June 28, 2010

World Cup Censors Stadium TVs

Photo courtesy of <a href=“http://si.smugmug.com/Portfolio/Portfolio/1674201_UxZmP/6/248654656_qCXN6/Small”>SmugMug</a>

Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.


ESPN is reporting today that FIFA, soccer’s world governing body, will censor instant replays on the large screens inside the World Cup stadiums, after footage of the first goal by Argentina’s Carlos Tevez in yesterday’s Argentina-Mexico match showed that Tevez was offside. The replay, which came in place of normally-scheduled “infotainment,” spurred the Mexican players to protest the referee’s call in real time. FIFA’s answer: No more replays inside the stadiums.

“This will be corrected and we will have a closer look into that,” a spokesman said today. “We will work on this and be a bit more, I would say, tight on this for the games to be played.” This comes amid mounting evidence of the game-changing fallibility of FIFA’s referees, who have made bad call after bad call in this year’s World Cup (see: Koman Coulibaly).

Soccer is one of the last sports not to use video replay technology to corroborate decisions by its referees. FIFA’s president, Sepp Blatter, has said that relying on replays would disrupt the “natural dynamism of the game” and, perhaps more significantly, he thinks it’s better for business, er, entertainment to leave fans guessing. After rejecting a free upgrade in his Geneva home to a new HDTV box, which has instant replay capabilities—and after a valid goal by England’s Frank Lampard was disallowed in Germany’s second-round drubbing of England yesterday—Blatter told journalists: “I like not being able to see things again, and prefer to try and guess what happened from one viewing, rather than confirm my suspicions by rewinding the live action and confirming my thoughts either way.” Really?

What happens when, byte by byte, footage of the most publicized, advertised, politicized sport in the world is available to audiences but not to referees? What of these apparent “blind spots” in sports, both accidental and enforced? This World Cup is expected to be the most-watched television event in history, with 22,750 hours of feed produced and SONY deploying new 3D cameras to film the matches. As FIFA buries its head in the sand, the world is watching—and wondering whether this uneasy marriage of access and willed ignorance can last. 

WE CAME UP SHORT.

We just wrapped up a shorter-than-normal, urgent-as-ever fundraising drive and we came up about $45,000 short of our $300,000 goal.

That means we're going to have upwards of $350,000, maybe more, to raise in online donations between now and June 30, when our fiscal year ends and we have to get to break-even. And even though there's zero cushion to miss the mark, we won't be all that in your face about our fundraising again until June.

So we urgently need this specific ask, what you're reading right now, to start bringing in more donations than it ever has. The reality, for these next few months and next few years, is that we have to start finding ways to grow our online supporter base in a big way—and we're optimistic we can keep making real headway by being real with you about this.

Because the bottom line: Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism Mother Jones exists to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we hope you might consider pitching in before moving on to whatever it is you're about to do next. We really need to see if we'll be able to raise more with this real estate on a daily basis than we have been, so we're hoping to see a promising start.

payment methods

WE CAME UP SHORT.

We just wrapped up a shorter-than-normal, urgent-as-ever fundraising drive and we came up about $45,000 short of our $300,000 goal.

That means we're going to have upwards of $350,000, maybe more, to raise in online donations between now and June 30, when our fiscal year ends and we have to get to break-even. And even though there's zero cushion to miss the mark, we won't be all that in your face about our fundraising again until June.

So we urgently need this specific ask, what you're reading right now, to start bringing in more donations than it ever has. The reality, for these next few months and next few years, is that we have to start finding ways to grow our online supporter base in a big way—and we're optimistic we can keep making real headway by being real with you about this.

Because the bottom line: Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism Mother Jones exists to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we hope you might consider pitching in before moving on to whatever it is you're about to do next. We really need to see if we'll be able to raise more with this real estate on a daily basis than we have been, so we're hoping to see a promising start.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate