To see some people blindly dismissing the article in The Age on the basis of absolutely nothing annoys me greatly, and speaks to a broader problem I have with the way journalists are perceived on BigFooty.
BigFooty is a microcosm of everything wrong with the general public's over-generalised, uncompromising attitude of contempt towards the media. While it makes sense to be healthily critical towards the media, the level of distrust the public at large harbours towards the industry is so completely disproportionate that it borders on absurdity. In the context of the AFL, all AFL-related news stories, particularly trade stories, seem to be read through the prism of this deluded, spurious narrative that all sports journalists are muckraking scum, and people seem willing to resort to obscene depths of confirmation bias to support this idiotic agenda; any time a journalist breaks a story, the media as an industry never gets any credit for it or any enhancement to its reputation, no matter how often this phenomenon occurs, yet any minor detail that turns out to be mistaken, is held against the media as if it were evidence of systemic incompetence. To me, the self-righteous, elitist, condescending way the majority looks down on the media reflects more about the ignorance of those attempting to critique or deconstruct it than it does about the media itself.
Now, I'm no apologist for the media - obviously, there are major flaws within the industry - but personally speaking I put far more stock in the credibility of stories broken by those whose professions it is to break stories than the blithe, over-confident dismissals of those aforesaid stories by anonymous members of the general public, most of whom are in thrall of an irrational, anti-establishment conviction that all journalists do is make things up, despite the mountain of evidence - namely, the fact that literally every single trade that has gone through thus far was reported on by journalists before it went through - to the contrary. Call me crazy. The media may be imperfect, but most of the information they report is still broadly accurate. To acknowledge that fact is to be in touch with reality, which is certainly preferably than continuing to perpetuate hoary old myths about the incorrigible untrustworthiness of sports journos.