There are people who wonder why I focus so much attention on the media. It’s because I firmly believe there are things for which we would be hung, drawn and quartered and which other clubs seem to get away with as a matter of routine.
Sevco message boards have been convulsed over the last few weeks demanding news stories appear every day about an ancient scandal which actually didn’t originate with our club at all, as if wholly ignorant of the fact that every front page editorial had referenced it and every news report had got it in there. I don’t know what planet these people live on.
Real media silence exists. If you’ll pardon the apparent contradiction I have seen it. I’ve researched stories which I felt sure had the potential to clear the front pages. I’ve read stuff that was sourced and proven and which the press didn’t touch with a 20 foot pole.
Two of those stories are in the public domain right now, and one of them has been barely touched in the MSM and the other hasn’t been touched at all. They both concern Sevco. Of course. Which begs a question; why are negative stories about that club so easily buried? Why are those stories which cast a bad light on Ibrox (and occasionally Hampden) so readily dismissed by the press, when many thousands of people are sharing them on social media?
Here’s a question for you;
Do you believe that if Celtic’s roofs were apparently in a dangerous state of disrepair that the story would be ignored? Do you think if we were accused of having mislead the SFA over our European license in 2011 that the press would have failed to write about it? Do you believe that if our chairman had been accused this very month of fraud and tortious interference that the media would have blanked it, completely? If he was accused of deliberate stock manipulation?
Not in this lifetime. They’d have been all over those stories.
I wrote yesterday of how Sevco is facing further court problems, as a consequence of Dave King’s inability to play a straight game. This story is not 24 hours old; in fact, the document which was published on Aiden Earley’s website is two weeks old. The story of how King purchased the Charlotte Fakeovers documents predates that by months. This is an explosive story; the chairman of a Scottish football club, allegedly buying hacked material for the purposes of waging war against commercial opponents … that’s a show-stopper.
Yet not a word about it in the media. Odd, don’t you think?
But it’s this stadium story that takes the biscuit, and how they’ve ignored that for so long I’ll never know. King himself went on the record to tell the world that essential maintenance work hadn’t been done at the ground in over a decade. Yet the Internet Bampots were the only ones even remotely interested in investigating that further.
For years now tales of disrepair have stalked those who run the Ibrox operation. Stories of asbestos in places where a removal operation would cost £10 million and upwards have never generated comment from the club, but those issues are well known and more or less an open secret around the City of Glasgow. Inspections have been done over the years, and as long as that stuff is undisturbed it poses no immediate public health hazard … but in a ground getting old, and where areas around the affected one need upgrading and where that work would risk stirring up the deadly dust … well that’s a problem, alright.
The Ibrox frontage is a crumbling ruin. They always make much of the status of their Main Stand as a Listed Building, but those require constant attention and fixing. You only have to look at photos to know none of that is getting done. Cracks run up walls in ways that don’t inspire confidence in those who walk under them, and now we have this thing with the roofs.
Yet that story has generated two media follow ups, and one of them was a jokey piece laughing at the Celtic fans who are headed for the game at the end of the month in hard-hats, as if public safety was suddenly a laughing matter. I understand our fans wanting to poke fun at the Ibrox club, and I especially understand why anyone who had a ticket would want a little extra security on the day, but I don’t know how the media can be so blasé about it.
Always you hope that the public silence is masking private digging. Always you want somebody to be asking the questions they’re supposed to. You keep on having faith that these people learned their trade somewhere good, that they have some modicum of professional pride and respect for what the profession is supposed to be. But you see no sign of it.
So the Bampots keep on doing their thing, because we are the only ones who will. Issues which we push into the public domain get discussed where otherwise people might not know about them at all. But we’re still minor players compared to the media machines, with their longer reach and – and I hesitate to use the word – their credibility.
But I have never known so many media outlets to not want to write news. It’s easy enough to blame this on PR firms with way more influence than their performances and the intelligence of their leaders justifies, but these people should never be able to cow the media so completely … unless the media saw its own interests and theirs as co-joined.
But as the Ibrox roof’s story has evolved, to the point where the Scottish Executive had to respond to it, confirming that Glasgow City Council has concerns and is looking for answers, one fact has been established above all others. Ignoring stories no longer makes them go away.