The Herald has stooped to lazy journalism – if we’re being generous – by parroting The Daily Record’s nonsense that Alex McLeish said Kieran Tierney would be joining a “more important club” than Celtic if he went to Napoli.
I did a piece on this earlier.
The Record did not accurately report what McLeish said.
That a newspaper like The Herald has reported this piece of outright nonsense as if it were a fact does them no credit whatsoever. I know standards have slipped across the boards there, but to simply repeat, verbatim, what is manifestly untrue is shoddy, shoddy stuff.
This claim appears as part of their “rolling commentary” blog, which is basically a way of recycling every garbage rumour out there and pretending they are breaking news.
This is a common thing now for the media, and it lowers standards more than ever.
Remember the days when the media used to write factual stories?
Now they regurgitate all manner of rot.
“Alex McLeish has claimed Celtic star Kieran Tierney is ready to join ‘a more important club than Celtic.’ in a report in today’s Daily Record,” the segment reads.
Except, of course, McLeish said no such thing and The Record simply put those words in his mouth.
Even the most basic research would have revealed the ex-Scotland manager’s actual words, which were that he would be moving to a club “at a higher level than Celtic” which is an entirely different thing.
I understand The Record doing this, but The Herald is supposed to be a cut above the tabloid rags.
That it now uses them as source material is shameful.
There was a time when newspapers actually produced original content; now they recycle each other’s most ludicrous stories, without even bothering to verify them.
A couple of recent cases in point include the story about the NewCo being after Martin Skrtel – which, by coincidence, surfaced on the day after we’d spent £7 million on Jullien – and the story yesterday about our new boy’s alleged “tussle” with Alfredo Morelos, which was a nothing story about a nothing incident.
Click-bait is one thing, but when newspapers are repeating each other’s stories and those stories include quotes which appear to be wholly made up – but why let facts get in the way of anti-Celtic story? – that’s a different matter entirely.
It was Jonathon Swift who said “Falsehood flies, and the truth comes limping after it.”
Well, falsehood has never moved faster than it does today, and irony of ironies, it’s the media that is disseminating much of it at superfast broadband speed.