Like a Beijing two way-street: hostile

Caroline Wilson has a point. The media is a two-way street. But the two-way traffic between clubs and the media is sometimes pretty combative territory. Clubs can use the media to promote their teams and players. They can get the word out about their pre-season (the best in recent history!) and they can warm our hearts with human interest stories about their community minded youngsters (bloody do gooders). The media needs the clubs for stories and club information that they can feed to the insatiable public. Reciprocity is paramount.

The importance of this street does not stop the media from taking risks that endanger the balance of said street. Sometimes they take dirty side roads and allies and stray from the street. Sometimes they create stories that harm the relationship, and the street becomes a dangerous, hostile street. Some media do voyeuristic, inexcusable and unjustifiable things. See the Herald-Sun. Other media mostly stick to the rules, but they too report on things that are not always true. They take hearsay, sell it as hearsay until it becomes a sort of fact in the muddy consciousness of the information-overloaded public. No wonder clubs become hostile. The clubs are constantly fighting to assert their importance. They put barriers up on the street like we did at our neighbourhood street parties in the nineties. And the media, like those idiot drivers who wanted to drive down the street, piss and moan about the injustice of it all.

Caroline Wilson has been involved for years. Like a player, some media writers lose all perspective stuck in the little Melbourne fish bowl. Wilson’s job as a woman in a man’s world is doubly difficult. She has never been the most popular journo amongst the boys club of the AFL. And to her credit she has never backed down from reporting the facts as she sees or hears them. But perhaps some of the animosity towards her comes from the fact that most of her comments are unrelated to actual on-field games. They are usually focused on the politics and media created controversies of the league. She seldom offers positives on the beauty of the physical game itself. Her focus on Ben Cousins is rarely on his on-field performance (thought they are admittedly rare) but on the media storm around him. A number of media commentators feel they have the right to sit back and comment on the rights and wrongs of the storm that they and their colleagues have created. That job should be left to people like me. The “Today Tonight” tactics of other journalists has led to club hostility towards all media. Can the responsible media legitimately complain? Isn’t it the same as the reputation of all players being stained by the misbehaviour of a small few?

But what about the public’s right to know? What is the public’s right to know? Is it the same as our appetite for such knowledge, which is close to insatiable? Does the media, the dominant channel of information from club to public, have the responsibility of deciding what rights we have to know? Is it the guardian of good and evil, the moral intermediary between club and public? A sobering thought. When a player is relentlessly judged for a minor off-field misdemeanour the media has the nerve to talk about the public’s right to know. They just report the story and let the public react. The public may want to know, but it may not have a right. The clubs do have the right to conceal any information they choose, within reason. They have financial obligations too. The media is publishing the news for purely financial reasons, and justifying the publication of its ‘stories’ as heeding to public rights is simply nonsense. So if one is to concede that the media is just reporting facts according to public demand for such facts, what is the justification for the unreasonable demands placed on the behaviour of players?

When players do suffer from the merciless judgment of the public and media, the question gets asked. Why are players of a sport held to much higher standards than to those of the general public? The most common response is that they are role models for our youth. Simply, they must do only good things so our kids will be good too. The role model topic needs to be researched more. Do kids become successful because they idolized Chris Judd? It’s a long bow to draw. Even if a youngster obsesses over every step that Juddy takes (he could even be a youngster older than Juddy!), will this youngster do everything that Juddy does? Will an easily influenced youngster lose interest in footy after reading about the Ben Cousins’ drug problems? Will the kid give up the game and turn to drugs? It seems unlikely. Perhaps the best reason for the high demands placed on the players is their responsibility to their clubs reputation and their clubs sponsors. This reason is much more believable than the unproven role model theory. Whatever the justification, the media and public scrutiny of a player’s every move is a steam train that won’t slow down. As long as the media continues to speculate over the unproven, minor off-field mistakes of players there is going to be hostility between clubs and reporters. And those reporters who do report on hearsay and rumour cannot complain when clubs refuse interviews.