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The Daily Record Crossed A Line Yesterday. It’s Time To Ban All Its Hacks From Celtic Park

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If The Daily Record was based in England instead of ten minutes up the road from me, there’s a very real chance its editorial staff would have been facing criminal prosecution for what their print and online editions did yesterday.

That this hasn’t even dawned on them doesn’t surprise me at all.

Laws were recently passed in England and Wales on this very issue; in print it’s covered by various harassment and privacy statutes.

Online, the publication of personal information is known as doxing.

The law has been slow to deal with this kind of thing, but over the last couple of years people have gotten serious about it and the legal framework is now in place south of the border.

It’s a matter of time before similar laws appear here, and they are long overdue.

The Record’s behaviour yesterday was appalling even before it was pointed out that they had included photo stills from the Companies House website which included people’s home addresses, including that of our chief executive Peter Lawwell; on some of the online versions there’s some kind of grey magic marker been applied to some of that info, although not very well; it’s clearly legible. On other versions they’ve not even bothered with that.

This is incitement to violence; I’m afraid there’s no other way to put it.

People’s privacy has been invaded, but that’s a small matter next to the way the story strongly leans towards pandering to the lunatic fringe of the Sevco support, including those who threatened Neil Lennon and others.

The irresponsibility of it would be stunning except many of us believe labelling it as such does the Record more credit than it deserves. Its writers were more than happy to write a smear piece, targeting our club; why would we believe they weren’t motivated by darker desires?

There are Sevco bloggers who do this kind of thing; they are deplored by every right thinking person.

For a national newspaper to do it beyond offensive.

It is dangerous.

I consider the very act to be a not so subtle form of intimidation and it’s time our club acted in a resolute fashion and told this rag and its “journalists” they are no longer welcome at our ground.

They will cover our club anyway, in the manner they do right now; lying and smearing and spinning and distorting.

The difference is, they’ll no longer do it from seats in the press box and it’s overdue because the Daily Record is not a newspaper and it hasn’t been for a very, very long time; it is a repository for anti-Celtic PR and pro-Ibrox guff. It doesn’t employ journalists, it employs internet trolls, former players who can barely string a sentence together and people whose biases are so acute they belong writing for fanzines or official club websites.

But they should stop kidding themselves on that they are journalists and we should stop indulging them in that fantasy.

For one thing, it does a dis-service to their readers, or what’s left of them. There are still Celtic fans who buy this rag, those who perhaps don’t get online much, and it would be instructive for those guys to pick up the paper and see that Celtic had withdrawn support and co-operation from them. More than that, it debases a profession they’ve been scandalizing for far too long. De-legitimise them, and see what the results are.

But we can’t go on like this. Yesterday’s “reports” were a blatant attempt to muddy the waters ahead of major developments at Ibrox, developments which our national sport will need clear thinking if we’re going to tackle right.

The Record has chosen not to inform or educate but to act as a clearing house for lies and discredited rumours.

Even that, we could have understood because this is just the paper acting true to type; an all-out assault on our club was launched but it wasn’t the first of those and nor will it be the last. But they put people in harm’s way yesterday and that’s new and awful and unacceptable.

They will not be shamed, they are beyond that.

Instead they have to be punished, and that should start with banning every single one of their writers from our ground and our games. If individuals named yesterday have cause to bring legal action as a result of what appeared, well I hope they do that too.

The gloves ought to be off, and no action within the law should be off the table.

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