Sports journos have been artfully complicit in ‘convicting’ sportspeople over drugs, with still no hard evidence. When will they, and ACC supremo Lawler, have the same blowtorch applied to their un-enhanced performances?
New sports ‘thought police’ emerge
By Bill Rowlings*, CEO, Civil Liberties Australia
Article posted 22 August 2013. On 28 August 2013, Mr Lawler announced he would step down as head of the ACC as of 16 October 2013.
ASADA, the Australian drugs behemoth, has apparently become the sport thought police, or so an article by a leading sports journalist suggests:
“Essendon captain Jobe Watson has been warned not to antagonise ASADA after he agreed to put his name to a club-penned statement which said the Bombers players felt ‘fully vindicated’ after the AFL announced it would not yet be charging them with prohibited drug violations…
The AFLPA and key player managers remain concerned that the Bombers’ comments have been unnecessarily provocative where WADA and ASADA are concerned.”
So writes Caroline Wilson[1] in Fairfax media on 15 August 2013, continuing the tricoteuse role she and other prominent journalists and commentators associated with the ABC’s Offsiders program have played since the start of this most unfortunate fiasco.
They couldn’t wait to get aboard the Australian Crime Commission (ACC) and Government Ministers’ bandwagon when the sports drugs schemozzle erupted at a media beat-up in Canberra on 7 February 2013.
The leap-before-you-look judges indicated on the ABC sports program that they thought sports people were guilty…because the government said so. They sided with “the authorities”, and have remained firmly and appropriately affixed to the drip feed ever since.
“Guilty until proven innocent” seems to be the dictum of most sports writers and spruikers in Australia (not all: Danny Weidler of Nine appears to value facts over ministerial PR handout and police/crime authority spin). If they have a civil liberties bone in their bodies, sports writers and commentators, in general, don’t show it.
Their role in bringing the game of AFL, and NRL, in Australia into disrepute should not be overlooked. So far, not one person has been charged and found guilty in court.
If Essendon is to be charged with bringing the sport of AFL into disrepute, what charges should ACC supremo John Lawler face? He shattered Australia’s sporting reputation with his bombast and bluster at the media performance, which resulted in instant world-girdling headlines like:
Australian sports darkest day!
Remember the glossy report he produced for the media? (see illustration)
It’s now more than seven months on. Not one person has been charged with being involved in organised crime in association with drugs in sport…or even organised crime in sport.
Mr Stephen Dank, the sports scientist, rightly continues his business without facing anything like a charge from the ACC or the Australian Federal Police. His main burden is having to mount a $10m defamation claim against media outlets. He should sue the ACC.
It’s surprising that Mr Lawler is still in his job when executives and managers at football clubs have stepped down. In terms of performance, Mr Lawler’s certainly is not “enhanced” by anything like convictions. Why hasn’t the ACC Board stepped in?
It’s like he’s permitted to deposit anti-reputational faeces against Australia in the sporting corridors of the world without anyone telling him to pick it up.
Perhaps Mr Lawler is saved by the quality of his speech-making. Here is the opening of a speech he gave on 13 August 2013:
Organised crime corrupts. To understand this statement, you need to understand a simple yet common idiom – ‘it takes two to tango’.
Read the full, riveting speech, containing what looks like further suspicious beat-up figures at: http://tiny.cc/ohcw1w The all-dancing ‘Tango Pete’ Lawler has ‘form’ in relation to exaggerated claims, which continue to dog him.
Returning to the issue of the Offsiders, if only the panellists had taken a Bex and had a good lie down at the outset, their silliness would not be so galling.
What should the Ageing Wilson and the others well and truly Offside do now? So far, as sporty journo types, they are batting virtually zero on their alarmist predictions about “tips of icebergs”.
Maybe they should bat down the order in future, because they have shown little understanding of the notion of a ‘fair go’ for sports people. They still don’t appear to understand how Australian justice works – you’re innocent until you are proven guilty.
Perhaps it’s time for Barrie Cassidy, Wilson and the rest of the peripatetic Offsiders panel to be dropped quietly into retirement by the ABC.
For Wilson’s recent take on the Rule of Law and how inappropriate it seems to be for a player to be provocative towards such shining lights of competence like ASADA and WADA, see: http://tiny.cc/rqbw1w
If the Liberals win government and continue with their threat to slash the public service, then the ACC and ASADA (and the current lynch-mob panelists on Offsiders) might be the place to start.
That would be a fitting response to the theorists who claimed that the ACC/ASADA beat-up media conference in February 2013 was nothing more than a bid to claim the agencies were indispensable, and should not be axed.
No, they shouldn’t be axed…not if there’s a guillotine available.
*Bill Rowlings OAM is Chief Executive Officer of Civil Liberties Australia. He is a former journalist of the vintage of some of the venerable Offsiders panel, who remembers the days when the journos’ code of ethics could be summed up by “give everyone the fair go you’d expect them to give you”.
I totally agree that people shouldn’t be convicted by journalists without being found guilty. But when I see on TV serious allegations that players were given possibly harmful injections that the club doctor didn’t know about, or club bank accounts not disclosed to the board of directors, I think they should be investigated by a competent authority.