Caroline Wilson's descent into gutter journalism

[MadAsHell 4,088]

It's amazing when at the same time Adelaide appear to have blatantly breached the rules, they aren't coping half the heat we are for something that's in a complete grey area.

In other news Tim Harrington on the website today talked about using Pick 4 in the draft. No comment in relation to if we'll even have pick 4.

Makes me think that the club have been assured we'll have our draft picks. At least for this draft anyway.

[Brian Wilson 331]

anyone think that sponsor may be De La Rue and Hankook? He didn't leave on the best of terms with CS did he.

Could be Ben Polis. Might make some sense out of all of this.

[Flying Cloud 152]

Today's editorial by CW has shown her true intent. She has not to date published any "evidence" to implicate CS in this matter, but has stated as fact that he must go. Oops.

[rjay 23,888]

Compared to CW, Venom Denham is beginning to look rather tame...

Quite measured for a change, just maybe he sees the damage this is doing and even though he has a big issue with CS is not sinking the boots into the supporters.

She has breathtakingly hitched her wagon to MFC's guilt even though due process isn't completed and no findings submitted. It may be a long bow to draw, but should the MFC be found to have no case to answer her position in football would be just about untenable.

I find her inflammatory remarks and hasty judgment of the club prior to the completion of the investigation as disgusting as she finds the issue of "tanking".

With her remarks on Jim if it was my mate she was talking about I wouldn't be in the same room as her let alone work with her. There is no way known Gary can work with her and time for him to stand up.

She is putting it all on the line here.

[timD 994]

I appreciate and understand your emotion, but the AFL have to govern by rules, not feelings - although I'm hopeful they'd take them into account if need be.

Right now we're being investigated, not Carlton, or Hawthorn. As a lawyer you'd appreciate the need for a formal complaint and subsequent evidence. Those things may happen, but if they do they'll be treated on their own merits, as the case against Melbourne will.

And just because "everyone was doing it" is a poor defence. By all means correct me if I'm wrong.

BH, as you'd appreciate, this investigation was kicked off by a bogan making spurious comments on a chat show...not some formal complaint.

When libba made comments that were much more serious (for their clarity and given his position) that investigation was a comparative sham. Not sure where the "rules" were then; not sure why there is such a disparity of effort. I'd also understand that, if the process of this investigation is fundamentally different (in terms of resources or time for example) that this fact alone would be biting in to question the 'independence' and nature of the processes enacted against Melbourne.

This needs to 'go legal', our best chance to get the afl to think of an alternative solution.

[Straight Sets Simon 23,113]

What worries me is that she is saying all this because she knows 100% for sure that Melbourne will be found guilty.

[jnrmac 18,947]

isnt Guy Jalland a lawyer, and a very good on e at that?

There is no way she can get away with this rubbish. She must be sued and taken for every penny she has whilst losing her job.

Talk about defamation, wow.

Companies can't sue for defamation any more. Connolly, Schwab and McLardy potentially could. The problem with legal cases is that under the 'discovery' process a lot of stuff might come out that the club. AFL and people might not want to see. The AGE would be thrilled with that.

There is no smoking gun. Not one public statement has said 'I was told to lose". It didn't happen. The other stuff is like experimenting etc is not a crime nor a breach of rules.

[SidVicious 121]

And in any case on what basis is she qualified to give an opinion on a footy club's training and development regimes? I must have missed the chapter in the AFL history books when Caro played on a half back flank for the Tigers,

I don't know of any Richmond half back flankers who would have touched her with a ten foot pole.

[Flying Cloud 152]

Have just cancelled my home delivery of The Age and removed the link from my Android.

Years ago watching 60 Minutes I saw a story that I had inside knowledge of, was clearly done with an agenda, and was based on only one side of the story. Haven't watched the show since and am getting on fine. Think I can cope without The Age.

There are many great places to get news online now, and I can clean the BBQ with paper towel.

[MadAsHell 4,088]

Companies can't sue for defamation any more. Connolly, Schwab and McLardy potentially could. The problem with legal cases is that under the 'discovery' process a lot of stuff might come out that the club. AFL and people might not want to see. The AGE would be thrilled with that.

There is no smoking gun. Not one public statement has said 'I was told to lose". It didn't happen. The other stuff is like experimenting etc is not a crime nor a breach of rules.

You're 100% correct jnrmac.

If this tanking thing went to court, if there's no directive to loose then we can't be found guilty. ie: No penalty for MFC.

[Kiss of Death 708]

I feel sick. We have put up with enough over the last few years. I'm sick of this attack and sick of the lack of a response from the club.

Why can't we just do our bloody pre-season and look forwards to next year?

Adelaides 100% cheat with Tippett isn't even remembered a week or two after it happened!

