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An Exchange That Sums Up The Dire Standard Of Scottish Football Journalism

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Last night, on Twitter, “journalist” Neil Cameron made three accusations against yours truly; the first was that I wasn’t really a Celtic fan.

I have no idea what prompted that snide remark, and it doesn’t really merit a proper response.

We’ll move past it to the ones that matter.

Next, he alleged that I had somehow invented a story where there was none, namely in my article on big Moussa sending a message to the Celtic fans and the hacks that he was staying at Parkhead in this window.

Cameron’s specific claim was that not one outlet had suggested Moussa would leave in this window.

Be honest; how many of you just read that line and went “What???

We’ll get back to it presently.

Then, he accused me of lying about him, and about his profession.

Which is pretty serious stuff, when you think about it.

That’s the kind of stuff people sue each over; calling someone a liar is pretty hairy, pretty dodgy.

If I was going to do that I would have to be very careful, very sure I had my facts right beforehand.

Let me offer you my precis on what I’ve said about Neil Cameron, personally, up until now. I’ll leave it up to you, the reader, to decide if he is a liar, or just a moron.

I’ve looked over this. I’ve written about Neil Cameron several times and on those occasions where I have I’ve offered the unvarnished opinion that he is lousy at his job. That’s an opinion backed up by the toilet paper standard of the stuff he sometimes produces.

The last of those articles was back in August 2016, when he wrote that Brendan Rodgers was one of a “handful of people” in the country who earns £3.5 million a year.

That, as I said at the time, would put Brendan in the top 0.5% of all earners, including those working at investment banks and finance houses.

Break it into weekly payments and Cameron was actually saying our manager is on £67,000 per week, a claim so outlandish that it broke even the Keith Jackson Ceiling for absolute garbage; Jackson’s own claim was that Brendan was earning £2.3 million, which equates to a mere £45,000.

If you are outdoing Keith Jackson in writing nonsense … that’s probably not good.

I asked, in that article, if there was even the remotest hint of evidence that this claim was factual.

Needless to say, none has ever been produced.

Was it a lie?

It was stated as a fact, and is palpably, obviously, not.

So you tell me?

It was the second time that month I’d written about Cameron on the blog.

The first article surrounded a piece he’d written where he suggested – in the same week Andy Walker had – that Scottish football fans needed to take a “different view” on diving; it was, in short, an endorsement of players who cheat.

I called that a reprehensible idea, and I’d stand by that view without hesitation. It’s the kind of thinking that would excuse a decade of cheating by one particular club, the kind that says the rulebook doesn’t really matter, that it’s all about the result.

There are undoubtedly journalists in Scotland who take a similar view about their work; as long as it sells papers and generates discussion, it doesn’t matter if it’s based on facts or if it’s outright bollocks.

The profession would be in real trouble if they were running it, right?

I asked Cameron to cite the example where I had called him a liar. He couldn’t even produce these two pieces, one of which was simply condemning his view and the other in which I challenged him to produce evidence for his ridiculous claim.

I reminded him that people were following our discussion; it was Twitter, after all.

I repeatedly asked him to back up these particular claims.

They were so emphatic there had to be supporting evidence, right? That’s what journalists do; they deal in facts. I didn’t think it was unreasonable to ask him to produce them.

Other people challenged him on the second – that not one news outlet had suggested Moussa would leave.

Some named actual “journalists” who had said exactly that.

His response?

To say he had “no idea” whether others had or hadn’t … which pretty well demolishes the central claim about my Dembele piece.

Cameron had been emphatic. “Not one” outlet had said Dembele would leave. Not one. He didn’t hedge, he didn’t walk the middle of the road … he crawled right out on the limb. And then, when the branch started to creak behind him, he simply waved it away as if it was nothing.

He’d decided to tweet something, stated as a fact, – and it was an accusation that I had made stuff up – but then later claimed he had no idea at all whether it was a fact.

And I guess I have to accept that this was just a guy behaving like a child, and having a go without thinking it through.

