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Tuesday 9 March 2010

Football (still) having to fight in Oz

No Free-To-Air football so little reason for news channels and newspapers to report football games and events.

Why else would the biggest sporting event on the weekend in one of our major cities, Sydney be ignored by the Daily Telegraph in the lead up to the game?

It still amazes me how many Rebecca Wilson's Peter FitzSimons and the like we have in the media, and why football still gets poor coverage.

Les Murray says.

In this respect the behaviour of the Sydney media, in particular the Murdoch press, was an utter disgrace.

On that Sunday the Sydney-Melbourne showdown was the biggest sporting event in Sydney by any measure. Yet on the day before the game the Daily Telegraph, Sydney’s biggest selling daily (I’m not sure why), gave less than a tenth of its sports space to the game, burying it, while it dedicated 60 per cent of its allotment to the NRL, which was not due to kick off for another week.

The sleazy, grubby and calculated media resistance to football, five years after Johnny Warren’s death, is alive and well.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

be interesting to see how they report it when the new western sydney team enters the comp. i suspect most of the telly readers are western suburbs based and sydney fc is considered too eastern suburbs and "middle class" to be of interest to their readers.

either that or they just don't care. be good to get some free to air coverage. interesting to note that abc had live coverage on the radio of the sydney - melbourne game. crap commentators but.

Eamonn said...

Live coverage from the ABC that's a start.

and the SMH have heaps of stories on the Western Sydney team...the AFL one not the A-League one.

Which given the numbers of players from Western Sydney suggests the AFL must be paying for coverage.

In many cases they are getting more coverage than even the Swans!!

Brendan said...

The Daily Terror currently (since late 2008) has an extremely (even for News Ltd) anti-football editor in Garry Linnell - check his previous published comments on the A-League to see how biased this guy is.

He's actually a Victorian AFL fan (Geelong is his team) which is why the paper has given such a positive slant to Kevin Sheedy's efforts with GWS.

Don't expect too much for the A-League too much while Garry is the chair leading the other nutters.

Interesting thing is Tom Smithies and John Taylor write well for the D/T on the world game they love - the ed and sports ed just do their best to subtly or not so subtly bury their good articles.