There have been two national news stories this week involving sports. One is the death of WWE wrestler Chris Benoit, his wife and son in an apparent double-murder/suicide. The other is the House hearings into the NFL’s disability plans for retired football players. And although both those stories are getting airtime, Andrew Tyndall keenly observes that you’re hard-pressed to find the video versions of those stories online:
The explanation for their presence on television but their absence as video has nothing to do with journalism, and everything to do with copyright. The rights to use sports footage do not transfer from one medium to another so the footage at a correspondent’s disposal to cover a sports story varies medium by medium. The same is true for journalism about show business.
Consider these examples: since the start of May, there have been 18 news stories that aired on ABC World News that have not been posted online; fully half of those (six sports stories, three show business stories) have been on subjects where video rights are difficult to clear. On CBS the same holds true: of the 13 CBS Evening News stories that have not been posted online, four were sports and three were show business.
Amen, Andrew. We have been warning about this for years now. I would argue fair use in these cases, but it’s not hard to see why networks would back off putting the stories online, given the onerous way the NFL and others enforce their online rights. You can bet any use of sports video, even in a news story, would result in a cease-and-desist letter, followed by more back-and-forth letters and lawsuit threats. Who needs that? The risk adds up to the potential for networks losing real money, and they are understandably shy about getting into expensive fights these days.
