24/7 football coverage is not all it’s cracked up to be
Roar Guru By Jesse Fink, 9 Apr 2009 Jesse Fink is a Roar Guru
- Tagged:
- football, mark milligan, Mark Viduka, Masal Bugduv, Socceroos
Related coverage
Australian captain Mark Viduka (9) competes for the ball with Sotirios Kyrgiakos of Greece. AP Photo/Mark Baker
I got a lot of personal satisfaction a year ago in anointing Mark Milligan “Where’s Wally” for his habit of leaving clubs without notice and jetting off overseas, but I’m starting to think it could also be a good nickname for Mark Viduka.
Not playing in the Premiership and AWOL with the Socceroos, the V-Bomber has been linked to just about every Australian club going around in recent months, from Melbourne Victory to Melbourne Knights to Melbourne Heart and now to Gold Coast United.
Then there was that embarrassing story about Pim Verbeek sending an “SOS” to Viduka to play in the World Cup campaign, which turned out to be completely fictional.
The Viduka to Gold Coast yarn was enough for News Limited to run with a big story on Tuesday declaring “Gold Coast United coach Miron Bleiberg is planning to bring 33-year-old Viduka to the new A-League club as a guest player.”
Bleiberg denies it, Gold Coast moneybags Clive Palmer denies it.
Not to say it might not turn out to be true, but until such time as there’s any verification from the player or his manager or the officials of the club he is supposed to be going to, why bother printing it? Just another cynical ploy to sell papers and a sign of the diminution of editorial standards in the Australian football media.
What are editors there for any more?
Not to say I don’t deal from time to time in rumour and innuendo, but I’m careful to couch what I write or suggest as possibilities (strong or otherwise) and not fact and I usually only listen to a few trusted sources.
Like any writer working in this business, though, I’ve been seriously burned a couple of times and I try to make amends when I make an error. And what I write is always opinion; I’m not writing news.
But there are some sites on the wild-west frontier of the worldwide web that seem quite happy to pass off completely unsubstantiated rubbish as fact – and there are a number of them in Australia and overseas. But it’s not just the start-ups. The websites of established newspapers, as my colleague Mike Tuckerman revealed in January here at The Roar, also swallow stories without verifying the facts.
The “Masal Bugduv” story completely fooled The Times and was a nadir for online football journalism.
But it achieved one positive thing: it made football fans a little bit more sceptical about what is presented as news – and so they should always be sceptical.
The internet has been a boon to football followers in this country but it’s also created a monster: the expectation of news 24/7 when there often isn’t a lot of real news to go around. And the pressure to publish what passes as news when it really shouldn’t be published.
So next time you read a news story about Mark Viduka, you’re likely better off not reading it unless it carries a quote from the man himself or is written by somebody who knows the player personally and can vouch that he’s what he’s written is the honest-to-god truth.
Otherwise, chances are, like Palmer said, it’s just “made up”.
Recommend this story.
- Explore:
- football, mark milligan, Mark Viduka, Masal Bugduv, Socceroos
April 9th 2009 @ 9:41pm
jimbo said | April 9th 2009 @ 9:41pm | Report comment
News Limited printed a Front Page News Story in the Sydney Daily Telegraph a few weeks back about “Record Opening Round Rugby League Season” despite the fact that it wasn’t a record at all – 10% less attendance than last year’s opening round in fact.
The AFL Annual Report says that AFL is growing by 30% in NSW and Western Sydney is crying out for a second AFL team, despite falling AFL crowds in Sydney and the ABS figures suggesting there is no AFL growth at all in NSW.
I know times are tough, but where’s the truth in Sports Journalism and Reporting gone?
April 10th 2009 @ 8:39am
Slippery Jim said | April 10th 2009 @ 8:39am | Report comment
jimbo, careful, Greg will accuse you of spouting negative bilge…apparently he wants us to accept misleading journalism as the way of the future.
