A question for anyone who sees no problem with how the Harrington situation turned out:
If Harrington had called an official over, what should the result have been?
I don't think there is a good answer to that question.
(1) Harrington says "I think the ball occilated and ended up back where it started, but I'm not 100% sure." The official says "I obviously didn't see it either, but if that's what happened, play away with no penalty." Harrington plays away, and later a TV viewer calls in and says "but the ball didn't end up back where it started." Then one of two things happens:
-- (a) There is no penalty because calling in the official somehow gives Harrington cover. I don't understand the theoretical justification for this view, but even if it is justified, as call-in penalties proliferate, this will just encourage players to call officials over all the bloody time, making tournament golf even slower and harder to watch than it already is.
-- (b) There is still a penalty. I think this is the only coherent answer for a rules absolutist to give - whatever the official says, the official knows he didn't see what happened and the ball still moved - but it leaves open the question, what the hell could Harrington have done? He did not know that the ball had not ended up back where it started. I suppose the best thing for him to do would be to assume that the ball moved and that he failed to replace it (because he couldn't replace it, not knowing whether it had moved), assume that he incurred a penatly, count the penalty in his score, and sign for a number which might be too high. But I doubt anyone really wants to defend that outcome, especially because I imagine that a movement of a few dimples on the green happens far more often than we would guess.
(2) Same as above, except the official instead goes to the TV replay booth to determine whether the ball moved. Now I at least see a principled basis to say that whatever the official decides should be final, even if a TV viewer sees something different and the official turns out to have been wrong. But do we really want tournaments to stop for fifteen minutes or more to check something like this? Isn't slow play a bigger problem for both the success and the integrity of professional tournaments?
On the other hand, I agree with George and others who have said that banning use of video isn't the right way to go. If the video shows a player violating a rule either without knowing the rule or intentionally with the hope that no one will notice, handing out a penalty after the fact seems like the right way to go -- though I'm still not sure that the DQ rule shouldn't be softened. The biggest problem for me is when the player does not know the facts about what happened and therefore can't know whether he broke a rule, even if he does know the rule, and where no one else on the scene knows the facts either and so cannot without unreasonable delay confirm for the player what happened. I just don't think a solution that says "yes, even if it takes an hour, get the video to make sure you get it right, or else risk DQ" is in the game's best interest.