[Flying Cloud 152]

Sorry mate, don't have the time to bother. Just voted with my feet in cancelling my Age on-line subscription. Hopefully they put the pay wall soon an like the Herald Sun I won't have to even stumble upon it. Unfortunately the ABC now looks like the only news resource in Australia to provide news reporting without a toxic mix of fiction and opinion.

Have cancelled my home delivery and removed all online links. I had forgotten about the ABC. Thanks for the tip.

[Flying Cloud 152]

What worries me is that she is saying all this because she knows 100% for sure that Melbourne will be found guilty.

If she does heads will roll at the AFL and they will be easy to find because only the Commission can make this call, and so it is either the Commissioners or the small team of staff that support them directly.

[premiers13 48]

Thankyou Caroline Wilson for ensuring that natural justice has taken a huge whack!

If this was a criminal trial, her bias, blokes in the closet, vitriolic and emotional attack on the club could only be seen as interference with justice.

It would be impossible now to get any natural justice, her articles have made this a legal minefield. I hope our lawyers use 'her words' to seek a strong case for biased interference in the process and a public attack ,without providing 1 real piece of evidence. Come on Caroline , provide the "Hard evidence you say you have, to the AFL" Not possible?

According to her 'gutter'' approach , she has everyone guilty of everything, well before an investigation has been completed. She has made the truth so impossible to get at, having tainted the investigation with a public attack on the club. She has dismissed any attempt to widen the investigation as unnecessary and her personal attacks must open her to slander possibilities.

I am hoping that the AFL can see the very injustice of such attacks and acknowledge that she has clouded the truth. Who could find the truth in her 'declining' articles.

Regardless of outcome (and I doubt how anyone can come to a conclusion now ,without a stong hint of interference by a single journalist), I would ensure that Caroline Wilson gets 'nothing' from this Club, ever!

Now of course we get every 'hater' of Melbourne jumping up and making statements that provide no more facts, just more fiction and hate mail.

If you or I persisted with such a vitriolic attack on another person, without providing a shred of 'real' evidence, we would be in court and suffer strong sanctions.

I can only be hopeful that natural justice will be afforded to Caroline Wilson, because she has tried to stop Melbourne from having any.

Remember , we are guilty because Caroline Wilson says so!

There must something underneath the surface to ensure such hatred from a person who calls herself a journalist. There I've done it , used inuendo and a maybe's to enhance my story....sound familiar

[Hannibal 5,814]

BH, as you'd appreciate, this investigation was kicked off by a bogan making spurious comments on a chat show...not some formal complaint.

Semantics. His comments and the subsequent reporting of them was considered enough evidence to at least investigate the claims.

[Guest]

Just imagine if James Brayshaw gives us his verbal support in this matter. She would go postal!

[What 18,810]

To those of you who are rightfully cancelling your paid subscriptions to The Age, i am hoping you are letting them know the reason why

If you didn't tell then go do it now so they know exactly whats going on and that we wont accept the defamatory tripe they are allowing that old hag to publish

[Straight Sets Simon 23,113]

Interesting to hear Danny Frawley's comments at the 3:06 second mark of the video:

[media=]

I was overseas when this happened, so I never saw the game but hearing Frawley say the team was down to one fit man on the bench must count for something.

[What 18,810]

Have just cancelled my home delivery of The Age

Make sure you let them know why!

[diesel 420]

To those of you who are rightfully cancelling your paid subscriptions to The Age, i am hooping you are letting them know the reason why

If you didn't tell then go do it now so they know exactly whats going on and that we wont accept the defamatory tripe they are allowing that old hag to publish

There was a box to check when I exited asking why. I ticked "Poor content"

[What 18,810]

There was a box to check when I exited asking why. I ticked "Poor content"

Should email them and tell them which poor content you're referring to

[Dr John Dee 1,057]

The piece might not just be one that’s been past the lawyers but written to placate them. Certainly there are still assertions being made without substantiation and qualification, but the qualifiers are scattered strategically throughout the piece:

A picture is being painted

but it looks shocking for all concerned

He seems to have been proven wrong

As we said, the AFL was probably incompetent

No other club seems to have done it quite like this

Even losing heart in one final game for an earlier pick seems more forgivable than systematic planning, career-ending threats and a plan which seems to have dragged on for weeks leading into months (great writing, that!)

