Is the media mature enough to interview referees?

In an effort to be more open with the media and public, SANZAR are now allowing match referees to front the media before and after games. While this will hopefully give fans an incite into how a referee goes about one of the toughest jobs on the pitch, will the notoriously fickle media be able to hold back some of their less warranted criticisms of the match officials?

Unfortunately it would already appear that 3 News have shown they lack restraint and a little maturity with their first piece of the season about referee Stu Dickinson.

The introduction to the story contains the claim that Dickinson racked up one of the highest penalty counts in Super rugby history. Now claim reeks of a lack of fact checking and reporter putting their own spin on a story with no regard for facts.

Firstly, with the new interpretations of the tackle ball law coming into effect and players reverting to bad habits as they tired, the penalty count was always going to be higher than usual. And that doesn’t even take into account the participants, the Blues and Hurricanes, are not exactly known for their discipline.

Secondly, I seriously doubt that 25 penalties (yes, that’s how many Dickinson gave out, some of us were counting) is “one of the highest penalty counts in Super rugby history.” Just a quick look at some of the other games from this round, Craig Joubert also dished out 25 penalties, while Keith Brown gave out 23 and Jaco Peyper blew 21, yet somehow I don’t see Brooke Sabin doing a story about a record number of penalties being given in the opening round.

Sabin then asks the viewer if Dickinson was refereeing a game of rugby, or trying out for an orchestra followed by a montage of Dickinson blowing his whistle. Another element carefully chosen to portray Dickinson in a poor light.

The claim of blowing his whistle more than 30 times baffles me a little, we know there were 25 penalties, so were there only a few scrums and lineouts in that game, or did Sabin pick “blowing his whistle” as an expression in an attempt to have the view believe that the penalty count was higher than it was (25).

But once again, I come back to my old adage that if the players don’t infringe, the referee won’t blow his whistle. Even Dickinson himself said, “I don’t like blowing a lot of penalties but if it has to be done, it has to be done.”

Referee Dickinson set his standards early on in the game as to what he expected at the tackle, as the referees have been asked to do by the coaches themselves, but the players failed to adjust, yet TV 3 decide to run this thinly veiled hit piece on the referee rather than asking the coaches and players why they did not heed the warning.

Fortunately other media outlets were a little more restrained in their coverage, with Sportal noting that the tackle ball interpretations were known to all Super 14 teams and players would need time to adjust to the way it was being refereed.

So TV 3 and Brook Sabin, you win the first ever Sports After Dark yellow journalism award for intentionally fueling the perception that Dickinson performed poorly, and was to entirely to blame for the somewhat high penalty count on Friday. Perhaps a review of the facts before putting that sort of story to air could be in order…

UPDATE: Having checked up on this story further, it appears TV 3 trimmed a quote from Blues’ coach Pat Lam to suit their agenda on this story.

TV 3 quoted Lam as saying, “I know there were some frustrations on behalf of the players on some of the calls made.” He did say this but added in the same sentence: “but we’ve got to take responsibility. At the end of the day 27 points [from penalties] and an intercept try speaks for itself.”

Disgusting

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The Is the media mature enough to interview referees? by Hamish McBrearty, unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License.