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Yesterday I read one of the best articles I have in years.
You can read it clicking on this link.
It’s called “Scottish Media & The Celtic Tax Case.” In it, the writer thoroughly dismantles last week’s piece from The Daily Record, which sought to suggest that our club had been involved in a Sevco style scandal involving HMRC and LLP trusts.
Almost every Celtic supporter’s blog had covered the story and thoroughly condemned it, but what made this article special was that it was a forensic takedown of the Record’s piece. It was detailed, thoughtful, intelligent, well written and devastating.
It placed the Record’s shoddy report in the proper context and questioned the motives and integrity not only of the journalists who wrote it but the editor who approved it and ordered that it be published.
The article doesn’t actually detail the editorial process which resulted in that dreadful piece, but take a moment and think about what that would have been; someone proposed that article at a meeting, there would have been a debate about its merits, and “reporters” would have been assigned to do it. This wasn’t a flight of fancy from someone; an actual series of discussions and planning sessions would have gone into an article like that.
Which makes it somehow worse.
Bear that in mind when you read the rest of this article, because I want to look at the reason why it’s important to keep on challenging this kind of nonsense, and why blogs like this one, like CQN, like Celtic Underground, E-Tims, IndyCelts, VideoCelts and others will always be watching these people and taking them on.
I know many Celtic fans don’t read the mainstream press any longer. Some of them think that this kind of thing is unimportant as a result. They couldn’t be more wrong.
These are just some of the reasons why.
To read the next page click on the link above.
The Bloggers Don’t Have The Reach Of The MSM … Yet
This is the main reason why we can’t let these people get away with doing the things they do.
The media reach is longer, by far, than that of the bloggers at the moment.
The Record itself shifts more than 100,000 copies every single day, and the accepted wisdom within the trade is that readership is roughly three times circulation, which means that The Record still gets picked up and read by 300,000 or so. That’s an enormous number for a country this size.
It gives the paper many things, including credibility with the clubs, the governing bodies and even the political parties.
Do not underestimate those things. The print media still thinks it can set the agenda. During the independence referendum it was the Record that published the notorious (and soon discredited) Pledge to Scotland … it didn’t last but it did the job, and helped the No campaign get over the line.
That’s what we’re up against. Don’t forget that.
For all that, there’s good news.
There was a time when the media could write what it wanted and go essentially unchallenged. The blogs might not have the reach of the MSM yet but the readerships are growing and the influence of the bloggers is now, arguably, greater than that of the hacks at their own individual clubs.
Things are changing, slowly, and whilst the current generation of “leaders” in the sport try to pretend we’re not here the next set of them are going to have factor us in to every single thing they do. It’s going to get better.
The Bloggers Don’t Have The Resources To Do Major Investigations … Yet
In a perfect world the bloggers would be focussed only on covering their local clubs.
There would be no need for commentary, for breaking news, for correcting and dealing with lies.
All this has come about because the MSM in Scotland is hopelessly compromised and corrupt.
I make no apology for using those particular words; they are an accurate reflection of where we are.
If it wasn’t so, if the media actually did what it was meant to do, if it actually reported the news and went after the facts there would be no need for us to. And in many ways it would be better, by far, for Scottish football if that was the case. Because the media has resources the bloggers simply don’t have.
They have a surface credibility we can’t touch at the present time. A journalist can pick up a phone and call any national organisation for a quote. He or she can email a club to ask to talk to an official or player. They can go “on the record” with a manager or director.
And they can dig. Using sources in various public bodies and with the power of a media organisation’s chequebook behind them they can get information that’s beyond the reach of even the most diligent and dedicated of the Bampots.
This site depends on advertising. Many of you have complained about it, and I’m sympathetic of course. But without it there wouldn’t be a site. Over on Fields I maintain that site on donations. (Feel free to make one if you like the work I do haha; you can do it by clicking on the link at the bottom of the last piece).
I put less time into that one than I’d like, and why?
Because the big pieces, the investigatory ones, they get published over there and I’m not able to devote as much time and attention to them as I’d like.
My resources and time are limited. To do a major investigative piece is a huge undertaking for one person working alone.
There aren’t always enough hours in the day.
Newspapers have multiple journalists working on a big story and they’ve got the money and the influence to back them up. We don’t have that. Yet.
But Fields has been going strong for four years on the back of reader support. I’ve been running this site now for a little over two, and it’s working out. I’ll never have the resources of a national title, but as long as things are going well I’ll be here, doing this.
On top of that, the readers make us credible. The more of you there are the more we look like an alternative to the MSM. That’s opened doors for us; many of us now get access to the kind of information that explodes onto the front page.
People don’t expect payment for it, or credit … many of them hear snippets and think they are worth passing on, but occasionally you get a true insider, someone who knows a story deserves an audience and has the facts to do it justice. Those are little gems, little packets of gold dust, and the more of them there are the better we’ll do.
Finally, it’s not unusual these days for bloggers to work together on a story, and the more successful they are at doing so the more of those close collaborations there will be. That can give us the weight and the clout to really break the can of worms open.
The Media Can Give Legitimacy To Dangerous Ideas
One of the most potent reasons that it’s important for us to keep on doing what we do is that the media is capable of taking the dumbest, most barking, conspiracy theory or crazy notion and putting it in the public domain, with a coating of “respectability” on it.
That’s dangerous, for obvious reasons.
In the aftermath of the Scottish Cup Final Sevco’s claim that it’s players and management team were assaulted on the pitch was never given the scrutiny it deserved by the press. Having investigated the matter thoroughly (and I keep meaning to write up my findings; see the previous page) I am convinced that few – if any – Sevco players had hands laid on them that day.