Because hey, the only other explanation is that he wrote something he knew to be manifestly untrue.

Isn’t there a word they use for that?

Well I will not accuse him of that.

Of incomptence, perhaps, of utter idiocy, but not of that.

Some say he has previous for leveling wild accusations at people,  as Matthew Leslie, the outstanding Scottish football blogger and Hearts fan, can attest.

You know, I give it to journalists a lot on this blog.

Some of them, I really do lash mercilessly.

Keith Jackson is probably the guy who gets it in the neck most, closely followed by some of those who’ve worked with him.

Nature of the beast.

Like someone much smarter than me once said, “It’s not personal sonny … It’s strictly business.”

Jackson understands this. He has never blocked me or had a dig. Doubtless, that’s partly because he doesn’t think it’s worth his time, but he’s also approachable on Twitter and doesn’t mind chatting with myself and other bloggers.

He does it frequently, which I always thought was pretty decent.

Some of what we, in the blogosphere, write is coached in personal language – how can it not be?

We’re commenting on his work and on his skills – but Jackson never takes it personally.

He shouldn’t.

Do the politicos take it personally when the press has a dig at them?

(And I’m not talking about Trump; the most powerful man in the world, having a go at anyone saying negative things about him … Jesus wept.)

No, and in fact, there’s a lot of professional respect between the media and those they cover.

Footballers have good relationships with the media, in spite of constant sniping from them.

There appears to be no such respect for the guys who cover the media though …. and whether they like it or not, part of what the football bloggers do now is cover the sporting press … the political media has bloggers who cover it, as well as the process itself, and some of them do get a modicum of respect, with some of the mainstream press recognising the bloggers as their peers.

It’s rare, but it’s not unknown.

This is how it works these days.

It’s a brave new world.

Jackson was actually named in a headline piece earlier this week; I believe I could still tweet that guy and get him to offer an opinion on something today and I’ve always had a lot of admiration for him for that. The one time he did react to a personal slight, that I saw, it wasn’t directed at him but, shockingly, at his family.

He puts up with a Hell of a lot, but he does it with good grace.

When I wrote an article which had a pop at Gerry Braiden last year, he responded angrily but his anger was directed. He didn’t make it a personal dig. When we chatted – and he too was very approachable – he clarified something I’d taken spectacularly the wrong way and I was happy to amend the piece accordingly, even altering the tone of it, and I held my hands up to say I’d got it wrong the first time around.

Because some of us, some of the bloggers, do take this seriously, and we try to maintain standards.

Gerry handled that with a lot of class, but that wasn’t really a surprise.

Because Gerry Braiden is an actual journalist and not a stenographer who gets his lead from PR firms.

Cameron decided to make it personal last night, for no reason I can fathom.

When the Dembele article wasn’t even about him, when neither he nor his paper were named in it.

When, in fact, I’ve not mentioned Cameron in anything I’ve written in a half a year.

He will excuse me, perhaps, if I am about to do likewise.

Say what you like about Jackson and others; if they seem like easy targets it’s because they are always putting stuff out there for guys like me to take a swing at. Check out Cameron’s output. If he did more work I might be even more critical of him.

I’m moved to wonder what I did that was so bad last night that this guy, who works for a very respectable title and has a very respectable job within it, could have been so driven to have a personal pop at me?

It’s almost like he’s gone Donald Trumpesque in his insecurity.

Could he really have the needle over something I wrote about his standard of work a half a year ago?

A guy in his position?

(That article last night was fairly tame; it was more a celebration of Moussa’s commitment to us than anything else. Cameron can’t possibly have reacted so negatively to a top class player staying at Celtic that he simply took a wild swing? That would be most unprofessional, right?)

Dear oh dear, it’s all pretty sad, isn’t it?

Mind you, he was having some of this “debate” from the pub, which makes allowances, I guess, for his lack of self-awareness.

I would be speculating if I suggested that it might offer an insight into some of his other work.

There we go.

