By STEVE MASCORD
IN the NRL, Joseph Suaalii seems to be the story right now.
The Sydney Roosters signing is considered such an exciting prospect that when he played for North Sydney in a pre-season trial last weekend, it was streamed just so people could watch him.
Now NRL chief executive Andrew Abdo is getting personally involved in the bid to have him cleared to play in round one despite being just 17, which is a year younger than the competition’s minimum
Before writing this column, I read a piece by colleague Robert Crosby at leagueunlimited.com entitled Joseph Suaalii Is Being Set Up To Fail.
I disagreed with almost everything in it.
This, therefore, gave me a perfect platform on which to explain the way mainstream media has always worked for those who don’t understand. For example:
-
So what if he fails? On a personal level, I might wish him all the luck in the world but as a journalist it’s my job not to care. I am just bringing an interesting and legitimate story to the reader. I’m not defaming him by saying he’s a good player – my responsibility ends there;
-
Handling media is the job. Professional athletes are like lion tamers and fire breathers – that’s why they get paid, to amuse the populous. If Ashley Taylor. Jamal Idris and Tim Smith – who are all mentioned in Robert’s story – didn’t deal with scrutiny then they weren’t up to being top-line NRL players. Park footballers only have to worry about running and tackling and passing. Full-time pros have to worry about being recognised in the street and getting paid a lot of money and behaving in public. That’s the job;
-
Mental health wise, I’m with Ben Ikin – some players just aren’t suited to the job. The job can’t change for them. That’s just life.
So, that’s one of Discord’s 20 or so core riffs. I’ll wait until the end of the month to get paid your subscription fee. Thanks.
Except … I want to go beyond that in this column because the mainstream media is no longer what it was when I formed those opinions. Community standards are different to the ones with which I grew up. And today, jobs ARE changing to suit individuals.
Not only that; the media is splitting in two, with rugby league a microcosm of that. Many websites and podcasts are marketing themselves as “no politics” or “fan-run” and that is their point of difference from mainstream media, whose attitudes I tried to sum up above.
In this paradigm, you will have the MSM becoming more hard-nosed in situations like Suaalii’s because they are trying to entice casual readers and viewers – and you’ll have the alternative media mollycoddling him more to accentuate their point of difference. These are all completely new dynamics in terms of my career.
I like many – or indeed most – of the changes I have seen in the last 10 years in the way we interact with each other in our society. I’m a fan of prejudice of all kinds being called out. I’m all for #metoo and most of those tree-hugging leftie causes. I actually refer to myself as politically correct and I reckon if you’’ve got virtue you should signal it as loudly as possible because it might catch on.
But to my core I don’t believe you can censor someone from giving an honest assessment of a footballer’s performance, or to hold back on saying nice things about a footballer, because of how he might handle things.
In my day, rugby league players blew up about being “bagged” not “rapped”!
But the fact is, it’s not out of the question that such conventions might exist in future. I learned a new phrase the other day: reductio ad absurdum. It means reducing things to an absurdity to prove your point.
Could we have a colour system for how sensitive an athlete is to criticism – based on independent psychological assessment – with the media and people on Twitter agreeing to observe a sliding scale of words they can and can’t use for each colour? If you break it, you get kicked off Twitter or lose your accreditation?
It sounds absurd. But in the world that Joseph will inhabit as a professional athlete, I don’t think it is completely out of the question.
