The other day I was reading an article about Louis Van Gaal and a rant he had made about FIFA, scheduling and also how his team have been totally hard done by with bad refereeing. Now this article wasn’t surprising in itself, other than Van Gaal’s claim that the two penalties awarded against his team were not real penalties.
What was surprising was that when reading this article it occurred to me that the way in which news on the world cup was reported in New Zealand vs the rest of the world. In NZ most newswebsites have a page or similar setup for World Cup news, although it is mostly just re-posts of the more popular international news articles. However the main pages of these sites do not have very obvious links to these world cup pages, and the main sports pages seem to be more focused on the oval ball code. Also the main sports news website doesn’t even have that much. There is an article on of Brazil’s manager, Luiz Felipe Scolari’s counter to Van Gaal’s accusations I did in my research find another sports news source from NZ, but even they were leading with oval ball sports news, though had a page for the world cup with better coverage.
I am slightly disappointed by the lack of local news sources, but then like everyone else in NZ I normally go to overseas websites to get my football news.I also have my tablet/phone which has apps on it to find me articles from all over the web on football and the world cup and deliver them too me, as well as Google Now to do the same.
These news sources that get delivered to me do have an interesting side to them, other than the news content. That would be the lack of news content contained within some of these articles, which generally come from the more gossipy UK news rags. Some of these articles, like the one I was actually reading that was mentioned at the top of this post, had headlines which didn’t really cover the topic (unlike the BBC version linked.) The one I actually read had a headline more along the lines of “Dutch Coach Blasts Cheating FIFA” or some other sensationalist headline such as that. The source was a tabloid of some sort so one cannot be too surprised by the article.
Of course, this is not a sports news only phenomenon, nor is it new. Also I fell completely into the trap of the tabloid, which only had a sensationalist headline in order to garner more clicks for their website, and thus increase their advertising revenue. The modern day media outlet (sports or otherwise) has tended towards short catchy headlines and soundbites so as to find away to catch the attention of a wider audience; one that is likely uninterested nor concerned about the actual content of the article that the headline is advertising. This possibly says more about us as a culture that our media has become distilled to such a simple delivery method.
NineSixFourTwo 