All Blog Posts from Public Eye

Foul Ball: Blogging a baseball game, it turns out, can get you kicked out of the press box. By the NCAA's logic you're providing a "live representation of the game," as a Courier-Journal sports reporter learned when he got the boot at a University of Louisville/ Oklahoma State contest. Says Courier-Journal attorney Jon Fleischaker: "Once a player hits a home run, that's a fact. It's on TV. Everybody sees it. (The NCAA) can't copyright that fact. The blog wasn't a simulcast or a recreation of the game. It was an analysis."

Hartman Goes To Beeb: Former "Evening News" Executive Producer Rome Hartman was supposed to take another job with CBS News after he was moved off the show in March. Instead he's heading over to the BBC to launch a new broadcast in America. "CBS and the other networks have very talented correspondents overseas," he tells Howard Kurtz. "But there's no way any American broadcast network can or will cover the world the way BBC does. They just don't have the capacity. It's a frustration for people at every network." Speaking of the "Evening News," Broadcasting and Cable notes that CBS is launching an "aggressive promotional campaign” this summer to pump up the show's ratings.

Reasons To Be Depressed: "More people agree that Bill O'Reilly is a better source of political information than ABC News, according to a JWT survey conducted on behalf of Adweek." There are those who hated the Soprano's finale. And we're now into our second week of this.

If you watched the "Evening News" online Monday night, you didn't get the whole shebang: Anthony Mason's report on how "March Madness Is Big Business" was not included in the online broadcast.

The reason? The NCAA can be pretty picky when it comes to where footage from its games is shown. "Sports rights holders typically don't allow use of their footage online," says Mike Sims, CBSNews.com director of news and operations. "In this case, we probably could have used it because CBS owns the online rights. But it's just standard procedure for us to cut it out. The league is protected so tightly that we just sort of have a blanket policy."

It's not just the NCAA that doesn't take kindly to use of its footage. In February, Brooklyn Law School professor Wendy Seltzer posted a YouTube clip onto her personal blog of the copyright message that the National Football League aired during the Super Bowl.

The message will be familiar to football fans: "This telecast is copyrighted by the NFL for the private use of our audience, and any other use of this telecast or of any pictures, descriptions or accounts of the game without the NFL's consent is prohibited."

Seltzer has a problem with the message, however: It makes no allowance for fair use, the doctrine that allows limited use of copyrighted material without permission. Which is why she posted the video of the copyright message, along with this note: "Let's see whether the video, clear fair use, gets flagged by a copyright bot."

Read full post…

With all the conspiracy theories and suspicions circulating around the media these days, it’s kind of nice to encounter something that’s a little counter-intuitive to all that. Of course outside of the theory that every story reported by mainstream news organizations is vetted through some secret council of Ivory Tower liberal elites, one of the most often heard complaints about the press is that it’s just too beholden to its own business interests.

True, there are a lot of reasons for one to think that news is used to push product and protect the bottom line (is what happened in the latest episode of “Survivor” really news? No, but that doesn’t stop the “Early Show” from participating in a little cross-promoting synergy). But let’s give credit where credit is due once in awhile, in this instance to the CBS “Evening News.”

Read full post…