Today CQN was forced to clarify certain matters in relation to the ad they tried to put in The Guardian newspaper, and which the editors refused to do, after taking cash from the Requisitioners.
The reason they had to publish a clarification was simple enough; a lot of people in our online community are Guardian subscribers or readers and wrote to the paper asking for the specific reasons why the ad copy was refused.
And you know what the country’s liberal paper of record did then?
They lied about it.
They blatantly, openly, shamelessly lied to their own readers.
Incredibly, their lie was both stupid and easy to disprove. They told some of the respondents that the article had been submitted to them in French. If that makes you scratch your head then you’re not alone. CQN confirms that they did, at one point, have the article translated into French, but only in the context of whether the Swiss based paper would want it that way. They decided, in the end that because UEFA’s principals all speak English, to do it in that language.
No version in French was ever sent out to a newspaper, not here or in Zurich.
So what was the purpose of telling such a lie? Well, in spite of not giving CQN a reason why the ad was being refused, and in spite of not giving one to Alex Thomson when he asked earlier, they told those who emailed them that it had been refused on “editorial grounds” as a violation of their “unbiased sports coverage” policy.
In order to sell that obvious fiction – the ad space had already been booked and paid for, the article itself lawyered – they claimed that they had accepted the ad based on the French copy only, without knowing what it had said.
Is there a more obvious insult to our intelligence? On top of soliciting it, lawyering it, booking it and then pulling it for reasons unknown, they’re now going to try and pull this crap? The more you look at this the more it reeks and the more you wonder what they are hiding.
The blogger John James has an interesting theory; that the decision was “assisted” by two organisations with some involvement in Scottish football, both of whom have taken out ad space in The Guardian over the years. One is William Hill, sponsors of the Scottish Cup. The other is Ladbrokes, sponsors of the SPFL.
William Hill’s CEO used to be Ralph Topping. He’s now the chairman of the SPFL. And Ladbrokes, as this site has discussed many times, are deep in the power structure of Scottish football and are represented, at a local level, by a PR firm close to all of our hearts; that’s right, it’s our old friends at Level 5. A noxious mix, I’m sure you’ll agree.
Is this the reason for the steel shutters coming down?
Are those involved in running the game in Scotland somehow opposed to us getting to the truth and having other people know the facts?
This isn’t an allegation, you understand. It’s a question.
Another in a growing list of them.
The more they try to make this go away, the more of them they throw up, one after the other, again and again and again.