Why Murdoch's Minions Might Muck Up FIFA

We found out Friday that vuvuzelas will not blare en masse from Arrowhead Stadium in 2018. Now we might have to wait a bit longer to see if Lamar's Lair will welcome the world in 2022.

FIFA executives are now saying that they might postpone their vote on who gets to hose the 2018 and 2022 World Cup finals, currently scheduled for 2 December, following a sting expose by The Sunday Times. In their article (complete with undercover videos that are only available via a paid subscription), two Sunday Times reporters pose as English-based lobbyists trying to buy votes for the US' 2022 bid. In particular, they entertain offers from the presidents of football federations in Nigeria and Tahiti, both of whom are on FIFA's executive board and wield clout amongst the African and Oceania confederations.

FIFA have vowed to move swiftly with their investigation, and could suspend the impugned executives as early as Wednesday. Additionally, FIFA's ethics committee are reported to also be investigating reports of collusion between bidding committees, likely concerning vote swaps. While it could be another potential embarrassment for England's hopes to host the 2018 finals, there just might be an underlying reason for this. (Please convert your old UHF antennae into tinfoil hats… now.)

The Sunday Times is part of Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation conglomerate, the same conglomerate that owns the Sky network of channels in the UK and the Fox networks in the US and Australia. Despite building much of their sport coverage on association football (namely Fox Soccer and Soccer Plus in the US and Sky Sports' Soccer Saturday), none of these channels have ever broadcast the sporting event that's surpassed even the Summer Olympics in cumulative audience numbers.

Since 1994, coverage rights of the World Cup in the US have been owned by ABC, whose parent company Disney also owns ESPN. In England, broadcast rights are split between ITV and the BBC. However, the current partnership is due to expire after the 2014 finals in Brazil, with no current indication of either the partnership being renewed or the World Cup remaining on a government list of sporting events required to be shown on free-to-air broadcasters. In Australia, semi-public broadcaster SBS have the rights.

While a majority of major US sporting events remain on terrestrial or basic cable/satellite channels, in Britain most anything not on the government's protected list has been picked up by Sky or ESPN (which replaced Setanta Sports when the Irish-based channel collapsed last year) on a pay-to-air basis. This includes all Premier League fixtures and high-profile cricket Test series, namely The Ashes.

Were England to win the 2018 bid and either Australia or the United States to follow in 2022, News Corp. would have home turf for eight years. While their newspapers would generate a large following reporting on preparations and whipping up support by way of nationalistic headlines atop The Sun and New York Post, an even larger chunk of revenue could come to them if they had exclusive rights to broadcast coverage in all three nations. Granted, it might not go down well were Fox to pre-empt habitual coverage of Cardinals baseball and NASCAR with 22 guys in shorts chipping a ball around. But the audiences, ad revenue, and ability to force subscribers to pay to view every game would generate far more revenue and profit for News Corp.

While such an insinuation–that a media conglomerate would conspire against its nations' interests as to prevent their domestic competitors from raking in millions–would need a ton of concrete evidence to support, the circumstances seem to connect (if only within the cosy confines of a tinfoil hat). Why would The Sunday Times pose as agents acting on behalf of the US Soccer Federation to sting and expose two corrupt voters that representatives from England's bid courted early in the process? Is it possible that, knowing that the status quo for broadcasting World Cup games will remain in place, News Corp is seeking to undermine or derail the bidding process as to prevent their competition from milking the home-field advantage?

Such a scenario, even if true, would be preposterous to believe and damning if accurate. But should English-speaking nations prevail come December, I suspect the current broadcasters will quickly ink new deals to extend their coverage rights and secure the eventual windfall from broadcasting the world's biggest single-sport spectacle, much to the dismay of Murdoch's empire.

McDreamy might be dreamy, but he's not going to save you from a tornado

So I took the night off yesterday in lieu of posting an obligatory picture of Harry Truman and screaming Happy 125th Birthday to him. I took care of the screaming part on my Twitter.

Today, I'm going to gripe a bit. Thursday night, a freak line of thunderstorms rolled through the Grand River Valley in north central Missouri. This storm system eventually ballooned cells to the southwest and caused considerable damage across Southern Missouri the following morning. The worst mess from this storm, however, seems to be focused on Kansas City's television stations who, instead of airing highly popular programs, opted to break away to provide wall-to-wall coverage of the storms, a solid 60 miles northeast of the downtown area, where roughly 41,000 people out of the 1.8 million in Kansas City's Designated Market Area were directly affected by the storm.

