Yesterday, before the BBC Sport Sound show started, Kenny McIntyre read out a prepared statement in which he apologised to Jim Traynor for the comments made by Michael Stewart the night before. During that debate they had slammed Stewart because Traynor wasn’t there to defend himself; well guess who was absent from the studio as they rolled back his words and went crawling to kiss the Ibrox PR chief’s ample posterior?
The BBC is a flat-out disgrace at times.
Last night it looked craven and yellow, and by throwing Stewart under the bus they were sending a very clear signal to the very dark forces that the ex-footballer was talking about that there are still plenty of outlets and individuals willing to bow, scrape and bend the knee.
It’s a sign of how gutless that institution has become.
What makes this worse of course is that they’ve done this to appease an organisation, and an individual, which continues to have a ban in place against one of their own reporters. They are in a standoff with Sevco precisely because its PR department smarts at every little bit of criticism and because those running it constantly try to bully people into acquiescence.
This is precisely the charge Stewart, rightly, laid at Traynor’s door.
And things are worse than they seem, because not only has BBC Sport Scotland grovelled to Traynor, but you get the impression that they were so keen to make good on it that they provided him with another service.
They have almost entirely ignored Celtic’s statement last night which destroyed the legitimacy of the Sky Sports Morelos interview.
Their one concession to us is to throw our statement in with the Gossip segment, linking to a report in a newspaper. This is Scotland’s biggest football club accusing a major broadcaster of deliberately, falsely, targeting our fans … and the BBC does not think that is news.
It reeks. It stinks. It is so obviously an editorial decision, but for what purpose? To keep alive a lie. To deny the exposure of that lie publicity with the national broadcaster. Who would want something like that? Who would ask for it? The people who created that lie in the first place.
Someone trying to serve the interests of Sevco. Dare we even ask who?
You know, there’s a debate ongoing right now about the license fee.
The BBC used to have many friends amongst progressives, but here in Scotland years of this took their toll and by the time the 2014 independence referendum ended most non-football fans didn’t trust them either. If the license fee was voluntary they could probably count the number of those who’d pay it up here in single digits.
Once I’d have said that was a worrying prospect, but when they act like this you realise they are already serving interests other than the public good, so why should we even care?
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