In many ways, rugby league fans talking about the media is exactly what the media wants. You care whether they are positive or negative but, commercially anyway, they don’t have a similar interest in whether your reaction to their content is.
With so much behind paywalls and more free NRL blogs and podcasts than ever, the traditional media is engaged in a desperate war to keep something like its market share by getting your attention and then making you part with your hard-earned.
‘Exclusives’ don’t really exist the way they used to because the essence of them can be reported elsewhere within seconds. So stuff not easily ripped off, such as uber-strident opinion, holds much more value for proprietors.
People will pay for the honour being angry, indignant or offended as readily as to be entertained or informed.
If I’ve noticed one thing in the near-two seasons since I was an accredited NRL reporter (last year I had to borrow a generic pass every time I went to a match), it’s that reporters have become the story now.
With players and coaches refusing to say anything of interest if they can be contacted at all, it makes sense for media executives to talk up what their on-air talent says, with other reporters quoting them. It closes the circle – you need to ring-fence your properties when so many people are doing stuff for free, and consuming stuff for free.
I don’t really have much new to say about the Bulldogs stuff or the Rabbitohs stuff of the last fortnight. Did it happen? Could it be seen from a public place? Has it, or would it, lead to police charges?
Canterbury-Bankstown Bulldogs (Photo: Mark Kolbe/Getty Images)
If the answer is yes then to me, it’s reportable. I could go into the nuances of whether someone needed a telephoto lens or had to stand on a fence and I might say I don’t think X should have appeared in the paper by Y should have.
But that’s boring. I’ve written those columns a dozen times before.
What is interesting is that probably you don’t agree with me, or that your X, Y and Z are different than mine. There has clearly been a backlash against much of the coverage and that backlash is also against my views expressed above.
Could it be a rugby league media spring?
Here’s the point of this column: if you don’t like it, don’t read it. Forget what I think should be reported and what shouldn’t. Don’t read me either if it upsets you.
Canterbury and Souths players won’t be embarrassed by the coverage if no-one saw it. You won’t be angry about the coverage if you didn’t see it.
I’ve completely changed my media diet since I moved to the UK this year; I don’t waste time consuming stuff I don’t care about. Because I am interested in the media, I am interested in this subject.
But if you really don’t care about players’ private lives, why does this subject interest you? Did you pay for the right to be infuriated?
I still believe the traditional media plays an important role in keeping rugby league, along with other parts of public life, honest. I started covering the sport in 1986, player behaviour is infinitely better now and that’s at least as much a result of coverage often labelled intrusive as it is full-time professionalism.
But it is a simple fact that you no longer have to give a shit about that.
If you don’t want to know what those naughty blokes got up to in Arizona, you don’t have to read about it. It is actually possible to see a bloke on the front of the paper holding a beer with his genitals pixilated and decide ‘nup, not gonna read it’.
You can immerse yourselves in websites and podcasts and Facebook Live shows that focus on the on-field action.
If a tree falls in the forest, and an NRL player pushed it but no-one sees it fall, then just tell yourself it never really fell at all and stop getting outraged at the media no-one forced you to consume.
Just so I’m completely clear, I’ll say it one more time: instead of whinging about negative coverage, become oblivious to it.
These days, you can immerse yourself in the world of Mauritian Jazz, be almost unaware of who the current US president is if you really, really want to try. Tweet me and I’ll tell you how to fill your week with ‘alternative’ rugby league coverage – I know all the outlets.
(As an aside: for my entire career you’d never get young, up-and-coming writers criticising senior reporters by name the way I have seen many doing of late – because that young reporter’s career would be over before it began. But is newspaper journalism even a career anymore? It’s harder to push around people who’ve nothing to lose.)
And if people stop caring about what NRL players do in their spare time, the mainstream media will stop covering it – because it will have lost the white-knuckle battle to remain a part of your life.
And sure, player behaviour will probably go back to what it was in the 1980s. But you won’t care, will you, because you’ll have let your actions match your convictions by switching off.
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