Guess what? That's the reason why they're on the air!

Now while residents in the area are more likely to tune into local radio stations like KCHI and KMZU when bad weather hits (and I personally recommend this if you're not in an area dominated by automated conglomerates, by the way), television stations are also obligated by their operating license issued by the Federal Communications Commission to broadcast pertinent weather information when the need arises to affected area. And all four counties are in the Kansas City DMA (pictured at right, counties in red; image derived from maps at Digital Topo Maps store and Arbitron.) The other DMAs that could serve them are St. Joseph and Kirksville (both of whom have only one station, both ABC affiliates, and otherwise lucky to have enough advertising revenue to support a weekend meterologist who also reports on sports!) and Columbia. All three of these markets are in the lower half of Nielsen's rankings based on viewers aged 12+, meaning KC (with its 31 ranking) is the main television source of weather for these viewers. Which means, if anything potentially serious were to hit anywhere from Purdin, Missouri to Lone Elm, Kansas, Kansas City's television stations are expected to make a decision on whether to break away to report on it.

If my guess is accurate, these decisions rely not on each stations' radar but more reasonably on trained storm spotters watching these cells from the ground, phoning in reports to the stations and the National Weather Service. And the nature of tornados are erratic, as they can drop down at any moment. Not everyone is going to have their weather radio or AM/FM radio on when severe weather hits. So guess what? TV stations also need to break in and report on it.

Across comment boards on various media outlets, viewers (most of whom have probably never been to Chillicothe, the birthplace of sliced bread) were quite negative about the coverage. Several suggested mere crawlers, placing wall-to-wall weather coverage on digital sub-channels, or simply ignoring the outer areas. Bad, bad and bad, and here's why:

Crawlers at the bottom of the screen. Sure it's there, and you can include a bite-size radar image and ominous warning beeps every two minutes. But the main focus of the viewer is still on the programming. And after awhile, the beeps will get annoying in of itself, not to mention older residents whose eyesight is going bad and who didn't grow up dodging pop-up ads and interpreting icons for instructions might not even get a glimpse of the warning. McDreamy might be dreamy, but he's not going to jump out of the TV screen and escort you to the basement if a tornado's one block away.

Placing wall-to-wall coverage on digital sub-channels. I'm not sure as to what obligations the FCC has on cable companies to carry every digital sub-channel of a television broadcaster, but I sense they'll drag their feet if such provisions aren't in place. Not to mention that while converter boxes will be common place, digital signals typically don't broadcast as far as analog, and because it's digital, it's either on or off, as opposed to intermittent static. Even in areas where digital reception is prime and cable companies are carrying digital subchannels, telling people to tune to another station to watch critical weather information is quite disingenuous. It's essentially the station saying "Hi, your life's in danger from this tornado barreling down on you. If you value your life, you'll tune to this channel. But if you would rather watch two people who don't give a rat's rump about your life tie the knot, then have fun. Don't say we didn't warn you. And now a word from Charmin." In fact, it should be the exact opposite. Put the entertainment on the digital subchannel, asking viewers to decide whether to forgo such vitial information by changing the channel away from the coverage.

Simply ignoring the other areas. One word. Elitist. Surefire way to make extremist nutcases in the boonies nuttier. You might be able to get away with doing this in radio, but that's because it doesn't cost as much to establish & maintain a radio station compared to television.

Another suggestion would be to isolate certain areas affected and send overriding broadcasts. With the technology, it could be possible, but it'll just be too unwieldy for TV broadcasters to send information to specific areas (see prior two paragraphs). Ditto for cable companies. To make it remotely cost-efficient, they'd have to pool resources with other outstate cable companies to put together a full-time staff of 2-3 people, and hope to heck two different areas in the pool don't need coverage at the same time. And then, most critically, it wouldn't be sufficiently local. Sure, advice like "stay away from windows" and "duck and cover" are universal. But something as simple as saying "find a ditch or cellar and stay there" wouldn't work along areas where a cellar would wind up being under sea level or in a heap of permafrost, and worse, you'd have guys in North Carolina or Sacramento saying "if you're near shel-bin-uh" (as opposed to shell-BYE-nuh for Shelbina) and pretending to sound dumb by saying Mizzur-uh.

In short, if your show is pre-empted by severe weather coverage, get the damn episode off iTunes or Hulu the next day. Broadcast outlets have a paramount mission to serve the public interest of its community, not their entertainment desires.