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NRL's media hounds are off to a shocking start in 2015

3rd February, 2015
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Willie Mason drawing by David Green Cartoonist.
Expert
3rd February, 2015
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What is doing with this so-called Willie Mason ‘story’? Have our rugby league reporters begun 2015 with the worst beat-up in decades?

Manly’s star recruit is being investigated for alleged anti-social behaviour while in New Zealand as a (non-playing) guest and ambassador at the highly successful Auckland Nines tournament.

Mason’s crime? A light-hearted wrestle with his brother Les outside Eden Park. Gee, what a shocker. A league player having fun – that’s against all the rules.

From what I have gleaned, he wasn’t drunk and disorderly. No police cars were watered and there was nothing as remotely serious as a human bubbler incident in a lavatory, or a drunken spray of the game’s officials via Twitter.

I’d like to know who reported this scurrilous incident to the code’s Integrity Commission. Just who is the bozo who felt the need to muck-rake even when there wasn’t a trace of muck to be found?

Mason is entitled to be furious at being painted as the bad guy in news reports that surfaced late Sunday. All have sullied Mason’s image at a time when he is establishing himself at a new club and I feel sorry for him.

The 34-year-old has never professed to have been one of the code’s angels but in this instance I feel he copped a public flogging for nothing. A good-natured rumble in public with your young brother? If that’s a bad thing that attracts headlines, well, there’s no hope of any NRL player enjoying a cleanskin reputation.

If this sort of reporting becomes the norm this year, I won’t be reading any newspapers and I’ll be ultra careful where I source any information I may need. While it was bad enough for league writers to stoop low enough to report this non-incident, I’d like to know what the news editors around the nation were doing.

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Even the Sydney Morning Herald‘s headline on Michael Chammas’ opinion piece yesterday was a dead give-up. It read: ‘Willie Mason’s Auckland Nines incident not serious, but what was he thinking?’

Fellas, if the ‘incident’ wasn’t serious then why did you devote a 19-paragraph article to its supposed whys and wherefores? Mr Chammas asked why Mason was caught behaving like a teenager on his first footy camp. Please. That’s a stretch.

I realise that the NRL integrity people announced they were investigating a report on Mason from Auckland but as I see it, the SMH and just about every other media organisation got caught up in this crazy and irresponsible non-story, fuelled as ever by Twitter.

Here’s hoping the standard of rugby league reporting in 2015 rises well above this dreadful beat-up. It was a very poor start to the new season that did nobody any good.

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