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Are the media to blame for the A-League’s problems? It was suggested as much on The Roar yesterday, with some fans criticising the negative tone employed by many media outlets in their analysis of Season 6 so far. Not surprisingly, the sentiment kicked off a heated debate, but the old adage “don’t shoot the messenger” was the first response that sprung to my mind.
Are the media really to blame for poor marquee recruitment or the lack of atmosphere in the A-League? Is it the fault of journalists when teams fail to engage with their local communities?
Or are the media simply reporting what most reasonable fans can see for themselves?
No doubt I’ve got a vested interest, but to my mind blaming the media is a quick-fix solution which ignores the ugly truth that many of the A-League’s problems can’t be solved by a mere change of editorial policy.
Much as I’d prefer more coverage from mainstream media outlets, to demand it ignores the commercial reality that the media is a business just like any other.
It may hold itself to higher ethical standards, its image as ‘the Fourth Estate’ might be lionised and mythologised, but when push comes to shove, the media business is about selling more copies, gaining more viewers and getting more click-throughs.
And it’s a pretty hard sell to try and get more mainstream media outlets interested in coverage when the first thing an editor or producer sees at an A-League ground is row upon row of empty seats.
That someone like Ray Gatt might report on those empty seats – a veteran who with more than twenty years experience in the field, a journalist without whom we wouldn’t have read Rale Rasic’s biography – doesn’t make Ray the problem.
The problem is, at least in part, that despite a marketplace featuring four dedicated football magazines, two free-to-air networks regularly screening football, a Pay TV network which broadcasts every single A-League game live and innumerable websites, some fans still claim a lack of media interest in football.
“What has News Limited ever done for the A-League?,” a fan once asked me.
“They publish Australian Football Weekly,” I replied.
“They publish what?” came the response.
In my near-fifteen months as a weekly Asian columnist and occasional feature writer for AFW – a publication which doubles as the A-League matchday programme – I can’t remember anyone ever asking me about the contents of the magazine.
Sometimes as football fans we can’t see the forest for the trees – we’re so busy worrying about the contents of a national newspaper, we overlook the specialist football media right before our very eyes.
That’s to say nothing of the fact that guys like Mike Cockerill and Jesse Fink have done their utmost to raise the profile of football in this country through good, honest, thought-provoking reporting and analysis – not by turning a blind eye to the problems in the league and pretending everything is peachy keen.
The idea that all journalists are objective is simply not based on reality: it might be the ideal, but every journalist has an agenda, just like every media outlet has their reasons for embracing or ignoring their stories of choice.
And some of those media outlets clearly pay less attention to the A-League than they do other sports.
But it’s too simplistic, in my opinion, to blame the media as the sole cause of the A-League’s problems.
It’s a sentiment which reminds me of a line from those old punk stalwarts Bad Religion, about people who “point their finger ’cause they can’t accept the blame.”
Right now, what the A-League desperately needs is fans regularly going to games, bringing their mates and embracing the football media we already have.
Do that, and more mainstream recognition will invariably follow.