Media

FEVOLA: VEXNEWS confronts football pig’s abuse of power

Brendan Fevola has now shifted from Carlton to Brisbane. And VEXNEWS’s story on his outrageous misconduct attracted so much attention it brought down our website for most of this afternoon, and while that was going on we incurred the wrath of grouchotron Neil Mitchell on 3AW, got credit where it was due from the patriots at ninemsn and an ever so slight touch-up from our friends at News Ltd, who’ve been busy managing a sticky situation.

For the most part we won’t get attribution for breaking the story due to the laziness and intellectual dishonesty of too many in the meeja. But as Ronald Reagan once said “There is no limit to what a man might accomplish if he doesn’t mind who gets the credit.”

Our objective: bring Brendan Fevola to account.

With the story exploding all around him, and a real question mark over whether he should be able to continue as an AFL footballer, we are happy to declare ‘mission accomplished’.

OUR FRIENDS AT THE HUN
The Herald Sun is a great newspaper, the jewel in the crown of the Australian News Limited empire. It is truly of one of the world’s great newspapers.

VEXNEWS is frequently in the habit of co-operating with the Herald Sun on many stories, partly because they have such a great reach and they do what they do so very well and professionally. That and they are the mortal enemy of our enemies at The Age, of course.

We are aware of only one serious foe in the Herald Sun, a former Sunday Hun editor in retirement mode who is not used to be scrutinised and is still extremely grouchy about our cruel and unusual punishment of his wrongdoing.

Out of respect for him and his colleagues, we usually leave him alone unless subjected to extreme provocation. At one stage, the former Sunday editor argued in the pages of the newspaper that our reporting on the political candidacy of his ultra-leftist mate Les Twentyman was “criminal” and warranted “Police action.” It was an outrageous slur and we responded in kind, analysing his pointless waste-of-space weekly column in a vigorous way. His response was to engineer an unpleasant article about my father, a long since retired politician, proving that the former editor is not only clueless in pampered retirement but gutless as well.

Other than that, we love the Herald Sun, we read it every day, regularly supply them with stories or tips, and salute their great work in eliminating The Age from the face of the Earth. For Pete’s sake, we won’t even name the former Sunday editor who is an out-of-control sociopath, because we respect his bosses like Rupert Murdoch, Peter Blunden, Phil Gardiner and many of their colleagues who are the best in the business. It’s a large organisation so there’s bound to be the occasional freak. We’ve only encountered one there so far.

RUMOUR SITE? OR JUST REPORTING NEWS?
We also don’t fault their approach to the gravely serious problem of having one of their staff sexually harassed by Brendan Fevola. They’ve put her first, as they should. They’ve been very sensitive about the whole issue, understandably.

No one can fault how they’ve handled the issue and we’ve made it very clear we have no issue with what they’ve done. They are indeed a case study in sensitivity, decency and honour in how to treat a staffer in what is clearly a perplexing and disturbing situation. We can’t imagine what more they could have done for their employee.

But it does seem a little rich of them to describe VEXNEWS as a “rumour website.” We don’t publish unverified rumours and never have. We are no more a rumour website than news.com.au or the Times of London’s website or dead trees edition. We report news, we break news, we do that by verifying stories to the greatest extent possible, with multiple sources.

The author given a by-line in that story is someone known to me, not someone we regularly give stories and tips to but we certainly have in the past and would happily help her again. She’s a rising star there. The by-lined author would know full well that we are not in the business of publishing unverified rumours, any more than the Herald Sun does.

Indeed this story is living proof of it. We broke it first. And now all involved have acknowledged the story to be true.

Like our newspaper friends, we can make mistakes but we don’t do so very often. And we apologise when we do.

In this case, unlike Brendan Fevola, we have nothing for which to apologise. His expression of ’sorryness’ (sic) kind of says it all. He’s an overpaid piece of human excrement who should be sitting down to write big fat cheques to his victims. His ’sorryness’ should be measured in the tens of thousands of dollars.

In relation to this story, we did nothing more or less than speak truth to Brendan Fevola’s grotesque abuse of power. We are delighted that he’s now being held to account for it. When he’s pulled out his chequebook and been really punished for his disgusting behaviour, justice will be done.

He might be Brisbane Lions’ problem. But Brendan Fevola has become an issue for all of us to carefully consider.

Is he fit to be a lavishly paid role model for Aussie kids? Like our friends at the Herald Sun, we don’t think so.

© 2009 VEXNEWS 2010©.