Daisy in strife

[Lods]

What the wider community think is irrelevant, if you want to build unity and a culture what Carlton people think, the coaches, players, families, staff, sponsors and fans is the really important perspective.

If the publicly exposed order of events had been different in most cases it's usually first in best dressed. I'm not sure you can make the bolded argument retrospectively. In my experience the opening statement sets the agenda and perspective, it's why print and broadcast media structure reports and headlines the way they do, they know most people form opinion on the first line or two of a report and never read or pay attention to the rest!

Have a look at CheatsFC, despite the early claims being clearly exposed as false, to this day it's still the opinion of CheatsFC fans that the players were ignorant of any wrong doing! But that lie by deliberate omission of a fact, set up the structure of support for the players and ultimately stronger support for CheatsFC as a club!

My father was a journalist and what you say is true about structuring reports.

The thing is "Daisy will attend a children's cancer function" would hardly have raised an eyebrow.
Good bloke playing good football for a struggling club ….but it would only get a paragraph if a mention at all.
It might be a nice piece for the club website in the aftermath.

"Daisy drinks too much at function" is a much larger story.
The fact that it was a cancer charity function  was reported extensively.

The reason I think the bit you wrote about using the charity function as a defence would backfire is that I'm a Carlton tragic and a Daisy fan....and I felt uncomfortable that would be the line we'd take.