Let’s talk for a minute about language. About the use of words.
Let’s talk for a minute about how the media appears to understand some of them but not others.
Take the word “crisis” for example. How many times did you see that word in connection with Sevco over the last four or five years? Very few, right? But as anyone knows, that club has been in a nearly permanent state of crisis for the whole of that time. Perhaps it’s like Trump in the USA, perhaps what we’ve got here is shock fatigue; nothing surprises us anymore, and when one crisis bleeds into another you could be forgiven for thinking it was just normality.
But the media does use the word from time to time.
They used it last week, after we’d lost two games in a row for the first time since the manager’s been here.
Let’s take the word “liquidation.” It surely needs no introduction to our fans, and nor does the word “relegation” which they claim is what happened to Sevco when it “survived” the liquidation of Rangers. You see what I’m getting at here?
A few days ago, Donald Trump’s lawyer offered a bizarre defence for why his client will probably refuse to talk to the Special Prosecutor Robert Mueller; “Truth isn’t truth,” he said. When challenged on that statement he repeated it.
Some journalists and media commentators have said we’re living, now, in a “post truth age.” I’ll tell you this, it will be if we don’t defend words and language and what they mean. We’ve seen how the media here in Scotland has twisted it over the years.
That’s not all they do.
Let’s look at the term “not for sale at any price.”
When we spoke to Aberdeen about their defender Scott McKenna earlier in the week that was the answer we got.
The club accepted that answer and has moved on. The media does not try to pretend that Aberdeen said something else; they have, for the most part, said that Celtic would be wasting their time to raise the issue again … and we would be.
The words are easy to understand. They have just one meaning.
There is no twisting them, no reinterpreting them, there is no denying the simple message they convey. Nobody would even attempt to. The media here doesn’t try … except when it comes to Celtic where they just ignore those words completely.
Which, I presume, is what allows them to write nonsense about Moussa Dembele, Kieran Tierney and Olivier Ntcham over and over and over again. One report yesterday said we might be willing to let Dembele got to Marseille on loan as long as there was a permanent fee clause attached to the deal … where in the Hell do they get this crap from?
It doesn’t seem to matter how many times we say this, or what the position of the club is.
Since we went out of the Champions League they’ve been using nonsensical terms like “cash strapped” to describe us whereas before the rationale behind these stories was that we were a club dedicated, above all else, to hoarding money like Scrooge McDuck.
The media has a great tendency for just not caring what it is that we say. Celtic has told the press and everyone else that none of our first team players will be leaving this year; that has to be hard for the hacks to take, especially as many of them have swallowed King’s line about the club being “a house of cards”, in complete ignorance of our repeated assertions that we do not budget for Champions League Group Stage qualification.
All this is simple stuff, but surely the phrase “not for sale at any price” is one that ought not to be simply brushed aside just because it suits the narrative of us as a club struggling for money and desperate to get people out the door?
The media is a disgrace. Ignore everything you read about high profile departures. Boyata aside, it is simply not going to happen.
Trump’s lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, summed up the attitude of the hacks very well when he told the media that truth was no longer truth. During the same interview he said that “facts are in the eye of the beholder.”
“No,” Chris Cuomo of CNN told him. “Facts are not in the eye of the beholder.”
Giuliani’s response was to give reality another twist; “Yes it is — yes they are. Nowadays they are.” Our media would agree with that completely, and that’s what we have to challenge everywhere they try to maintain that shameful line.