The BBC has gotten itself into one Hell of a state trying to defend its Dermot Desmond story whilst at the same time seeking to explain why it has ignored others, some much bigger and of far more importance to Scottish football fans.
To say that its tying itself in knots is an understatement; Mark Daly in particular is attempting to defend the report on public interest grounds whilst deflecting about other important issues which are far easier to justify in that fashion.
His latest tac has been to attack people for hiding behind user names whilst attempting to ask him questions.
Hey, unless he’s a complete moron he’s missed a couple of crucial facts.
First, if my story, based on Corsica’s, about the BBC blackmailing him is correct then he caved because he knows what’s out there.
He knows why some people choose to hide behind pen names and ambiguous identities. He will know some journalists have been publicly hounded and worse. He knows that some people can’t publish their names for other reasons.
He is trying to hold us to a standard that is too much for his own profession, where they do use anonymous sources, and protect them. I strongly object to the sneering way he and others act towards that perfectly understandable decision.
He also plainly ignores the fact that myself, Phil, Paul Brennan and others don’t hide behind pen names, that we go about our business and live our lives in the open, publishing under our own names and opening ourselves up to the consequences of it.
He ought to have more respect for that.
The wider point, that our own concerns have no validity, that they are not public interest concerns and that those of an Irish billionaire with accounts in the BVA and a company registered in Switzerland are somehow more pertinent … it’s just untenable and everyone watching knows it.
And a lot of people are watching, on Twitter and elsewhere.
Who knows what else is going on behind the scenes? As Daly and his people try to fight off our attentions Dermot Desmond will have started the ball rolling on his legal action. The BBC is going to be squeezed between two types of pressure, and it’s so un-necessary.
People like RTC have been trying, in vain, to get these people interested in the stink of corruption wafting off the SFA.
They would rather do soft seat interviews with EBT recipients and cast Celtic’s campaign for a review as being about the disgraced clubs of Ibrox, when we’ve said over and over and over again that this is about the SFA and Hampden.
But of course the two things are tied. Whyte, Green and now King were only able to operate their various scams because the Hampden beaks allowed it. The last two owners at Rangers and everyone who’s sat in the Sevco boardroom carry the same taint … they are men who should never have had the leeway they did to do the things they got away with.
The BBC failed in its role of holding these people to account, them and the governing bodies charged with policing our game.
Their failure would be put down to simple incompetence if not for their sudden discovery of investigative power and a public interest responsibility.
In light of how they’ve used it, this is not incompetence.
It is as corrupt as those they have failed to investigate.
No wonder they are flailing.
They, too, are in this up to their necks.