Scottish sports news is badly skewed in favour of bigots and partisan goons with obvious agendas.
This is not a new thing, but the spread of it, the reach of it, is definitely brand new.
In some ways, it has to be.
This is because the current environment no longer gives the media a monopoly on setting the mood of the fans.
Now the blogs play a role as well.
The bloggers have become important because for too long a handful of hacks at the top of the trade were able to influence fan moods to a shocking degree. I blame the media and their relentless attacks on Fergus for the fact that the man himself was booed as he unfurled the flag for stopping the ten.
He should have been hailed that day; the media did its job well.
It is unthinkable that Fergus would have gotten that treatment now. The bloggers would have been his praetorian guard in his war with the media. They would never have gotten away with demonising him the way they did, and they know it.
Even Lawwell, for all his sins, has never been booed at a flag ceremony.
He never will be.
The press has lost all the power it once had to make us flap about “enemies” amongst our own ranks. But they can still get through to a tiny minority, if they pump out this stuff in volume.
And that’s where the clown posse comes in; guys like Rae, Boyd, McCann and others. They amplify the message, and for reasons which I’ll never understand a lot of our supporters continue to listen to their bile and bluster. No more so than when they talk about transfers.
Bear in mind, these ignorant yahoos don’t know the first thing about what goes on inside Celtic Park.
Boyd tried, just once, to claim that he has sources in our dressing room and was shot so full of holes that he hasn’t tried it since.
He is a weapons grade halfwit, but one that an alarming number of our online supporters get themselves in a flap over.
What does the media promote such obviously partisan, blatant soup-stirring? Because it is obvious. Because it is partisan. Because our media is lazy and incompetent and prefers controversy to straight reportage. There are important things going on in the game and yet the headlines are filled with clownish comments from the cast of the Muppet Show.
Kris Boyd hates Celtic, and the media gives him a platform for that very reason.
Rae hates Celtic. It’s why he’s so popular on the radio shows and in the tabloids.
These guys don’t have the intellect, between them, to power a remote control but their words are plastered all over the media on a daily basis.
Their bitterness is obvious and undisguised.
That’s what our media wants. It must be, or they wouldn’t put these people front and centre.
The latest is Charlie Adam, and between him and Boyd this has been a vintage week for the Peepul Under The Stairs. Adam, who is out of contract and can’t find a club and who has begged Sevco to make him an offer, has spent the whole summer talking absolute mince over on the clickbait site Football Insider, so called because it employs the services of a number of ex-footballers who are about as uninformed and pig ignorant as it is possible to be.
Any site that believes Frank McAvennie has any intelligent contribution to make to talking about the game in this country is out to lunch. Whatever they are paying him for his pearls of wisdom, it is way too much. But Charlie Adam isn’t going to win The Weakest Link either.
When he hasn’t been trying to win an Over 30’s contract at Ibrox, he’s been “advising” Celtic and Sevco on who to buy; the highlight was suggesting both clubs would be “fighting it out” for low-scoring injury prone Lyle Taylor, an idea that impressed the Ibrox illiterati but which went down like a lead weight with Celtic fans the moment we were linked to him by the mainstream press.
Such is Adam’s ability to spot football talent, which is why we should pay no heed whatsoever to his wholly ridiculous view on Ajeti. Celtic scouted this guy a few years ago, and we know exactly what we’re getting for our money.
Yet the press thinks his comments should be taken seriously, and that has sparked some anxiety amongst that section of our support which pays attention to such stuff.
The coverage Boyd gets is worse; tonight The Daily Record is slobbering over him because of a crap joke he told on Sky Sports earlier, who show their contempt for the Scottish audience just by having him in the room.
There are things on the bottom of rocks that are more intelligent than Kris Boyd; I understand The Sun giving him a column, that’s their standard, but Sky Sports can afford better. They just choose not to pay the premium, and stick us with this.
The media loves this guy, for all the reasons I’ve outlined above, but he’s spent the entire week contradicting his own views and revealing his naked bias, some would say bigotry. His agenda could not be more obvious if he did every report in a Castore kit with a peeling badge.
Nobody at Sky or in any other media outlet which hires him should pretend, even for one second, to think him unbiased; it’s like putting a fanzine editor up front, except they are much smarter.
The Celtic bloggers are generally disdained by the press, because we slaughter them on a regular basis. What else are we supposed to do when they insult us and our club like this?
Yet in a sense it’s a veiled compliment.
We have succeeded in shifting the narrative, and in the absence of any Sevco blog which isn’t run by foaming lunatics – who all hate the media, by the way – the hacks have found a response that works for them. Make no mistake, that’s why these clowns are on.
For all that, our job is more important than ever … and so is yours. If you know someone who’s still reading the clickbait sites or still reading the mainstream press, tell them to quit it. Point them in the direction of the bloggers. Tell them to stop believing a word they hear from The Daily Record or The Sun. Even The Herald and The Times are filled with dreck these days and The Scotsman has been hilariously bad for as long as I can remember.
And the radio shows … don’t get even get me started on those, although today most of the panellists were incredulous that the SPFL and the SFA want to charge clubs and players under rules that have just been written for offences committed weeks ago.
We are winning the PR war … but we have a long way to go.
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