Calm Down

God knows I wasn’t going to write about the Sydney Swans, not least because I have no idea what happened in the wee hours of yesterday morning. It’s murky as hell and remains the subject of a police investigation. For anyone who holds a pen or a microphone, I’d describe valour here as being restraint and the presumption of innocence.

But in journalism it’s typically a race to be first, and in commentary it’s even worse: restraint and presuming innocence don’t typically get you published in the op-ed pages. Always better to assert your righteousness as soon as possible, and in lieu of facts to marshal non sequiturs to better uphold it.

And so it was with this piece by Angela Pippos, published earlier today by The Age. Arrogantly impulsive, the piece regretfully acknowledges its lack of facts but then, undeterred, continues in that familiar vein of cliché-mottled sanctimony. It begins:

“When Sydney Swans CEO Matthew Pavlich addressed the media on Monday about the alleged sexual assault scandal enveloping his club, he said he was ‘shocked and disappointed’ that the players have ‘found themselves in this situation’.

“The ‘situation’ he was referring to was that after their game against Essendon on Sunday, five Swans players had been out drinking to 3am, then invited women back to their rooms at the Pullman Hotel, which were paid for by the AFL.

“Pavlich’s language bizarrely implies that the players somehow stumbled into a situation not of their making. At least one woman has since made an allegation of sexual assault over what unfolded in that hotel room. Eight police officers attended the hotel and are investigating. To date, none of the players have been formally interviewed or charged.

“We don’t yet know what happened in the hotel room but at a bare minimum, sexual assault allegation aside, by bringing two women back after a night drinking, the players involved have apparently shown no regard towards their partners, their teammates, and their AFLW team.”

That we don’t yet know what happened might’ve been cause for aborting this column, but Pippos was doubling down – the second clause of that sentence, in an attempt to hedge against the ignorance she confessed in the first, is given to weird puritanism. And quite naturally, because it would be unsatisfactory to her, and her editor, to have ended that sentence where it should’ve: “We don’t yet know what happened in the hotel room.”

What is bizarre is that Pippos might question Pavlich’s language about a situation she admits she knows nothing about. Pavlich appeared before media just hours after police began arriving at the Melbourne hotel where the team was staying: his words weren’t meant to be illuminative. They were a placeholder. They were dutiful and platitudinous – necessarily so because he himself was a) attempting to figure out what happened, b) modestly satisfy the curious media scrum, and c) not inadvertently insult a police investigation.

What might Pippos have Pavlich do? Pretend to possess facts that he doesn’t have and, thus “armed”, assume a greater authority than the police?

Oh – perhaps she would. “It’s time for them to do their bit,” she writes. “And by ‘do their bit’, I simply mean call out and educate the community about sexist and demeaning behaviour – the kind of behaviour that excuses and validates gendered violence.”

I can’t stress how surreal this paragraph is when accompanied by the fact that we don’t know what happened.

Pippos’ attention now turned to the footy pundits: “The focus has been on the five players and the inconvenient timing of the allegation at the pointy end of the season,” she wrote.

Sweet Jesus. I’ve watched quite a bit of footy media in the wake of all this – much more than I’d ever like or recommend – and it’s seemed to me that most, if not all pundits, have earnestly pre-empted their footy-based reflections with an acknowledgment of the gravity of all this.

Now, in the midst of a (currently) mysterious scandal – the worst assumptions of which would be terribly grave indeed – reflections on Sydney’s season are jarring. They might strike one as witlessly trivial, at best, and at worst sinisterly oblivious.

But, at time of writing, this reaction is either absurd or disingenuous. For one, they’re footy commentators, not crime reporters, and are professionally obliged to offer something achingly dull about the sporting side of things, but, much more importantly, they are speaking about the things that they can speak about outside the limitations of fact and the law.

After one makes a sober acknowledgment of the Situation (as those I’ve seen have), what’s left for the footy pundit as simple matters of fact or inference, and which won’t jeopardise grave and formal investigations, are the jarringly prosaic. It’s notable that Pippos doesn’t cite any example of gratuitous insensitivity or trivialisation.

While pondering the fortunes of the Swans may now seem cringingly insignificant, there are legal and epistemic restrictions here – and, to be fair to pundits whose whole profession I’m typically unkind to, they’ve acknowledged as much.

Pippos, like Pavlich, is yet to know what actually happened – and as such, must conscript those non sequiturs. “Just two weeks ago, former footballer and television host Sam Newman said on a podcast that the woman raped by AFL players’ agent Ralph Carr ‘might have had some buyer’s remorse’”.

A gross comment from a notorious creep, but this here is called conflation. We must remind ourselves of what Pippos herself wrote in the same piece: “We don’t yet know what happened”.

Deprived of any facts, Pippos must energetically conscript other things too: the long history of misogynistic resistance to women in sport and the sewers of social media. None of which – for now, anyway – have anything to do with the ostensible subject of her column. But this thing is like these things – even if we don’t know yet what this thing is. The argument describes a pretzel.

It’s a bleak irony, and one presumably lost on its author, that a piece decrying the quality of public commentary might offer a wretched example of its own. What’s more, I question the benefit of publishing uncooked righteousness and associative arguments about something so important. It might be that terrible things happened, but it’s definitely true that your LinkedIn commentary can wait until we know.

The righteous impulse that’s evident in this piece – at once voluble and vain – repels those you might like to persuade. And it’s an impulse that should be tempered because justice pre-empted is often no justice at all.

My third book, Sirens, was released in May. Go on, have a look.