Glad I got that off my chest.

Very little of this stuff actually bothers me, you know.

It amuses me to debate journalistic ethics with a guy who can make claims like those and then backs up like someone facing a mugger in an alley when asked to justify them. The one place where I feel a little piqued, a little cheesed off, is where he accuses me of having a go at journalism in general.

Because in many ways I still revere that profession.

In a world where a guy like Trump can get elected on outright lies, and when people are led up the garden path to vote for Brexit, where the No side of the independence referendum was run out of an office which styled itself Project Fear, and we’re facing a deluge of stories about how the Russians want to eat our children and the right wing tabloid hacks are screaming at the top of their lungs about how Muslims are the cause of every ill and evil in the world, it’s never been more important for those in that business, and who take it seriously, to be good at what they do, and sharp and probing and digging and holding people to account.

I love the guys who do it right.

I am in awe of them.

Those in the profession who treat it with utter disdain are an embarrassment to it, and threaten its very existence … and that’s a problem for all of us.

These guys won’t even call Dave King a liar, and that’s just begging to be done since there’s ample evidence – including his own published statements – that makes it clear it’s exactly what he is. Judges have had no problem labelling him as such, after all.

These people have the easiest job in Scottish journalism, they’re writing the sports section.

They aren’t changing the world or being asked to, which is a good job for all us.

If they can’t muster the will to challenge the Doncaster-Regan nexus, you really don’t want them questioning the government.

These are the people who cheered Craig Whyte into Ibrox and then left it to guys like me to do the real digging. Some of them even turned on the few in their own profession – like Alex Thomson, a real journalist in every sense, and Mark Daly – who did, and then jumped on the bandwagon of criticism after Whyte was out the door, having set fire to the place behind him. They gave Charles Green a free ride at the start, despite his own clear-cut message that his Big Yorkshire Hands were only there to grab the money and then they wrote about their shock and disgust when he did …  They let Campbell Ogilvie swan off with his pension pot with barely a critical word in spite of his many “conflicts” and they refuse to scrutinise the SFA properly, or its role in a dozen scandals. On top of it, they’re too gutless to challenge the Survival and Victim lies and instead push them like hard drugs.

And they expect humility from bloggers, who they view with soaring, open, contempt.

None of it has to be this way either.

Where are my uber-critical articles of guys like Graham Spiers? (They exist, but I rate the guy.) Tom English? (They also exist, but ditto.) Where are those which slam Alison McConnell? There’s an occasional shot at Matt Lindsay, but he’s a very decent writer.  I’ve got enormous respect for Stuart Cosgrove, a highly intelligent writer who has guts and is unconstrained. Where are the pieces where I turn the flamethrower on Ewan Murray?

And doubtless there are enormously talented young, and upcoming, real journalists labouring away on sports desks, throughout the country, waiting for their break, if they can ever crack the business ahead of talentless dolts like Kris Boyd, Barry Ferguson, Derek Johnstone, Andy Walker, Craig Burley and the other clowns with single digit IQ’s who don’t belong near a typewriter far less given a newspaper column.

And God, keep them away from hacks who can’t see past the old duopoly, and make them forever love the game as much as the fans do instead of seeing it as a meal ticket and nothing more.

I read The Guardian’s sports section every day of the week, and there’s none of the fawning, disembling or outright cobblers I get from certain Scottish hacks with those who cover the EPL. The English sporting press has hounded failing managers out of jobs, without an iota of sympathy or faux grief, but they’ve also held their Association to account, investigated corruption in the sport and even played a role in bringing Sam Allardyce down from his lofty perch in the England job.

And some expressed open scorn at the club which then hired him.

(The Guardian does have questions to answer over the Resolution 12 advert; as usual no-one else wants to pursue those but the bloggers.)

I’ll say again what I have a thousand times; if they did their jobs – informing us, bringing us the facts – there would be no need for guys like me to criticise them in the first place.

Some of us would still be here, of course, but writing about our teams and slagging our rivals, without needing to venture into covering the media at all.