April 10th 2009 @ 9:13am
Koala Bear said | April 10th 2009 @ 9:13am | Report comment
Jimbo,
I’ll give you a true story lad; yesterday I watched Chelsea humiliate the Red on their own turf (Anfield) and Drogba scoring one of the best goals I have seen him score…
Slippery Jim, their are 6 billion stories reported on the planet in one day.. and that was the best of them … Chelsea 3; Liverpool 1…
~~~~~~~~
KB
April 10th 2009 @ 1:02pm
Slippery Jim said | April 10th 2009 @ 1:02pm | Report comment
Indeed, it could have been 6-1 if Drogba was at his best! Hello Barcelona, eh KB!
April 10th 2009 @ 2:04pm
The Bear said | April 10th 2009 @ 2:04pm | Report comment
Greg, the path to hell is lined with good intentions. I for one appreciate your input, but it is doubtful Slippery cares about the “line”. Or if he does, he is powerless to maintain a discipline to abide by it. We all know he has a point re: factual journalism, and that Jesse maybe somewhere in the wider orb of “respectable journalism”.
However, it is Jim’s purposefully aggressive tone and his seemingly obstinate duty to be Fink’s cyber-minder, that manages to distort his message and invariably it becomes lost in the personalisation of the issue.
Still many on here know all this, and sift through the mire of Slippery’s regular “letter to the editor”-type posts.
I read his argumentative post early on in the blog, and thought about saying something.
But time has shown it is futile. “Curses and Coaches”, aside.
Infact, the more I ponder it, perhaps SJ is actually a construct, a blog-pseudonym for Jesse. I can only speculate, but have we ever seen these “two” post at the EXACT same time???
Fink/SJ, the jig is up.
April 10th 2009 @ 2:22pm
Slippery Jim said | April 10th 2009 @ 2:22pm | Report comment
Strangely, that’s not even the craziest conspiracy theory I have heard on the Roar, The Bear (is it just me or are the species and number of bears on the roar multiplying???)
April 10th 2009 @ 3:46pm
dasilva said | April 10th 2009 @ 3:46pm | Report comment
SJ
As much as I supported the campaign to expose the disinformation about Nicky Carle. I think just let it go now. He has admitted he got it wrong on a comment on a previous article. Although I would like an article explicitly stating that he got it wrong about Nick Carle I don’t think that’s going to happen
He also wrote this in this article “Like any writer working in this business, though, I’ve been seriously burned a couple of times and I try to make amends when I make an error.”
I guess that’s the most we can hope for a public retraction
April 10th 2009 @ 4:50pm
The Bear said | April 10th 2009 @ 4:50pm | Report comment
Yeah, the more I think about it Jim, you have an uncanny and intimate knowledge of what Jesse Fink has written, especially regarding Fink’s critique and musings on the Green and Gold. And you reference him a little too “cutely” in many of your Fink blog postings, too.
Perhaps it is merely in effort on Jesse’s part to prop up the debate(s). Let’s face it you (?) writers have no scruples, and the credit crunch is obviously testing your morales. {insert defamatory case here, lol}
Now, if I am right on this matter, let it be known that I would not be alone in feeling highly aggrieved by such a duplicitous “tactic”. But I fear I will never know, unless Fink admits it himself. Maybe then.
And for the number of Bears populating the site? Safety in numbers, obviously. I would speculate that myself and KB give off an air of confidence and intelligence, that has drawn in other furry woodland friends.
Once agan, just a theory, of course.
April 10th 2009 @ 5:05pm
Slippery Jim said | April 10th 2009 @ 5:05pm | Report comment
Dasilva, I quote: “But it achieved one positive thing: it made football fans a little bit more sceptical about what is presented as news – and so they should always be sceptical.”
Jesse himself says scepticism is a positive thing. Then both he and Greg (who seems to think it negative) have a go at me for being just that. I find that interesting.
The Bear, are you loaning that tin foil hat off Pippu?!?! I hear he had little use for it after the vics won the toilet seat
April 10th 2009 @ 9:13pm
jimbo said | April 10th 2009 @ 9:13pm | Report comment
The Blue army marches on KB and Drogba coming back to form at the right time.
Ivanovic given a chance to shine and shine he did.
Barcelona won’t get that much room aginst Guus the Great and mark us down for our first European Champion’s League title when we demolish Porto in the final..