The International Cricket Council (ICC), in attempting to regulate the media's coverage of the World Cup, has over-reached itself. While cricket's governing body has cause to protect what it perceives as its interests, its efforts to monitor and curb the packaging and the presentation of content, particularly in the print media, are excessive and in some respects over the top. The ICC's rationale is that staging an event of the magnitude of the World Cup requires a scale of money that can only be raised by guaranteeing exclusivity — without this assurance, sponsors would be reluctant to help fund the exercise. In itself, the argument isn't without merit; these are the realities of the world we live in. But its interpretation, in the ICC's instructions to news organisations, continues a worrying development. “The free and open coverage of sports events is under attack,” Larry Kilman, Executive Director of Communications and Public Affairs for WAN-IFRA, an organisation that promotes press freedom, said last year. Kilman pointed to the increasing tendency of sports companies and organisers to control coverage by limiting editorial and commercial freedom. Although some of the ICC's directives pertaining to “permissible and impermissible activity” appear reasonable, drawing a distinction between editorial and commercial work, there is sufficient cause for alarm.
At the heart of the matter is the question: who owns sport? Organisations such as the ICC contend they do, ignoring both sport's essence as a public activity and the media's role in developing and promoting sport. It is this contention that has seen administrators across the world lay claim to sport's every facet so that they can monetise it. Central to this endeavour is the prevention of others from doing similarly. One manifestation of the ICC's heightened urge for control is the severity of the restrictions it is imposing on fans who will attend the World Cup. Ostensibly, some of these regulations are security measures. But several, designed to thwart ambush marketing, verge on the draconian and the absurd. Not only do the restrictions establish a monopoly in what is a public domain; they also unduly curtail personal freedom. The ICC must realise that it hasn't total ownership of on-field action. Cricket, like every sport, is many things at once, one of them being a collective experience. Individual components of a sporting event moreover cannot be copyrighted. For the ICC to tell the media how “match content” may be presented is to challenge freedom of expression — which is guaranteed in Article 19 of the Indian Constitution — and also the right to information. Responsible news organisations must be trusted to use their judgment to account for both the ICC's commercial considerations and their own.
