CLANCY OVERELL | Editor | CONTACT
Uh oh! It seems the moral arbiter of professional rugby league may have fallen off the saddle of his high horse, according to recent reports by the Sydney Morning Herald.
In news that can only undermine his ability to criticise players for off-field misconduct or drinking problems, it appears that outspoken NRL360 host Paul Kent may have made a little bit of a goose of himself.
And by goose, we mean, he has behaved in the exact manner that some of our favourite NRL players have been.
Except Kenty didn’t get arrested, he just got dragged out sight by Fox Sports PR fixers. In his first public appearance since publicly berating the Premiership winners for being ‘bad losers’ the day after their glorious back-to-back Premiership against his old club.
It is alleged that a long-standing Twitter beef between rival Roar.com league reporter Mike Meehall-Wood finally exploded when he and Kenty were put in the same room together yesterday, during the Kayo season launch at King St Wharf. What a doozy.
Meehall-Wood has taken great pride in calling out Kent’s “gutter, clientelist journalism” over the last two years. However, it was the tweet that accused him of “dog whistle bullshit” for his repeated digs at Panthers superstar Jarome Luai that is believed to have made Kenty a little bit cranky.
Witnesses say the two men engaged in a rather anti-social screaming match over the Meehall-Woods anti-NewsCorp dog whistling about Paul Kent’s anti-Polynesian dog whistling, which culminated in the silverfox bully jersey-punching the younger reporter and dragging him outside the venue.
This news has barely made a headline outside of the Sydney Morning Herald gossip columns. Perhaps this is because 70% of the Australian media market is also owned by the same family that employs Paul Kent to push culture wars hot buttons and accuse Indigenous and Polynesian athletes of being either ‘sooky’ or ‘arrogant’ on live TV three times a week.
With the first episode of NRL360 yet to broadcast for the 2023 season, it looks like it’s going to be a lot harder for Paul Kent to say things like ‘Penrith Players are acting like rat mugs’ or that ‘Latrell Mitchell needs to grow up’ or ‘alcohol is the common denominator for all player scandals’.
In fact, Kenty is going to even struggle arguing that the NRL players aren’t showing enough respect to their employers by asking for salary increases. Because a Murdoch journalist wrestling with a rival journalist at an official Murdoch event is the height of disrespectful!