If what some former players and coaches say

There’s already plenty deposited on this thread about the comprehensive negativity and ugliness of this piece, and I’ll probably be repeating some of it. But I want to add a few points:

(i) Wilson’s source or sources would seem to have dried up. She hasn't got much more to say, so she's rounding up all the stuff she's said as a kind of exercise in self-justification masquerading as the 'full case' against the MFC. Perhaps she’s served the AFL’s purposes. Perhaps there was nothing but a little bit of smoke from a few statements but subsequent evidence has given the investigation nothing, or has undone any conclusions it was hastening towards. Maybe she’ll get something else from them but for now it’s all dried up leaving Wilson to repeat herself, to repeat herself … (which she has in fact been doing with the same few scraps of ‘evidence’ all along);

(ii) but she has managed one change in tack, or is signalling a change in tack with her humbug concern for the careers and reputations of all those young men we’ve destroyed (she really has a career in soap opera waiting, if only she’d notice) because this gives her another mallet to whack Melbourne with … poor development of young players and so on, a charge that would stick albeit that there are no AFL sanctions to be attached to it (not yet anyway except for good old ‘bringing the game into …’), but it can certainly be used to smear Melbourne a bit more and to help naturalise the ‘fact’ of tanking into the bargain;

(iii) and that’s what I suspect the whole thing is really about. Dear Caro (dear only in the sense of what she’s costing us) is a moralist at heart, like all self-appointed crusading journalists. It’s all a story of good and evil for her (well, we do call ourselves Demons, what do we expect?) and that’s all she’s got left to tell … or maybe, like a true knight of the crossed-word, it’s the story she’s wanted to reveal all along. Unfortunately her version of it depends on a pretty ancient and discredited kind of associationism: the stuff of medieval theologians and phrenologists and physiognomists and nineteenth century racists, where the internal condition is always identifiable on or as the surface. An ugly face is the sign of an evil disposition, a bump here or there on the skull makes one a disputatious sort of fellow, black skin reveals a primitive brain, all that sort of nonsense. And so Melbourne’s moral turpitude (begotten in a vault somewhere) has of necessity been realised and is now on show for all to see in the shape of its failures on the field, even unto this year’s failures. We are thus the victims of not much more than Caro’s magical and mythical thinking.

So I want to suggest (perhaps only a little facetiously) that we might even take some comfort in the fact that, perhaps unknowingly for the moment, she has crossed entirely her own personal Red Sea from journalism into the fictional domain. Why, she even ends with word story! (Yes, yes, I know it also means a journalistic – and so supposedly true – story, but also is the point …)

Personally I’m almost interested in what the next chapter will be in this serialised fiction, foreshadowed as it is by her references to the false knight - or was he the once and future Giant? - who might have come to save us were we not so far cast down into a vault of our own desperate villainy. It will no doubt make gripping reading even if it will take us just a little further from anything like the truth. But the truth doesn’t matter to Caro, not now, and I doubt whether it ever did.

[Flying Cloud 152]

She's clearly got a vendetta, and I'm certain it's to do with Schwab. Always finds a way to mention him without ever really expressly going for the jugular. Has wanted him out for years and took great delight when it looked like he'd leave after 186. Seems she didn't get her man that time but is determined to do so this time.

She has not published one piece of "evidence" that includes Schwab. Yet she says that he must be sacked.

He was not a coach or a player and so cannot be sanctioned under the rule regarding ensuring the team does all it can to win. So as far as I can tell the only AFL rule he can be sanctioned under is bringing the game into disrepute. Will be very hard for the Commission get Schwab for that given every administrator at every club has at some time put the interests of the club before those of the game/AFL. In fact they have a duty to put the club first.

[Brian Wilson 331]

Interesting to hear Danny Frawley's comments at the 3:06 second mark of the video:

[media=]

Thanks for posting. Just look at the player reactions from both sides. Is this what tanking looks like?

[dee_star 63]

Caro and that [censored] Greg Denham yesterday had similar information - it's clear the AFL are leaking info out to their favourite journos to justify how long this "investigation" has been going.

With that in mind, if Caro is getting info from inside the AFL, and she is writing that CS and CC are the focus of the investigation, then I reckon the Club has to be careful how it defends itself in the media. What the AFL will want is to be able to say that players and coaches try their best in every single game, but in this case "a few rouge administrators" put pressure on the coaches and players to tank. I'm not saying that's exactly what happened because who knows, but that's what the AFL will want to say, as they want to protect the integrity of the game. The issue for us is that if we come out and say that all the staff have changed since then and plead for leniency on our current football department then it hurts our argument that the two people that seem to be the focus of the investigation are still employed by the club.

I would hope that in private conversations with the AFL we would be suggesting to them that given the comments of Fevola and Liberatore about the Carlton tanking situation that if they were to come down heavily on us that we'd be expecting our penalty to be the same as what Carlton get. And then we start talking about Hawthorn, West Coast and Collingwood who all did the same...

Unfortunately as much as the AFL have created this by having the priority pick rule in place and made it worse by the denials of Demetriou and others connected to the AFL, at the end of the day we are going to be the ones left holding the can. You'd only hope that other clubs that engaged in the same practices are given equal punishment