Cameron’s real problem is that he mistakes my contempt for what he and others produce for a contempt for journalism itself, but they aren’t the same thing, because what some who call themselves journalists do isn’t journalism according to the definition most of us who follow the profession recognise.

Hey, I have a media degree; I’m not just a guy who one day decided I quite fancied blogging.

I’ll wager that I’ve been writing longer than Neil Cameron has, but I don’t mistake what I do for journalism either; it’s not a word I would remotely associate with myself, which is why I’ve never even bothered to apply for a NUJ card.

I don’t need to give myself a posey title; I know what it is I do.

I’m just a blog guy.

Maybe soon I’ll finish this opus of mine, this second novel, and get around to republishing the first this year or maybe 2017 will elapse with me no closer to either goal, thus putting off the third and fourth books for another year … and maybe ReLoaded Digital, my new project, will take off like a rocket or maybe it’ll struggle gamely on into the future … but I don’t kid myself on about ever one day having a parking space with my name on it at a national title.

I’m just a blog guy, and I know a lot of the other blog guys, on both sides of the Glasgow divide and across the country.

And believe it or not some of us get on pretty well

I know their contempt for the “mainstream media” is as deep as mine often is, because they and their clubs have been just as poorly served by it.

In fact, it’s the blue half of Glasgow who has been served worst of all.

They do this as much for the readers as they do it for themselves because they actually have some respect for their audiences …

Too much to write lies or spin or pass off garbage disguised as the truth.

And that’s why I have more respect for them than I do for some of the people who do have personalised parking places but no more real claim to that NUJ card than me.

You know what grates the most?

It was their profession which made it like this, that spewed bile at us all in 2012, when fans took an interest in the governing of the game,  and found their voices, many of them for the first time. But for a few notable exceptions – one of them was Jim Spence – it was their profession which said we had no right, which treated us with undisguised contempt, that sneered at everything we did.

They never thought we should have a place in decision making or influence over our clubs.

They held that turf, and they wanted to keep it, and I understand where their anger amd bitterness comes from, that it’s no longer their exclusive preserve, but that most of them have never made the slightest effort to treat us with respect means that there’s little chance we’ll ever grant them that courtesy.

Worse than any of it, they’ve consistently dared to question our motives and many of them still do.

This is all about hate, they say.

The weirdest kind of hate ever; some of the Celtic bloggers were the only people warning fans at other clubs about the people who had their claws in them.

And some are still the only ones who do.

I know some of the hacks will resent this, but it was “respectable journalists” who drove many of the debates in Scottish football down this dire, dire path, and some who still insist, to this day, that everything we do has some hidden agenda behind it.

And they weren’t above astonishingly personal attacks on some of the people in their own profession who were interested in the bigger picture.

That wasn’t an aberation.

Because a lot of them still think of us as the people who live “under their maw’s stairs.”

Not only was the author of that piece never called out on it or critcised for it, but he still weilds influence in the press rooms, with sponsors, and at one particular club to this day.

In fact, it was left to us to defend the credibility and standing of fellow bloggers and journalists alike.

You wonder why some of us sound angry and distrustful?

You wonder why some of us can descend below the standards we, ourselves, would like to set?

Cause that’s how it started, and that’s how we’re still viewed.

You remember when I said earlier that the profession would be in real trouble if those kind of people were running it?

That was posted yesterday afternoon.

It’s not an auspicious begining.

Found out by Friday at the latest?

It took less than 24 hours before we were served up a sterling example of the “standards” we can expect from now on.

For this is one of the men at the top of Scottish sports journalism, the profession that once produced poets like Hugh McIlvanney.

At The Herald group, where the giant Ian Archer used to work.

Believe it or not, it saddens me.

Corruptio optimi pessima.

The corruption of the best is the worst.

ReLoaded Digital is my new website, guys, run by myself and a team who want to build one of the best, most diverse, most interesting sites online. You can check it out now at this link.

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