A_Soporific t1_ix4b9b4 wrote on November 20, 2022 at 5:30 PM

Reply to comment by cramr in In honour of FIFA, who are absolutely not corrupt bastards by daveclampart

Some of them have long term contracts that would make it very expensive to not cover the World Cup. It just makes doing the right thing much harder, especially considering that there's a fair number of sports fans who don't know or don't care about Qatar's other issues.

super__mirage t1_ix4ib8m wrote on November 20, 2022 at 6:17 PM

of course, why would these companies care about human rights and slavery if there's some money on the line? It's expensive to do the right thing!

A_Soporific t1_ix4kwh6 wrote on November 20, 2022 at 6:34 PM

I think that's a bit weird position to take. After all, breaking contracts is costly. The company doesn't pay when things get expensive, the company is just a legal fiction. It's the shareholders and workers. The shareholders are usually people with retirement accounts moreso than incredibly wealthy.

It's okay to ask companies to do the expensive, and morally correct, things. But you have to recognize that doing so will hurt a lot of people. Continuing to broadcast as per the contract but highlighting the problems is more likely to punish Qatar in the long run.

The "get" for Qatar, the reason they are doing all of this is to create a new Qatari tourism industry. To compete with regional rivals like the UAE's Dubai or Saudi Arabia's NEOM by diversifying from oil into something "soft power"-y. If you hammer home the problems with Qatar's actions in the very thing that is supposed to win popular opinion to their side then you hurt them far more than declining to show the World Cup would.

I mean, if you break your contracts then people might blame you and continue to ignore Qatar's bad actions. If you highlight the problems then there's no distraction from the human right's abuses.

cramr t1_ix52j5j wrote on November 20, 2022 at 8:30 PM

That did not seem to be a problem with Russia when the war started. Everyone rushed to cancel contracts and business with them.

A_Soporific t1_ix55pc3 wrote on November 20, 2022 at 8:50 PM

They announced that they were going to dissolve the contracts involved. They didn't actually get out of the contracts for months. Some of them didn't actually leave so much as they created a new local subsidiary and transferred their assets to that "new" company with plans in place to reabsorb them at some future date.

Also, in that situation there would be big pain either way. Those companies that did stay in Russia face sanctions in other nations, and Russia is a small market compared to the EU or Texas. If you had a choice between losing the profit from Russia or Texas the greedy would save their position in Texas and leave Russia every time.

The point of sanctions and regulation isn't to turn the amoral into the moral, it's to align the amoral choice with the desired one by rewarding "good" behavior and punishing "bad" ones. Of course, these same practices are used by China to change the messaging in Hollywood movies and to stop criticism of their treatment of the Uighur by NBA athletes.

Turn out that morals aren't universal and lack power if people don't put in the work to give them teeth. It's important to put in the work to ensure that FIFA suffers for its corruption. You can't outsource that work to others. Media companies will do what they need to do to not fuck over their employees and stakeholders, if they see that it is more costly to air such a controversial World Cup than it is to break contracts then in the future they'll break the contract when FIFA does something stupid.

But, at the end of the day, FIFA is the western villain here. They are the ones who need to be punished. The whole organization probably needs to be razed and a new one built with controls to prevent (or at least make exponentially more expensive and challenging) the sort of corruption that's obviously endemic their decision making.