The infuriating media practice of dubbing someone a 'former football star' - regardless of the fact of whether they played two top flight games or 200 - when they hit the news for terrible reasons has long been a frustrating one for sports journalists.

It reached a despicable crescendo this week when a Queensland man set his wife's car alight, killing her and their three children before taking his own life.

In one of the most vile attempts at clickbait you could possibly envisage, a prominent online sports website saw fit to label the murderer as an 'ex-NRL star'.

He hadn't played a single NRL game for starters, the closest he came was a pre-season trial with the New Zealand Warriors.

The toughest thing to swallow for anyone with a shred of conscience was the fact the website was reporting on this terrible story at all.

The horror that unfolded on Wednesday in Brisbane has nothing to do with the murderer's sporting prowess.

To link him to the NRL just to generate a few more clicks is just about as close to being morally bankrupt as you can possibly get.

When the story was promoted as such on social media on Wednesday it was met with an overwhelming torrent of justifiable outrage from readers who simply couldn't believe it had been presented as the murderer 'dying alongside his family'.

However, in a gobsmacking inability to read the room the same website posted an article on Thursday recounting how the 'former rugby and league player rubbed shoulders with high profile stars' once his career ended.

His rugby league background has about as much relevance as whether he was a 'hopscotch enthusiast' or 'model train collector'.

This type of reporting only erodes the already shaky trust that we can expect audiences to have with the media.

Yes, 'clicks' are important. In media's modern digital age it's vital online content is popular, thus attracting advertising dollars and keeping journos in jobs.

But it shouldn't come at the expense of our souls, our very moral fibre and our sense of what is right and what is wrong.

The fact that no names ever appeared on the above-mentioned 'ex-NRL star' articles speaks volumes.

The journalists may have foreseen the furore which awaited (and those alarm bells should have curtailed publishing it right then and there).

But the more likely scenario is the writer, or writers, were pressured into doing so by their click-hungry bosses, wanting to satisfy their own superiors, and were understandably too ashamed to put their name to it.

Sensitivity must always be the priority ahead of potential readership. Imagine if it was your loved ones involved? How would you like it to be handled respectfully by the media?

Keeping those questions in mind would certainly be a good start going forward.