There is a misconception about our media which needs correcting, and especially by me as I’m one of the guys who has helped to create it. It’s that our media is somehow stupid, that its practitioners are lazy and not up the job.
Whilst that is true for some of them, and whilst the Village Idiot could get a job in certain newsrooms if he’d played at Ibrox, it’s not true for them all.
Some of them are not incompetent. They are just dishonest.
Some know exactly what they are doing; they are not writing wrong information, they are wilfully writing lies. They push disinformation. They bend facts. They paint pictures in a way that shows those they want to protect in the best possible light whilst painting others in the worst one.
I don’t know whether this is an editorial decision or whether its born of personal prejudice, but its real and we see it all the time. There’s no denying it.
This afternoon, I read Matthew Lindsay’s piece on Sevco’s managerial hunt and why it’s right that the club takes its time. It is written as if there is not a clear understanding as to why they’ve not just gone and got Derek McInnes already. This charade that the club will unveil a left field “big name” is one that not a soul is actually convinced by.
In another Lindsay article the financial position of the club was described as “improved” since Dave King and his Peepul took over. This is a patent falsehood and Lindsay is well aware of that as is t he editor who allowed that to be published with that assertion in it.
They are in no better nick than they were before he arrived; Graham Wallace, who’s job performance is questioned in the article, had at least published a business review. It was laughably bad, but then I was saying that at the time when Lindsay’s entire profession was lauding it in spite of it being vacuous nonsense.
But you cannot call it that now, after the fact, as Lindsay and others have done here, whilst pretending that the accounts Sevco published the other day were not equally disastrous and pointed to an equally dark future.
Soft loans do not stabilise a club’s financial position; they negate the effects of spending too much.
That promotes continued over-spending.
A club run right, a club that was fiscally sane, would stop doing so instead of chasing nonsensical dreams of “challenging Celtic”; we are a club with a huge structural advantage, years in front of them.
A club that was determined to learn the lessons of past mistakes would confront its supporters with the facts of living beyond its means; it would start drastic cost cutting or tell them straight that the alternative was administration.
They would not spout endless nonsense about transfer war chests and the media would not run such tripe if they did.
Our press corps frequently and flagrantly lies to its readers.
If it’s not doing PR spin on behalf of the association and a certain club it is ignoring stories which matter to focus on stuff that quite frankly is of no interest to anyone in the game but for a handful of conspiracy nuts on the Sevco forums. But that, after all, is their core audience.
Like Sevco, they know what side their bread is buttered on … and who butters it.