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STV’s King “Exclusive” Was A Shameful Exercise In Spin And Sycophancy.

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STV really is a deplorable little station, isn’t it? Its football coverage is so slanted, so one sided, so biased that it takes your breath away. Tonight, they just showed an “exclusive” interview with Dave King as his caddied for one of his celebrity buddies. Actually, his one celebrity buddy.

A guy like that, even those who hang around with the London heavies wouldn’t stand next to him for fear of attracting flies.

STV has no quibbles with King. To them, he is the font of all wisdom.

They allowed him to recast his Takeover Panel “troubles” – read ‘contempt of court’ for the rest of us – as his desire to “comply with the laws of South Africa” … a quite brazen statement from a man who has spent the better part of the last 15 years explicitly breaking them with abandon.

Even the questioning was disgusting; he was asked if he and his club were concerned that Murdoch MacLennan had been re-elected as SPFL chairman, with seemingly the rest of the clubs against their stand on him, a quite naked invite for him to do some grandstanding on the non-issue that has been obsessing them for the past few months.

And finally it allowed him to praise Gerrard’s “excellent start” which amounts to one win and a draw in competitive games against the team that finished fourth in Macedonia last year. Hardly stellar. There’s also talk of “two more signings” although what I actually heard King say was that there might be two depending on whether or not they can flog some of their dreck.

All in all, that was shameful. STV’s love affair with the dodgiest geezer in Scottish football is absurd. Select journalists aside, I know of no other outlet that crawled so completely up Ibrox arse in recent years. It is astonishing to watch, but no surprise to those of us with long memories of grubby commercial deals so rotten the company has never to this day admitted them, although the trade press was full of the story and it’s undoubtedly a fact.

STV has the right initials at least; that was a party political broadcast from Dave King tonight.

Sevco Television has finally, fully, arrived on these shores.

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