- Video
-
Club Roar
Captured a great grassroots sporting moment? We want to see it!Content Collections
The Roar Community
- Join
- Login
Eddie McGuire knows a thing or two about conflicts of interest. The Collingwood president has long been accused of showing bias towards his club in his other roles as commentator and print journalist, not that it seems to bother the ubiquitous media personality.
Yesterday McGuire wrote one of the most bizarre columns I’ve ever seen for The Herald Sun, starting out wacky and finishing with an even more baffling crescendo.
Taking it upon himself to dissect Harry Kewell’s on-again, off-again move to the A-League, McGuire railed against Kewell’s supposed salary demands – without actually listing what those demands are – before naturally reverting to his favourite topic, why the AFL is the best thing in the universe.
“Soccer lives on a screw-you basis. AFL survives on goodwill,” surmised our Eddie, and I can honestly say after more than 1000 words of this kind of prose, I still had no idea what he was talking about.
That’s the beauty of an opinion column, I suppose.
An author can write whatever they choose, simply because their name appears at the top of the page.
A piece I wrote on Friday conjured plenty of debate, and most of it was critical of former Roar columnist and now ex-SBS journalist Jesse Fink.
Clearly a polarising figure, many of those who logged on did so to disparage Fink.
But in doing so they missed what I thought was the crux of the argument.
Namely, that the editorial policies of a predominantly public-funded broadcaster were allegedly compromised by an editorial supervisor who not only introduced a key consultant of Australia’s bid team to FFA chairman Frank Lowy, but who is also a serving member of FIFA’s Ethics Committee.
It was a clear conflict of interest, or so I thought, but most of those who responded chose to overlook those circumstances in favour of criticising Fink.
Recently I read an article about climate change sceptics, in which a couple of researchers argued most people don’t believe in the science behind climate change in part because they are heavily influenced by the media.
“For example, if you read or hear opinions from climate change sceptics about 50 percent of the time then this could lead to a bias in the perception of the balance of evidence in your mind – that is, that the science is only about 50 per cent certain,” psychologist Dr Ben Newell said.
The equation got me thinking about how quick football fans are to dismiss negative coverage of the sport, often blaming bad press on some kind of Machiavellian scheme cooked up by those with vested interests in keeping football in the doldrums.
I wonder if the sort of nonsense Eddie McGuire came up with yesterday has a doubly negative effect on football fans.
Not only is it harmful to the environment – think about the carbon footprint created just for the hard-copy version of that guff – but it also helps condition football fans to overlook important problems in favour of criticising those who try to bring such problems to their attention.
I don’t mean for this to sound like a complaint – my job is simply to kick-start a debate, and generally I don’t mind what fans talk about so long as they’re talking about football.
But I can’t help but wonder if in our rush to condemn negativity, we’re not turning a blind eye to serious issues which bear more measured analysis.
For the sake of transparency, I would like to see the major players involved talk openly about their roles in Australia’s failed World Cup bid.
Because failure to do so affords critics the ammunition they need to label the exercise nothing more than a grubby waste of money.
But hey, that’s just my opinion.