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Celtic Fans Crowdfunded Newspaper Ads On Resolution 12 Shames The Media

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Last night, as some of you’ll be aware, I posted an article over on Fields about the incredible crowdfunding campaign launched over on CQN which has delivered the money to put full page ads on Resolution 12 and the lack of SFA oversight in two national newspapers next week, one in Scotland one in Switzerland.

They are in the process of raising money for a third.

If you can help them do it, I have put a link at the bottom of this article for you.

As I said over on Fields (you can read the article clicking here) this is an important step because it takes the campaigns off the internet and puts them into the mainstream, but it also says something interesting, something damning, about our press and I didn’t want the Fields article turning into a rant about that.

I thought I’d save the rant for here!

Over the last couple of weeks, many Celtic bloggers and online campaigners have been trying to get the BBC and other outlets to engage with the issues presented in the Offshore Game report which laid into the SFA over their handling of Lord Nimmo Smith and the core matter at the heart of Resolution 12 itself.

When Kenny MacIntyre tweeted that the BBC hadn’t yet decided whether or not an outside agency with tremendous clout slamming the football association was actually a news story Celtic’s online community was almost convulsed in laughter, although it was quite a serious moment.

When he talked about legalities we marvelled at how the very organisation which produced the Offshore Game report – the Tax Justice Network – was being quoted by the very same BBC on a story where they’d alleged the theft of literally billions of pounds from developing countries.

But of course, there are no legal problems with that eah?

Tom English has said the report was “flawed” but never attempted to point out what a single one of those flaws actually was, making the BBC Scotland silence on the matter now a complete embarrassment and textbook exercise in changing the story and clutching at straws.

So this is a flawed, non-news story with legal issues surrounding it?

Have you ever heard such blatant bull in all your life?

These people haven’t even decided on a “line to take”, they are all over the map, making excuses as they go.

It would be pathetic and contemptible except these people work for us, for the national broadcaster, for the organisation that’s supposed to report the facts without fear or favour, but which has swallowed the Survival Myth whole and regurgitates it every chance they get and is now blatantly ignoring a fantastically researched report from an outside agency which accuses the SFA of bad governance and even corruption.

This is scandalous in and of itself.

But it pales into insignificance next to the humiliation that’s heaped on these people by the courage and commitment of our supporters.

They don’t want to wait any longer for the media to do it’s job.

As many of us have already started blogs and websites, these guys are going to make sure the press writes the truth even if they have to pay for it themselves.

Imagine that; football fans paying to put in the paper a piece of work the papers own journalists are too timid to write.

How do you hide behind “legalities” as an excuse for not delving into a story when the lawyers at a national newspaper have said it’s fit for a full page ad?

Does anything more clearly reveal the truth; that for whatever reason these people don’t want to touch this with a 20 foot pole and are hiding behind pitiful excuses?

How do you say that this is not news when everyone online is talking about it?

When it’s been the subject of tens of thousands of words across various social media?

The media silence on this is disgraceful.

What these ads will do is take their disgrace and magnify it 1000 times. People with no knowledge at all of football will be appalled when they realise what’s going on here, at how the Scottish media, as a whole, has decided simply to ignore a story of major significance.

What’s worse now is the attempts to smear people, even the writers of the report.

For the record, the Offshore Game is wholly independent and its writers are highly intelligent, well educated people who are eminently qualified to make judgements such as those in the piece. They allowed every person right of reply.

They asked for quotes from all those named and involved.

They have been completely above board in the way they’ve handled it.

When they were asked to examine certain aspects of the piece they didn’t do what the Scottish media has done here and simply ignore that; they went out of their way to respond to the criticisms and wrote a very detailed amendment which clarified some matters and actually took on board some of what the critics had said.

They published their response in full.

But as they pointed out, not a bit of it contradicted the central facts in their story.

Everything these guys did, at every stage, was thoroughly professional.

Yet last night, one internet tweet from someone who calls himself Football Is Fixed suggested – to the delight of the gibbering hordes and conspiracy theorists of Sevconia – that the report had been “paid for” by CQN and The Scottish Football Monitor.

I don’t know which part of that I find more hilarious. That someone would tweet this or that the Great Unwashed would actually believe it.

The Offshore Game’s parent organisation, The Tax Justice Network, is a registered company which publishes annual accounts and details of all those who make donations over £5000. Their accounts for last year show £750,000 of income.

I know this is a mysterious and unbelievable concept to the people whose own efforts to raise enough money to save their club when it was ailing in 2012 were laughably weak … but there are people out there willing to spend their own money on helping those who would expose corruption, rather than excusing those who would try to hide it.

Above and beyond that, what these thick idiots have to realise is that there’s a world of difference between an organisation that accepts contributions in order to do its work and one that actually solicits cash to produce reports.

The allegation that The Offshore Game wrote this report because it was paid to is more than just moronic; it is libellous.

It calls their impartiality into question, which is the very worst thing anyone can say about an independent agency.

It says their ethics are for sale, which is about as damaging as any claim can be.

Anyone making that allegation is begging for trouble of the worst kind.

This has moved on from being a football only story.

It’s now about media complicity in a scandal. It’s now about how the press covers major events in Scotland. It asks questions about how we can trust them, even the BBC, when we know, for sure, that they are desperately trying to keep a lid on this for whatever reasons they have.

Some have suggested that it’s out of fear.

Fear of who? Of the assorted goons who give them a hard time on Twitter?

If these people are so scary how come guys like me can publish under our own names and go about our business quite the thing?

This isn’t to say that we’ve avoided trouble.

Myself and others, like Paul67, Paul Larkin, Andy Muirhead at Scotzine, like Phil, like Angela Haggerty, have called these people out publicly, ridiculed them, mocked them in merciless, often comic, ways and driven many of them half mad believing we represent the vanguard of a great conspiracy that they call The Unseen Hand. We’ve each been through the shit for doing so, but it’s not stopped us getting on with it.

Yet here we still are. None the worse for it.

Angela had to take someone to court over the appalling abuse she got. Paul67 got a lot of hassle at home for a time. Imagine that? Andy Muirhead has put up with more than any person I know should ever have to, including being targeted by the most vile people imaginable. Phil had his book launch derailed by the goon squad and if he didn’t live in Ireland would have to put up with far worse. Paul Larkin was subjected to a mind-bending amount of bile and hassle when his book The Asterix Years came out and I’ve had issues of my own I won’t go into, save to say that just last night Fields was the subject of a simultaneous denial of service attack and a hacking which almost took the site down.

We’ve all had to accept a certain amount of grief.

But we do it. We don’t hide. It’s astonishing how gutless these clowns actually are when you simply confront them, but our media never does that.

Who is the biggest fish in the media pond in Scotland? The national broadcaster or a Glasgow based PR company run by a fat former hack and a squad of rejects from the tabloids and the old Rangers press office? Why are Celtic fans now paying newspapers to run stories the papers own journalists are too spineless to run themselves?

We shame these people, yet they are not ashamed.

That’s why these ads are important.

That’s why they deserve your support.

You can contribute to the third national newspaper ad by clicking here.

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