The BBC is not our favourite organisation on this site.
Too many of its broadcasters are snarking fools.
The one really top class journalist they had was suspended for telling the truth.
They pander far too much to the club at Ibrox.
But when the BBC does journalism – real journalism – it is the best news organisation in the country.
This is where the anger at their conduct sometimes comes from.
As with a lot of other organisations you see the way they view the average football fan in the people they hire to cover the game.
People like Tom English. I could easily go on.
For all that, I still find myself defending the organisation from time to time and when it comes to their stance against covering Sevco games – their long term stance – I am in total agreement with them. Chris McLaughlin was banned by the club for one reason and one reason only; he did his job.
He asked hard questions. He pressed for answers they didn’t want to give.
This is the typical MO from Ibrox.
That club hates scrutiny. It hates scrutiny of any kind, and from any source.
When they get it from the media they issue threats.
When they get it from the likes of us, their fans scream “obsessed” as though their cheating, their arrogance, their financial doping, their corruption of the game was none of our business.
But the intimidation they direct at mainstream journalists is despicable.
The bile they pour out at them whenever they are questioned or criticised in any way is the mark of a club with a seriously fascistic tendency.
Nowhere is this more evident than with the gibbering loons of their official shareholder’s organisation Club 1872.
These people are rabid. I would be embarrassed if Celtic supporter’s reps behaved as they would. I would be pushing for their removal from office and I daresay that most of our fans would feel exactly the same way.
They have been engaged in a constant war of attrition with the BBC almost since the day and hour King let them off the leash on the subject. And their latest campaign – involving Michael Stewart – has clearly pushed some of them over the edge.
Yet even in the midst of a vicious hate campaign, they still expect the BBC to relent and agree to cover their games, something the broadcaster hasn’t done since McLaughlin was banned from the ground. They recently released a statement castigating the BBC for their lack of engagement, as though organisations fall over themselves to debate issues with crazy people.
And today the BBC responded with the diplomatic equivalent of “take off your tinfoil hats, sit down and shut up.”
Even phrased nicer than that, the inference is clear and the message is too; the people they should be blaming are their own club.
“It is categorically untrue to claim that BBC Scotland has refused to cover games at Ibrox,” said the national broadcaster. “(They) have maintained an exceptional ban on one of our journalists for the last four years. And despite numerous attempts to resolve this situation and to restore commentary from Ibrox – for their’ fans and for our audience – every proposal we have put forward has been rejected by (the club).”
They ought not even to have had to release such a statement; Sevco’s own most recent one on the organisation flatly refuses to resolve the matter. An announcement after Michael Stewart was cleared to return to our airwaves made that clear.
“This … tells us that BBC Scotland has no wish to resolve our long-standing issues, which are of course around fairness and accuracy. In light of this (we) will not now resume discussions on resolving those issues with the BBC.”
So, when the club itself is refusing to talk just what are Club 1872 holding onto this anger for? The club doesn’t want to resolve it, and unless they make the move the BBC is not going to. If Club 1872 wants to sort this out they should be questioning the club itself.
That’s what a shareholder organisation is meant to do, of course, and it’s not even that Club 1872 constantly goes on the attack; they are a disgrace to the members they are supposed to represent, having never once questioned a single thing going on inside Ibrox.
That the body of their support continues to carry this mob with “donations” and such like amazes me.