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If the NRL would quietly settle up and let Alex McKinnon get on with his life, he wouldn’t have had to go on 60 Minutes in a thinly-disguised plug for his book.
60 Minutes landed its best ratings for the year and topped the ratings for the night with 1.3 million viewers. The episode should have left the audience heady with the real life, love-conquers-all story of Alex and fiancée Teigan Power. It didn’t.
Why Liz Hayes and team decided to dilute a great story by engineering a malicious hatchet job on Storm captain Cameron Smith is a mystery. I trawled Twitter and 60 Minutes’ Facebook page for some positive feedback. She got no congratulations for her efforts.
The story was undignified and sensationalist. Over and over, the tackle that changed McKinnon and his family’s lives forever was played. It was more horrible each time.
Hayes shamelessly worded up, and worked up, interviewees. Out of hours of interview footage, Alex’s dignified and hardworking parents were shown emotionally charged or in tears, but we rarely saw the questions that got them to that point.
Little light was shed on their real story, which is them, day in day out, holding back tears and doing everything they possibly can to help their only child live a normal life.
Then there was Hayes’ shepherding of interviewees with leading questions. Asking McKinnon if the money situation with the NRL was uncomfortable was one of many loaded questions that was obviously going to get a yes and keep the story heading in her direction.
The leading questions stopped working so well when McKinnon said that he wasn’t angry at Jordan McLean, that he must’ve had some dark times since the incident, and that he had tried to make contact.
Hayes bulldozed on. “Do you need him to say sorry?”
“No, I know he’d be sorry.”
It was all too calm and forgiving for her. So she gave Alex his first viewing of the footage of the minutes after he was paralysed, focusing on Smith’s conversation with the referee.
Nearly all of the conversation between them during that eight minutes was edited out, so we’ll never know the context of Hayes’ goading if it “still made him angry”.
McKinnon’s answer, “Not really, just reassures the type of person that he is,” was thoughtful in the face of provocation.
In no way was it – or the rest of the conversation – the no-holds-barred blast at Smith that commercials had led viewers to expect.
Attempts to word up Wayne Bennett fell fantastically flat. Refusing to be led by Hayes, he replied only that, “[Smith] is a decent person, he is a good person. I gotta assume that on the night, he got it wrong.”
And that’s the point. Every single person in this sad story is a good person. Nobody got up that morning expecting the game to end like it did. Every single one of them would change their actions in a heartbeat. Viewers know that. And they are furious that they were tricked into watching a ratings-grabbing hatchet job.
On that awful night, Cameron Smith got it wrong for sure. But not as wrong as Liz Hayes and 60 Minutes got it. Not by a long shot.
The real bad guy in this story is the NRL. If they’d settled up with McKinnon, he wouldn’t have needed to be on 60 Minutes in the first place.
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