Today The Daily Record is at it again, misleading people and doing the bidding of the Ibrox hierarchy.
If you’ve been following the social media feeds of the prominent Bampots this week you’ll know that both JJ and Phil have said that a certain Glasgow PR firm has had a sit-down with four of Scotland’s most notorious stenographers and laid out the approach they should take to issues surrounding the Sevco AGM. This is an attempt to control the information flow and anyone who goes along with it isn’t a journalist in even the remotest sense.
Yet we know that some would. The four weren’t chosen for their journalistic skills in the first place, hard as that will be for them to read.
They were chosen for the same reason political parties chose candidates whose ambitions are greater than their thirst for social reform; they are pliable, willing to toe the line in return for something, and morally bankrupt enough not to care.
Fed their lines, told what they should write, they returned to the newsrooms to hammer out their articles as instructed, but those articles are a fraud against their readers and even perhaps against the organisations they work for.
It’s not news if it comes from a public relations firm and what you write strays from pure fact if you’re being told to spin it a certain way.
Celtic fans don’t read these rags, by and large and especially not what’s written in The Daily Record, where you can judge the talent pool by the man who heads it; Keith Jackson. If that doesn’t send you running nothing will. These people know who their audience is, and they know what that audience wants to read. Good news, and nothing but.
The sports pages of that paper are catered to the whims of the Sevco support. Even their hiring policy reflects that; remember Alan Clark, whose atrocious piece on the coming AGM I pilloried here last week? He thought he would take a few not-so-subtle swipes at the bloggers in his puerile article, but it didn’t take long to find out that he is one of them, and I bet you can guess which team he supports and the kind of websites he writes on.
You couldn’t hope for a clearer cut example of the paper’s editorial policy than that; they actually hire straight from the Sevco blogosphere now. They don’t even try to hide what they are about any longer, and that’s important to consider in light of what the paper is up to today, and what its clear agenda is.
Because if you accept that the paper caters to Sevco fans and that the conclave these hacks were invited to was about controlling the information flow you have to conclude that it’s not Celtic fans or Aberdeen supporters who are being targeted by this disinformation scheme. It’s Sevco fans themselves. Ponder that for a second.
This is the club, through a public relations organisation, trying to control what the newspapers tell their own fans. And the papers are going right along with it, with The Daily Record – a longstanding ally of this Ibrox regime – leading the way, trumpets blaring.
Bluntly put, the papers are lying for Sevco, to Sevco’s own supporters.
What’s wrong with this picture, I ask you?
Yesterday it was the leaking of confidential information, designed to get Sevco fans focussed again on “the enemy” which is Sports Direct.
Today it’s the staggering story of how the AGM’s resolution 11 is designed to “limit the control” the Easdale’s and Ashley have over the board.
Excuse me? Do these people still have control over the board or the club?
Their influence has already been reduced to near non-existence and Blue Pitch were the subjects of a voting ban last year which they didn’t even bother to contest. That still applies and they have not raised a single murmur of discontent about it.
Yet the paper says the club needs to dilute the value of their shareholding, and that of Ashley and the Easdale’s, to the point where they can’t interfere with the processes of the club. They clearly don’t interfere right now, so it’s clear that this is an attempt to get fans to vote for a resolution that, because it’s about a new share issue, requires 75% shareholder support.
All of this spin is sheer nonsense, designed to keep people from looking too closely at the small print. Having gained 6% of the club through various means, and over a long period of time, Club 1872 – which is almost wholly in the pocket of King and his board and is actually voting for this idiocy – will see its own influence diluted accordingly, and only a couple of weeks after they’d bought a tranche of new shares.
The con-job is now in full swing, and the media is cheerleading it all the way.
The new share issue is King’s fantasy writ large, and this is only the first piece of spin you’ll be reading about it. It is an obvious put-up job, telling the fans this is needed to limit the influence of guys who have virtually none.
If the board can get this passed with the 75% they require then the influence of Ashley and Co is already confirmed to be non-existent.
A proposed share issue will have nothing whatsoever to do with weakening them.
A short ways down the line, it will be spun as a way of giving the fans greater control of the club at the same time as it raises revenues for the manager. That it won’t raise a fraction of what they need won’t be explored and nor will the further impact it has on the shares fans already own. Green has already done this to them, now they are poised for King to do exactly the same thing, and the same people are selling it as helped to sell it before.
Because Jackson and his colleagues might not like to remember this, far less admit it, but they were wholly supportive of that share scheme which, if we’re being frank, was actually a share scam. The only people pointing this inconvenient fact out were the Bampots and we warned Sevco fans not to be part of it, only for many of them to ignore that.
The value of those shares has collapsed whilst the people who put it together long ago departed with bulging pockets. Now those shares are about to be rendered utterly worthless by King’s double whammy even as he’s asking them to buy more.
How many times can he shear these sheep? As many times as he likes.
Sevco fans need to wake up. Anyone who tries to sell you something through a PR firm is not to be trusted. Anyone who has to get the word to you through Scotland’s premier brand of decorative bog-roll and its “lead sports writer” isn’t to be believed.
But you know what makes this especially poetic?
I can say all this until I’m blue in the face because it’s already too late for Sevco fans to alter the course of this.
In physics they call the “point of no return” for entering a Black Hole the Event Horizon.
Well it’s fast approaching for this club and everyone who follows it.