It seems that the “football site” HTC is getting some stick today due to a story it published yesterday on a “conspiracy theory” linking Red Bull, Sevco, Celtic and Moussa Dembele.
Having read it, I feel the need to tackle a subject I’ve wanted to for a while, but before I do let me correct a misconception some seem to have about the HTC site.
HTC is not a football site.
It is a huge “news” organisation who’s “writers” cover a variety of subjects across a mammoth operation. It is a gigantic corporate clickbait site, dedicated only to getting hits, as many of them as possible. Its average article is under 250 words – there is more meat in a Keith Jackson piece – and even then its writers are encouraged to use as much filler (quotes, cuts from other sites etc) as possible, so they can move swiftly onto the next idiotic subject.
If you clicked on their article – on any of their articles at all – you’ve probably done so because of the headline. That’s what you were supposed to do. More creativity, more thinking, more work, goes into the headlines on those sites than anything that’s under them.
They thrive on controversy, inventing it when there is none.
They are manned by journalism school drop-outs and wannabees who couldn’t get gigs in the mainstream press. It is lower than grunt work. Trained chimps could do it with ease, and one of the writers recently broke cover in The Guardian to confirm what I’ve long suspected; working on those sites is a death sentence for anyone who wants an actual media career.
These people are encouraged to turn out a minimum number of articles per day … and they are almost entirely unhappy in spite of having a daily word output that myself and some of the other bloggers would consider a coffee break total.
If you are depending on that site for news or information, you’re looking in the wrong place.
But I doubt there’s anyone who doesn’t know that.
The article in question is quite possibly the worst piece of clickbait nonsense I’ve ever read, on any site, for many years. It is outright garbage, with no possibility of the slightest redemption. It is based on another piece of clickbait nonsense, from The Sun, which suggests that RB Leipzig are going to join the race for Moussa Dembele. The Sun based its piece of fiction on yet another piece of clickbait nonsense that appeared in The Daily Mail.
This is how “reporting” in Scotland works now.
You are watching the evolution of a lie.
It’s instructive to do this, to observe it at work, because every iteration gets a little bigger, a little bit fatter, and a little bit juicier. I wouldn’t mind if these sites were open about their intent, like HTC, and not pretending to be something else. But these are supposed to be mainstream titles, actual news organisations, and here they are shilling this guff.
Last week every major news outlet rushed to reproduce and give credence to a story that appeared on a local clickbait website called Glasgow Live, linking Dembele with a move to Liverpool. It wasn’t even remotely true, but that didn’t matter.
These stories get bounced from one place to another and generate their own momentum.
It is lazy journalism at its very worst.
There was no evidence to support The Daily Mail’s claim about Leipzig and Dembele at all except that they are an ambitious club with a truckload of money and are currently top of the German league (you notice that none of that has the slightest thing to do with Celtic or Moussa, right?) … but The Sun managed to squeeze a follow-up piece out of it nonetheless.
And as ridiculous as The Sun’s piece is it is a Pulitzer Prize winner by comparison to the one that HTC wrote based on it.
The suggestion attempts to link two wholly separate, but equally shitty, stories under one perverse banner; the RB Leipzig want Dembele story and the Red Bull might want to buy Sevco story. Combine them and you get an even stupider story, which is that Red Bull might buy Dembele for their German club prior to buying Sevco, so as to inflict damage on us before they do.
This is curious logic. No logic at all, some would say.
Because it makes good sense (doesn’t it?) if you are planning to take over a club to give its rivals a £30 million cheque before you do, right? It makes good sense that your first “investment” in Scottish football shouldn’t be to buy the club you really want but to hand their rival enough that they could do it instead, if they wanted to, or at the very least go on a spending spree so large you would have to spend twice what you’d originally intended to catch them.
What genius came up with this?
The writer thinks this is a win for Sevco, who’s fans, presumably, would then flock to embrace a company that wanted to change their jersey, their name, their badge and ditch not only the four years of history they’ve got but also the records they have gone to great pains to tell the rest of us they have, those of the defunct and dead Rangers.
I spend a lot of time on this site analysing the behaviour of the media and attempting to deconstruct the things they do, and write about, but this is the first time I’ve felt the need to comment on a site like HTC, although I have discussed articles on Sevco blogs and I never tire of taking shots at those who work in the mainstream press.
Sites like HTC aren’t generally worth my time, but this article is elevated because it is so incompetent and ridiculous and without the smallest redeeming quality.
What’s far more interesting is the evolution of the lie, the path by which a nonsense story invented by a journalist on a bathroom break can bounce from national title to national title and onto the blogs and in the process increase the feeding frenzy around our striker. In case no-one’s noticed, Dembele hasn’t scored from open play in a while … to say all this pressure isn’t affecting him is clearly nonsense. And it’s not going to stop.
Not unless we stop first. I got emails last week about the Liverpool story, asking me if it was true that Dembele was on the verge of signing for them.
The ridiculous thing about that was that as bad as the story was, not a single one of those reports said that he was; they all said the same thing, which was nothing at all, a series of if’s, but’s and maybe’s which amounted to zero.
But the lie evolved, as lies do, in the minds of the readers.
That’s what makes garbage like the HTC sorry so infuriating.
These aren’t serious people.
It would be better if we didn’t take them so seriously.