One of my favourite movies is Training Day, the only film where Denzel Washington, who usually plays good guys, crosses over to the dark side. The film opens with a young, impressionable, kid named Jake Hoyt, a cop who’s trying to get onto Washington’s team, which is a hard-core door-kicking, special operations unit in the force.
He has one day to impress the man who he wants to be his boss.
From the very first, it’s clear how difficult that’s going to be. Alonso Harris is a tough man to get on the right side of. They meet in a diner, and immediately Harris lays down the terms during a mini-sermon on the value of a newspaper, which Hoyt, in his keenness, won’t let Harris finish.
“Tell me a story,” he demands. “This is a newspaper,” he says, waving it. “It’s 90% bullshit, but it’s entertaining. That’s why I read it. You won’t let me read it so you entertain me, with your bullshit.”
And I love that scene, both for the way it frames both characters and because it might be the best summation of the written press I’ve ever heard … not entirely accurate, but sharp.
Back in the dawn of time, when news magazines still sold well, because there was no internet and no other way for certain people to get their fix, there was a title called The Weekly World News. It was an American mass-market tabloid. They used to sell it in the UK too and I remember some of the more lurid headlines from when I was growing up.
Surgeons Cut My Head Off And Sewed It Back On
Horse Born With Human Face
Clinton Hires Three Breasted Intern
And so on and so forth. The WWN was, of course, a fake newspaper, telling tall tales.
But as incredible as this will sound, some people actually believed what they read in there. There was one famous case involving a US police department ordering jet packs which actually ended up featured on television (on Fox News, naturally) despite being manifestly absurd.
See, the publishers of the WWN (who also published the National Enquirer) knew the truth of Harris’ remarks long before the release of Training Day. They figured that if the papers could get away with “90% bullshit” that they might as well ditch the 10% of actual news and publish something that contained not one scintilla of fact but was nevertheless highly entertaining.
Which brings me to the Daily Record this morning.
I take it you’ve all seen it, right? The latest attempt to drum up interest – of which there is exactly zero – in a Sevco player.
Man, that club is desperate for cash and its PR people must be getting paid overtime for coming up with, and pushing, this rank nonsense.
But imagine the media swallowing this whole?
Can you believe them?
I knew what headlines I would see this morning, when I read last night in The Daily Express’ online issue about how there was interest in Morelos from China. So Sevco’s PR arm is leaking to that fabled repository of Tory family values now, the paper owned by Dirty Richard Desmond, the porn king, yeah?
I guess it was a matter of time.
Anyway, that’s just good PR work if you ask me.
Leak to a more unusual outlet instead of going through The Record itself.
Because you just know when Jackson and Cooney get up in the morning and see that they’ll have to grab it and claim it. They’ll have to elaborate. They’ll have to find a way to generate “new facts” and push it that bit harder.
The Record elevated the nonsense beyond the limits set in the first piece. Which is why a £6 million bid became a £7 million one by the time it left their copy desk (an apt name for it as you’ve probably gathered, since copying is all that goes on there) and formed a story.
Am I being unfair to Gary Ralston, whose name appears on this?
No, I’m not.
This isn’t journalism by any stretch of the imagination. This is fiction writing with a newspaper as cover. Not all news out there is fake. These people bring disrepute to an entire industry and make it easy for cynics and charlatans to propagate the “90% bullshit” theory. There are publications which take fabricating, or stealing, a story seriously. Jayson Blair, Stephen Glass, Michael Finkel … I could go on. Those guys were sacked, and disgraced, for this kind of stuff.
There is so much wrong with Ralston’s article it’s hard to know where to start.
There are grammatical and spelling mistakes in it for openers.
That’s not a deal breaker; there often are in these, and I don’t always spot them even after they are online (I usually do though and I edit on the hoof which is a little cheeky). But I work alone without an editor looming over me. Quality control on a national title should be better than that.
But there are also errors of fact and logic in there which would stand a good chance of wrecking a story even if had a factual basis and wasn’t simply scraped off a vomit covered floor. Take this beauty of a line for a start;
“Ibrox chairman Dave King rejected the offer because it would have left boss Graeme Murty with only Jason Cummings to lead the line for the remainder of the season.”
Flat out bollocks which every single person who follows football in Scotland is well aware of.
Because there are no less than five first team strikers on Sevco’s books of whom Miller, Dodoo, Herrera and Cummings would remain.
“Morelos, 21, is the Premiership’s top goalscorer this season so far with 11 goals and caught they eye of the Chinese at the recent Florida Cup.”
(I’ve written that exactly as it was published, with “they” instead of “the”.)
Really?
I knew scouting was extensive but are we to believe that instead of sending their people to one of the many top leagues which didn’t have a winter break – the EPL for example – that Chinese clubs had sent them, instead, to a friendly competition which quite literally awarded a Mickey Mouse Cup at the end of the “tournament”?
The Florida Cup.
My God.
I guess if you just call it that and don’t remind your brain-dead readers that this was two games, one against a Brazilian reserve team and the other against one which brought on its reserve team at half time, that no-one will know that. And of course, Chinese scouts watched the whole thing and where goals in Finland did not make Morelos look like a top player and goals in Scotland’s top flight weren’t enough … this was what did it.
Aye, okay.
Is this story intended to soothe fears that their club is in financial peril?
It doesn’t. I remember Peter Lawwell laughing his backside off at a similarly barking tale about Nikica Jelavic in September 2011, when the club had reputedly turned down a £9 million offer for him after crashing out of Europe twice in quick succession.
“Last night, we got a £29m offer for Hooper, from an unknown agent, from an unknown club, from another universe,” Lawwell said, to much laughter.
Just five months later, Rangers sold Jelavic for £5 million, to Everton, and even that wasn’t enough because days later they entered administration and shortly thereafter swirled down the tubes.
Is it a reaction to Celtic’s bringing in Musonda, in an effort to dominate the back-page headlines?
Why bother?
Nobody believes a word of this nonsense; it makes the papers involved and the writers whose names are on it look like unprofessional halfwits and doesn’t alter the objective fact that our club has acquired the player for the next 18 months.
Is it yet another effort to bolster Morelos value?
If so, he’s gone from being a £10 million player to a £7 million one in less than a week; way to go Ibrox PR, although I guess it could be construed as putting a more realistic price tag on his head.
(I said more realistic. I did not say realistic. If you put gold plate on a lead bar it would be more like a gold bar, but you still wouldn’t get much for it.)
They are desperate to sell one first team player before this window shuts … and equally desperate to drum up interest for the summer.
Morelos is a sub-par footballer.
If Sevco are looking to China for big bucks, they have more chance of finding a fortune in a cookie.
In the end, it doesn’t matter what the reasons are for the emergence of this; Dave King is back in town and he’s clearly the source of this garbage. Look out for a major series of “exclusives” with his tame hacks later in the week probably.
As he sets out his “vision” for the club all over again.
In the meantime, consider our media for a moment and the level of their reporting.
Consider this story as a piece of museum quality cobblers … it will be a perfect specimen preserved for a time when the national titles have gone out of business because no-one trusted them anymore and merely being entertained wasn’t enough reason to buy them.
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