I am sick of the endless, deceiptful PR marriage of war and sport that bubbles to the surface on ANZAC Day like some malignant marketing orgasm.

As far as I can tell war and sport have only three things in common: they involve two sides wearing different uniforms and led by stupid but overpaid men; there’s usually a winner and a loser; and obsessed males buy books about both of them. If you watched any sports coverage on ANZAC Day you’d think the two were exactly the same. The broadcast of today’s AFL game started at 12 noon but the game itself doesn’t begin until 2.40pm. The preceding 160 minutes is 10 per cent football and 90 per cent thinly drawn analogies of war and sport, combat and games, hamstrings and minefields, sportsmen and warriors. Stories of AFL/VFL players who served in war because footy players and soldiers are, like, great heroes.

Let’s get a few things straight:

Sport is NOT war. Apart from nonsensical risky sports like high-speed motor racing, hardly anyone dies playing sport.

Running thoughtlessly into a pack of thick-necked footballers is not the same as running at a machine-gun nest.

In sport you might do a knee or rupture your Achilles tendon; in war you might have your head shot off.

Though it’s sometimes used otherwise, sport is apolitical; war is a continuation of politics by other means.

Footballers and soldiers are not the same thing, goddamit. Commemorate our war veterans and celebrate our sporting heroes - but don’t try to equate the latter with the former.

And a final question for the AFL: if the football community has always loved our returned soldiers, respected their effort in wartime and applauded players who served their country in war, etc. then why did the VFL competition continue through both world wars? Surely it should have been suspended as a mark of respect and to allow those brave footballing gladiators to serve Australia in war, as was done with the FA Cup…

While working as an editor in commercial television news I became aware of the phenomenon of the recurring news story (RNS). These are events that occur annually and will go to air each year virtually unchanged from last year save for fresh pictures and the odd random word change in the voiceover script. They represent everything wrong with television news, being the pinnacle of lazy journalism and easy airtime filler. You know an RNS when you see one: ANZAC day, Moomba parade, World’s Longest Lunch, Good Friday Appeal etc. I was reminded of this phenomenon on Friday while watching ABC news which contained a story about the AFL grand final parade and a story about the killed-in-the-line-of-duty police commemoration.

About 100,000 people lined the streets of Melbourne today to cheer on the teams competing in tomorrow’s AFL grand final. The parade route was awash with (insert grand final competitor #1’s colours) and (insert grand final competitor #2’s colours). Kids came face-to-face with their footballing heroes etc.

Melburnians dug deep today to give money to sick kids etc.

What happens on the day of an RNS is the newsroom chief-of-staff will allocate the piece to either the channel’s newest or most jaded journo – there is no middle ground here. The new journo will get the story because they are at the bottom of the pecking order. The experienced and jaded journo will get the story because they pissed the chief-of-staff off last week. The selected journo will hit the road with a jaded camera crew (there’s no other kind) to shoot some fresh vision to lay over the top of last year’s voiceover script, extracted from the news archive. They will then hit the edit suite manned by a jaded editor (there’s no other kind) and the new journo will micro-mange the story’s assembly while the jaded journo will barely stay long enough to hand over the camera tapes before hitting the pub.

When the RNS goes to air the autocue-bot will read the intro in a knowing voice, with just that right amount of cheese, cynicism and resignation.

And we will sit at home watching, content to consume such crap.