CLANCY OVERELL | Editor | CONTACT
Once a proud industry that brought us the Fine Cotton Affair and the Stephen Dank supplements program, the trackside tarp has finally been lifted over Australian sports journalism today.
As the AFL’s Collingwood continues to limp through the rumour-riddled and poorly quarantined 2020 season, the Brisbane Broncos are also delivering the NRL just as many off-field scandals as they have on-field losses.
Many would assume the tweed-coated hacks from Nine and NewsCorp would be relishing in the endless stream of scandals that come with this year’s bizarre season of COVID-bubble football.
However, this has not been the case.
Australian sports reporters have instead opted to spend their time and energy pressing the cultural hot buttons that are guaranteed to harvest clicks on social media.
Never before have we seen so many promising young men of colour labelled ‘sooks’ for taking issue with a news cycle that generates hundreds of stories a week about their personal grievances.
Racial ambulance-chasing and soap opera like coverage of the questionable naturopathic beliefs shared by footballers wives on instagram have replaced the honest alcoholism known as reliable sports journalism.
It is for this reason that the red-nosed drunks that still remain employed by Australia’s three half-profitable media companies have been replaced by the wildly unverified forwarded WhatsApp messages that have apparently come from a bloke who knows high-up people at the centre of these scandals.
At last count, there was roughly 234 different viral messages being shared around regarding the current implosion of the Brisbane Broncos, with every single player and staff member reported to have rooted one of their colleagues wives.
These same style of forwarded messages also suggest Collingwood is on the brink of financial collapse with less than $30,000 dollars left in the club war chest, after Eddie McGuire was forced to pay off bikies that had been blackmailing players into match fixing.
Not one story is yet to be verified on any legitimate news channel, with Fox Sports opting to instead publish another 2000-word listicle about the ’34 reasons why Latrell Mitchell is unfit and divisive’ – according to an obese 33-year-old nobody sitting in an office cubicle in St Leonards.
With not a shred of journalistic integrity left at any of the historically esteemed newspapers and TV networks that once diligently reported the on-field and off-field trials and tribulations of Australia’s football codes, it is expected that the media coverage of both the rugby codes and the AFL will continue being published on WhatsApp by a bloke named Keegan, whose apprentice’s missus used to root a bloke whose older brother’s mate from golf works high-up at the NRMA sponsorship department and has the good oil on the rumours surrounding this apparent scandal that you read about on a grainy meme in an unmoderated Facebook group.
MORE TO COME.
