Newspapers employ journalists to do journalism. Can we all at least agree on that?
It’s not just in the job description, the last time I checked it was the job. Since most of our hacks are dreadful at doing journalism most have become opinion writers.
Hey, I’m not knocking it; I’m primarily an opinion writer and some of my favourite writers – Marina Hyde foremost amongst them – don’t do straight news but give their views on it instead.
Most of our journalistic class have some qualification in the subject, so they know what the job involves and what it comes down to. Even those of them who write opinions – for which you need not the least qualifications since everyone has one – are usually educated up to a certain degree. Which is why I am frequently shocked by their conduct.
On how many major issues over the years have these people simply … not had opinions at all? I can think of dozens, most of them involving the club from the other side of the city. Over the years you form the distinct impression that these people are either gutless or corrupt, and this week has given us a sterling case in point with the Ibrox Five.
You would struggle to find a more concrete example of a club applying scandalous double standards within its own walls and of a media which doesn’t care about the equally horrendous double standards of covering it differently than incidents involving our own side. The story is begging to be written; I know that because a couple of the Celtic blogs have written it, and actually at least one of the Ibrox fan sites has done the same and called it what it is.
The hacks have been shockingly silent on it, and in fact spent all of yesterday lashing out praise to Gerrard and one of those five players. It’s incredible, and sickening.
Today someone broke ranks, and it’s not even a journalist at all, it’s Chris Sutton, our former player, with no formal training in the business, and yet he still manages to see with a clear eye and grasp all the contradictions and nonsense at the heart of the Ibrox stance on this. He called them hypocrites. He said Jones and Edmundson should be raging.
Why has it taken him to do this? Why a former Celtic player? This is the kind of thing former players from Ibrox should be saying; instead McCoist was painting the club over there as whiter than white yesterday even as he was attacking us. Idiotic.
Sutton will be easy for the Ibrox insiders and their stupider fans to dismiss as just another bitter ex-Celt talking crap, which is why this stuff really should have been said by someone else … but this is typical. The Record can now say “well we did cover it” although, in fact, none of their actual “journalists” would touch it with a bargepole.
What a gutless shower. Sutton has embarrassed them today.
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