What happens when the media has fallen so far out of the orbit of rational behaviour and truth that it displays an open contempt for its readership?
Today The Daily Record has set out to answer that question with an article so brazen and filled with obvious lies that it takes your breath away. Two “journalists” have put their names to this piece.
They should be drummed out of the NUJ. They are either too stupid to hold down their jobs or they knowingl wrote a story they knew to be utterly fictitious. In an industry of falling standards, that so-called newspaper has finally hit bottom.
Scott McDermott and Gary Ralston co-wrote the piece – a piece of just a few hundred words, almost all of them offensive to even the most leaden-headed reader. The media in this country really is a joke, and it’s no wonder we view these people with such contempt when they write this kind of obvious rot.
The story is ostensibly about Pena, but in fact the whole thing is a “feel-good” piece about the dizzyingly shocking Ibrox operation. It is an effort to steer media coverage in a positive direction despite the total shambles the club finds itself in.
First is the Carlos Pena story, which forms the headline of the piece “Sevco Set To Recoup Cash On Expensive Flop Carlos Pena.” Even this is a stonewall lie.
For openers, there’s the money the club has already pissed away on this guy in wages. None of that money is ever coming back, even provided they secured a permanent transfer deal for him an a hefty fee. The premise of the story – which is that Cruz Azul will be paying the full measure of his salary – is blatant bullshit. Reports in Mexico are unequivocal on this; the club will be paying half his wages with the hapless Ibrox club paying the rest.
Mexican football is not weighted down with riches. Sevco overpaid for this guy and gave him a whopping salary he was never going to live up to. Cruz Azul have talked about buying him for an agreed fee in the summer – there’s no knowing what that agreed fee is either – should he impress them, but anyone who watched him in Scotland knows the chances of that are pretty slim, which is more than Carlos Pena himself will ever be called.
This move was a disaster. Most clubs would face up to that fact and admit they’ve written off or are likely to write off a huge sum of money for him … not Sevco. They would rather spin total fiction than admit they screwed up even when everyone can see it clearly.
I understand to some extent why a club would choose to do that, even if it is egocentric nonsense. What I don’t get and never have is why our media helps them to sell such obvious garbage.
And the falsehoods and outrageous lies don’t even stop with the Pena part of the story, they continue into the second section, which discusses the Murphy deal.
Once again, the lie is repeated that Brighton “moved the goalposts” over the deal; Sevco, in the end were very damned lucky the club was willing to let him leave, even on loan. They are certainly not remotely impressed at the way the Ibrox side do business.
As Phil has pointed out in his latest scorching piece on the subject, this leaves the club humiliated in the eyes of every club in England, who now seem them as an unprofessional joke.
I don’t know who The Record or its Sevco sources believe they are fooling writing stuff like this, but down south everyone knows exactly what happened here and Sevco is seen as a basket case club who can’t even string together the cash to put down a deposit.
The suggestion that this deal could eventually net Brighton £2 million is just as farcical, yet the paper has repeated that particular lie as well.
The thing is, aside from a handful of Sevco fans who are so stupid they will swallow anything that spins their club in a positive light, there is not a soul anywhere in Scotland who believes a single word of this. The Record long ago took the decision that it would sacrifice its credibility as a newspaper to pander to the fantasies of a small number of yahoos … and that’s what everyone now knows that rag is about and who it caters to.