If you’ve not seen the Twitter feed for Chris Jack lately you should go and take a look at it; his profile image carries a picture of Gerrard with 55 in the background. The main image is of Jack standing in front of his beloved Ibrox.
The whole feed is a homage to the club that plays there.
Recently, Jack has been commissioned to write a book about their title win. He boasts that he has most of it done already. Quick work. But isn’t this guy supposed to be working for a national paper as a sports writer? It begs the question; what’s his actual job?
Is he a journalist, as his CV claims, or is he a propagandist for Ibrox?
Normally this would be nobody’s business but his, but see, this is an indictment of our press and how it is run. That’s a constant lament on this site and for very good reasons.
There are major issues in Scottish football which a good sports journalism team could be covering; instead national titles squander resources hiring gushing fan-boys to write about their favourite teams.
These guys don’t even pretend to observe neutrality or to have objectivity.
Chris Jack is not, as some have suggested to me, “in the service of two masters.”
It’s not as complicated as that. He is paid by The Herald and The Times, but he is in the service of Ibrox and it’s really as simple as that. The Times and Herald pays him but he knows who he works for.
There must be people at that newspaper group who are as appalled by this spectacle as the rest of us.
When was the last time Jack properly scrutinised the Ibrox club? When did he last break a major news story, instead of regurgitating their press conferences and talking up every development there? Why is a national title paying him for that?
Imagine for a second that a major story broke at Ibrox; say they were engulfed in some kind of scandal?
Or say, for example, that UEFA comes back on the Kamara issue and charges the club there with their part in it and threatens heavy sanctions; who actually believes that Jack will cover a story like that in a fair-minded manner, instead of descending into partisan howling?
The media is supposed to exist to hold power in check; guys like this will never do that, and if they’ll never do that what is the point in having them on the books of a national paper?
Jack is already notorious for his partisanship and his commitment to promoting the Ibrox cause, so much so indeed that he’s become something of a parody.
But really, why is his paper operating even the pretence that he’s actually a journalist and not a PR stooge for the Ibrox cause, in their service if not actually in their employ?