June 12, 2007
No Blogging Allowed at College Sports
Umpires weren't the only ones giving the "Yer out!!" call at Sunday's NCAA baseball tournament game in Louisville, KY. NCAA officials threw a reporter out of the press box for blogging live updates of the game.
Louisville's Courier-Journal reported that, in the fifth inning, officials came up to one of its reporters and told him that blogging from an NCAA tournament event is against NCAA rules and asked him to leave the stadium. The reporter, Brian Bennett left, under protest. The protests were quickly echoed by his newspaper, which called the act a violation of the First Amendment. The Courier-Journal also noted that its reporters blogged from the NCAA basketball tournament as well as from the Orange Bowl, and no one had complained.
The NCAA's position is that blogging is a "live representation" of the game, and it restricts such activity. (What it actually does is sell the rights for such activity to, say, ESPN.)
Today, a report in USA Today pointed out that other sports organizations don't get so uptight about blogging. The NBA and the the U.S. Golf Association allow online reporting, and the NFL says it has never kicked anyone out of a game for such activity.
Most tellingly, USA Today quoted a constitutional lawyer, Ronald Collins of the First Amendment Center, who pointed out that Bennett could have easily blogged the game by watching ESPN's sanctioned broadcast, so the NCAA really isn't stopping anything. --Josh Fischman
Posted on Tuesday June 12, 2007 | Permalink |Commenting is closed for this article.
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