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If there’s a media outlet that’s given the Matthew Johns story a bigger run in the last week than the Daily Telegraph, I must have missed it. Front and back page, and with such prominence on their website that the layout at the top of the page changed to accommodate a much bigger photo, links to stories, and a “special section”.
In the last week we have seen the paper variously take the moral high ground, stir up controversy, demand a ‘clean up’ of the game, lead the call for Johns’ sacking, and even lead a witch-hunt into identifying the remaining players in the Christchurch hotel room.
By the end of the week, it had turned its guns back on the complainant ‘Clare’ and undermined by her credibility by publishing accounts of her ‘bragging’ about her exploits.
The Tele is without peer as the media organ most responsible for publishing and stoking interest in off-field scandal. The number of stories published, and the prominence given to them, has sharply increased in recent years.
The ‘Terror’ can take the lion’s share of credit for this, because, if we are to believe the old hard heads, the phenomenon is not attributable to an increase in bad behavior by players.
According to one of the game’s most knowledgeable figures, Phil Gould, modern players are a lot better behaved than they used to be.
In more recent times, the paper has been the venue for an ongoing discussion into the future of the game, and the threats to its viability.
During this discussion the paper has stated a firm position on the growing public displeasure about player behaviour, and cites it as one of the chief factors affecting growth of the game’s fan base and thus profitability.
The question then begs: why does the company with easily the biggest financial interest in the success of the game, News Ltd, double as the chief publicist for behaviour that its own paper says is threatening the very existence of the game?
One reason is suggested: that player behaviour has become an industry in itself. Just a like a soap opera, but with real life characters that punters know and love from the weekend games, these well paid clowns provide endless entertainment with their mindless, drunken antics.
A very large number of readers love it, and for News Limited, it is a source of free content that can be used to sell the papers during the week.
If this is true can we conclude that their outrage about player behaviour is manufactured? That it is downright disingenuous; that they care not a bit about bad boy antics, that they don’t rate it as a big threat to the game, but instead just exploit it as another source of controversy?
Their website full of racy images certainly suggests an equivocal position on the ethics of the current controversy.
Business minded analysts might suggest that News Ltd, owner of FOXTEL, is looking toward the next TV rights deal with the NRL, for which they obviously would prefer to pay less rather than more.
News are in a unique position to run down the image of the game just at the right time, and suggest, for example, with reference to their reader survey run last week, that the NRL’s asking price might not be justifiable given public dissatisfaction with the game.
It is also plain as day that the Johns story has become the latest flare up in the long standing feud between News and Channel 9, and in particular the animosity that exists between the Tele and the Footy Show.
Bashing Channel 9 and the Footy Show comes naturally for characters like Phil Rothfield and Rebecca Wilson, who have not allowed this opportunity to slip by.
Wilson in particular has some very old scores to settle with what she perceives to be the sexist culture that exists at the Footy Show. Her pieces in the last week have been the shrillest of the foaming-at-the-mouth commentariat.
As they draw breath from their moral posturing and hand wringing, the Tele ought to ask itself the following question: do they bear at least some responsibility for creating the monster they now seek to bring down?
We know that their relentless publicizing of scandal is designed to elicit a reaction from their readers – amusement, titillation, contempt, superiority – so should they then be surprised when a large group of them respond by being disgusted and turned off by rugby league?
If News Limited, and their official mouthpieces, are serious about cleaning up the game’s image they can take the first step and make a stand that might cost them in the short term, to wit, stop using the bad behaviour of players as the primary grist for the mill to sell papers.
Instead of condemning the beast, just stop feeding it.
On the assumption that player bad behaviour has gone on forever, will continue to go on forever, and is simply a reflection of what is going on elsewhere in society, will the public, and their readers particularly, be any worse off without blanket coverage of this particular type of story?
Or is it impossible for them to do this for fear of other media outlets gaining an advantage?
I concede the genie might well be out of the bottle by now and the cap nowhere to be seen. It may well be unrealistic to expect the Tele to do anything else. And I have to admit I am entertained by most of it.
Which leaves me with my final plea to News: if you can’t stop the conveyor belt of scandal, can you at least spare us NRL fans the sermons and stop telling us with reference to the future of the game that ‘we’ll all be ‘rooned’?
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