The idea that fans assaulted players and that it was motivated by some form of sectarianism or hatred for the club itself is reckless and potentially deadly.
Sevco’s board are probably the most unscrupulous men in the recent history of our national game; I am not surprised to see them push this line to their more rabid, idiotic followers.
But I am aghast at the way the media helped them do it, unquestioningly and apparently without regard for the potential consequences of that, and the worst example of it, of course, came from the Record itself, and Keith Jackson, who wasn’t content with the utter nonsense that was already flying about in regards to the game but went much further and wrote an incendiary and quite deranged article saying every Sevco player had been attacked that day.
This latest story, about the “Celtic tax case” has spawned a rash of conspiracy theories all its own, but part of why it was written was to tap into a deep-seated paranoia amongst the Sevco support not only that their club was “singled out” for bad treatment by a country that hates them but that there’s this gigantic network out there which exists to protect our club from scrutiny or harm, so that when nothing comes of this shoddy “investigation” they have another brick in their wall of ignorance.
This, too, is deeply dangerous.
On top of that, who can forget the treatment Neil Lennon got from these guys?
It was our media which created, and pushed, the notion that our former manager somehow “brought it all on himself”, one of the most hateful suggestions every given mainstream coverage. It was all the fuel that the bombers and bullet senders needed to do their worst.
The Media Still Decides What The “Official Verdict” Looks Like … For Now
Whether we like it or not, the bloggers are still viewed by many as being “out there” on the fringes, and because so many of us are built around our own clubs there’s a perception that anything we write about, whether it’s our own clubs or those on the other side is automatically biased.
We’re also accused of being severely revisionist when it comes to our own history and the history of the game at large, and to being very selective in how that’s presented.
For most of us, those claims do not stand up at all. Yet even if they did, this is nothing the MSM doesn’t do. There’s not a newspaper in the country that didn’t write, with clarity and without doubt, that liquidation meant death.
Now the same titles flatly deny that death is what happened. They virtually invented the Survival and Victim Lies and they continue to push both like a drug. No wonder commentators and media personalities outside Scotland have largely swallowed both of those lies, and continue to propagate them today.
The Scottish Cup Final, as mentioned earlier, is another case in point. So too is the “verdict” of the Lord Nimmo Smith case, which wasn’t, as Sevconites and their PR buddies like to claim a total vindication. Their club cheated. It’s a fact, as the commission established quite plainly.
Only two ridiculous pieces of deflection and spin kept that from having dire consequences including the removal of historical titles; the notion that cheating isn’t cheating unless it’s discovered at the time and the idea that a gigantic multi-million pound tax fraud that let you pay players you otherwise would never have had “didn’t confer a sporting advantage.” The “official record” as put forward by the press is that Rangers and Sevco “won” that case.
Half-truths, untruths, rumour, innuendo and even flat out utter lies have been given credence and credibility by the mainstream press over the years, and many of those things are now “accepted facts” which govern the dynamics of our game. This is a travesty and an outrage. It doesn’t just lead us down blind alleys, it leads us off cliffs.
Yet even these things are slowly changing; a number of Celtic bloggers and authors have written books on these grubby years; Paul Larkin and Phil McGiollabhain are amongst them, and the best known, and I’m sure I’ll write one of my own in time to come.
History is written by the winners; that’s the accepted wisdom.
And the old media is dying just like the football club so many of them still fawn over.
We won. A
nd we’ll present that in all its gory glory, and we’ll see who future generations believe.
The Media Can Actually Destabilise Our Club, If We Let It
Media bias has been used to demonise whole countries. It has been used to promote illegal wars. It has helped to destroy political leaders. I have a media degree, and there is a long history of the press doing all of these things, in a variety of countries. To give you but one example; for years Boris Johnson was a writer for The Financial Times, and he quite literally invented a lot of the media lies which later went mainstream and formed the basis of much of the Brexit campaign.
Believe me when I say this; if we let the media simply write what it wants without challenge it will destabilise our football club to the point where we don’t trust anything that comes out of Celtic Park, or any of the people who work within it.
If all we had was the media version of events, our club would look very different and so would Scottish football. If the media’s lies were allowed to simply set the agenda, without us keeping an eye on them, they would write far worse than some of what they actually do.
Before the internet they had free reign, and they enjoyed that.
They tried to destroy Wim Jansen and Jo Venglos before they were even in the door. They branded Lubo Moravcik a disaster before they’d ever watched him play and they gave David Murray the free ride to end them all whilst whipping up anger amongst the Celtic fans against the great Fergus McCann.
Why do you think so many fans booed him on that famous day he unfurled the league flag? It’s certainly in part because the media narrative had encouraged that action over a long period of time, including the notorious comparison with Saddam Hussein, not to mention the unflattering comparisons with the megalomaniac owner at Rangers.
None of that works now, and I know that myself. Even the bloggers can’t write critical stories about Celtic without getting stick for it, and without someone dismantling the case we’re trying to make. Every article I’ve ever written about The Strategy which defined so much of our club’s last few years has been taken apart by other Celtic fans; I am not complaining. It’s exactly what should happen and it’s a credit to every single one of those who’ve done it in a reasonable way.
Celtic Fans Need To Keep The Pressure On These People ….
We’ve done one Hell of a job over the last couple of years, as a support, as a collective, and I do believe we’ve really changed the nature of the game. But we haven’t done it by ignoring the media as some have suggested. It’s not enough to simply not buy papers or even, as some seem to think, not reading what they write.
What they write is still important. It can still hurt us, but only if we don’t tackle the lies and the misinformation and the spin.
That’s why some of us are determined to.
It’s why the article I highlighted at the start of this article is so damned good, and so damned important.
If you haven’t read it already, please do it now.