Well over a year’s worth of speculation, articles and media reports saying now former Penrith Panthers coach Anthony Griffin lost the trust of the playing group was “a mass collection of coincidental autocorrects that made and continued a false narrative for 18 months”, according to a News Limited spokesperson.
Hot on the heels of Anthony Griffin’s dismissal on Monday and his NRL 360 interview shortly after, some are questioning how his sentiment. His assertion that the Penrith players have never fallen out with him went unchallenged from NRL 360 regulars Paul Kent and Ben Ikin, despite the panel being persistent with ‘player unrest at Penrith’ reports.
“What did you expect from Ben and Paul? Journalistic integrity?”, a passing Fox Sports intern remarked before being quickly cut off by the now on-edge News Limited spokesperson.
“What my good friend here was meant to say is that we do our teleprompter work exclusively on our iPads now”, the spokesperson nervously exclaimed, “so, yeah, the autocorrect bug also infiltrated our proud show”.
The spokesperson then went on to explain in detail the plot of Anchorman and the main character’s inability to avoid reading everything displayed on the teleprompter.
“Yeah, you see that mate? Yeah, we all have that, aye”, the spokesperson mumbled as he showed me a clip of the movie on YouTube.
Despite persistent denials from this particular spokesperson on the notion of potential bias against the Penrith Panthers, and News Limited journalists shifting focus of the story from ‘star players potentially leaving unless Griffin is sacked’ to ‘Gus has lost his mind and innocent Griffin was never the problem’, an anonymous journalist from the Daily Telegraph via a phone call late last night suggested otherwise, “it’s hilarious what we can get away with”.
“Penrith had more injuries in 2015 than any other club in recent memory and our interview with Griffin is being praised for letting Anthony suggest without challenge that Panthers’ lowly finish that year was purely because of the club’s staff members’ volition and ineptitude, and act like Penrith didn’t finish fourth and make the Prelims the previous year”, the journalist shockingly admitted. “we can get away with a lot”.
The journalist went onto confirm the not so shocking assumption that people who’s major media diet consumption derives from forms of News Limited are single tradies older than 40 who think the world ‘flog’ is a verb.
“I mean, Phil freaking Rothfield is one of the most prominent names in rugby league journalism and his core demographic are old men who yell at clouds.”, the journalist continued.
“The amount of lies and misleading content that man’s posted in an attempt to water down the efforts of the people at the club – whether it be him lying that the five-year plan was to win a comp – and not to fix the junior pathways or.
“Wait, get this… He even ignored all of the games Penrith have been cost because of unlucky decisions despite his excessive complaining about refereeing in any other game and instead published in an article a fake, scientifically inaccurate drawing some Manly fan posted on Facebook to justify why Penrith should have lost. Yet, him and all of us are painted as the credible ones”, he said.
The souce then he bizarrely finished, “Guess you can say it’s easier to please kids with party pies and sausage rolls than adults”.
Don’t know about that last part, party pies and sausage rolls are the pinnacle of food. But it became abundantly clear that News Limited’s change in narrative is an attempt to drive up controversy at a club thats side in the story they’ll barely mention – despite the media arm’s past reporting adding a lot of credibility to what they have to say.”
Stay tuned to The Roar for satirical updates on the situation.
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