such an event would definitely merit page one picture coverage in, say, The Times of London. And indeed that newspaper’s photographer was on his way when he got a phone call telling him to turn back to the hotel. The boycott was on and The Times would not be promoting the rugby cup via the team’s visit to war graves on page 1.

And then there was the nightmare for Visa, a major Cup sponsor.  What must surely be the ultimate nightmare for flacks is to host an event and the press doesn’t show up. So it went for Visa, it has five former rugby stars on the payroll who are basically ambassadors for the credit card company and so it was a natural to hold a news conference for media interviews. No doubt Visa would show up in many of the picture backdrops. But most of the press didn’t show up. Disaster!

The word was finally getting through to rugby officials that they had a tiger by the tail, yet their public words were that they were finished negotiating and they were not about to be bullied by the media (and we thought it was the media being bullied by the IRB).

But behind the scene French officials were furious that it had come down to this. All those pictures of France that were supposed to be seen around the world just weren’t there. Before the IRB capitulation, French Sports Minister Roselyne Bachelot-Narquin had called IRB chief executive Mike Miller “to raise his awareness of the need to resume dialogue quickly in order not to spoil that great sports party that is the rugby World Cup," the French sports ministry said in a statement.

The French foreign ministry was also not happy. “It is important for the rugby World Cup to benefit from the media coverage it deserves," a spokeswoman told reporters. "We hope that an agreement satisfactory to all sides can be found." It would have been great to have been the fly on the wall to hear what French officials said directly and privately to the Cup officials

At the EU, where a new “Televsion Without Frontiers” directive comes into effect around the end of the year that actually would stop such nonsense in its tracks by giving news media proper coverage rights, EU Information and Media Commissioner Viviane Reding called on the two sides to go back to the bargaining table.

And it’s no wonder that Visa said after an agreement had been struck that the company was “pleased that they have done up a speedy solution.” Can you just imagine what the Visa folks must have been saying to the IRB when basically no-one showed up at their news conference? That’s not what they pay the IRB big bucks for!

Perhaps one of the extraordinary things about the 40-member media coalition is that not only did it stick together – Reuters, AFP, AP, Getty, and EPA leading the agency contingent – but support seemed to gain as the witching hour approached. Even L’Equipe, the major French sports daily, announced its solidarity and said while it would have textual reports of the games there would be no pictures. And the French journalists union gave its support, too.

The compromise at the end of the day saw the IRB back away from its imposition that no more than 20 pictures could be used online for each half of the matches and the number was increased to 200 for a game. That was a climb down because the IRB had feared that too many still pictures on a web site could be used to compile video streaming. The media agreed they would not do that.

Negotiations are not yet over, because the TV agencies are still fighting a three-minute daily rule. The two sides are meeting Monday to "discuss ways of identifying improved opportunities beyond the existing three-minute limit per day". The results of that negotiation will be watched by media around the world since it has become a major point for many other sports, too.

Before the compromise was reached Rugby World Cup Limited (RWCL) issued a fascinating press release damning the “misinformation campaign” rendered by the media on what was really going on. As part of the news release it listed all of the things it had already backed down on because the media got tough and as one reads those items you then begin to understand why the media was up in arms, and fought as it did, and one has to question rugby officials why such draconian rules were even put on the table in the first place.

The news release said, “RWCL has:

* Withdrawn the condition that requested media organizations get permission from RWCL before sales of photographs could be made to the public.

* Withdrawn the condition that requested RWCL would have the right to use any photograph taken at the tournament for non-commercial, promotional purposes.

* Withdrawn the condition that did not allow overlay of text on photographs.

* Re-written the process by which breaches of the terms and conditions and tournament media rules are dealt with.

* Confirmed that mobile users can access text and photos on websites using their handsets and that sports text alerts can be sent to the handsets during matches.

* Increased by 400% the amount of photographs that can be published live during a match on websites. Media organizations can now publish 40 photographs per match. There is unlimited use of photographs before and after matches. This does not affect the amount of photographs a photographic agency can send to its client. The 40 photographs per match (plus extra for any extra-time period) only applies to public facing websites.”

Some elements of the media saw all of this as a “freedom of the press” issue but as ftm has argued many times before, it is not. It is a commercial issue – the media above anything else are businesses. They need to have the widest rights possible so they can make money out of what they do. There are special web sites set up especially for the Cup that will pay handsomely to use agency material widely. If there were restrictions on what the media could supply to its clients then there could well be limits on what the media clients would be willing to pay their agency suppliers. And as commercial enterprises they used the weapons at their disposal to win the day.

But “freedom of the press” plays both ways and in the so-called Western world we subscribe to a “free responsible press”.  With that in mind, how many editors out there support The Times’ and other British newspapers non-picture coverage of the English rugby team at the Somme paying tribute to fallen war dead? For all the problems the media had with rugby officials, was it really right to deprive the British public seeing still pictures in print of one of their national sporting teams paying homage to their war dead? (The Rugby Football Union web site did have picture coverage).

Yet again another definition of “freedom of the press” -- the right not to cover an event even if there were no restrictions. But was that the decision of a responsible press? Did the media in that case serve its public?

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