On Friday A Small Band Of Hacks Were The Dancing Bears At An Ibrox Freak Show.

On Friday afternoon, a small band of Scottish journalists – a term I use as loosely as possible – took their seats at the latest Ibrox “press event.”

That’s another term I use loosely.

Because of course, these folks aren’t journalists anymore; they are “media partners” of the club.

Every outlet which paid up for “access” is an embarrassment to the whole profession.

I spoke with someone who’s spent the better part of his working life in a PR environment yesterday and naturally the subject came up.

I asked him a question to which I thought I already knew the answer; had he ever heard of a company demanding money from the press in such a way?

And of course he hadn’t.

The idea is barmy.

As he pointed out, the club still gets coverage. They still get scrutiny. But now there’s bitterness and anger on the side of the media which the club has needlessly brought on itself. It’s utter stupidity.

But of course, the real stupidity belongs to those outlets which gave the club £25,000 to sit there in that half empty room asking questions so banal and dull that it’s a wonder they didn’t all fall asleep.

The amazing thing is that the rest of the media, which hasn’t subjected itself to the full measure of disgrace, simply waits until those outlets which were there publish their stories … and then they copy it all down and re-run them without the attendant dishonour.

As bad as it has been up until now, though, Friday would have been monumentally worse.

It would have been the mortifying experience of a lifetime for those hacks who went there still believing that they are journalists, those still clinging on to whatever shreds of credibility they think they have left.

Friday would have been the supreme humiliation.

Because sitting in the room with them were a collection of thugs right out of Central Casting, people whose beliefs, opinions and conduct has been abysmal if we’re being generous, people who have spent the week subjecting everyone they could find to the most vitriolic and despicable treatment in an orgy of score settling and bloodlust which has done nothing to erase the simple fact that it’s their own disgraceful conduct which sparked the affair.

Worse than that, every mainstream outlet which sent a journalist into that room was, de facto, endorsing the club’s scandalous silence on the matter.

Did any of them ask Gerrard how he feels being questioned by people who’d spent the week acting like power-craze mafia dons, to say nothing of their casual bigotry?

Of course not.

Those “journalists” didn’t ask a single serious, pressing question; how can they when the club keeps their balls in a jar along with the £25,000?

Who amongst them wanted to press to much or too hard with the goon squad sitting in the room with them?

It’s clear now that this is what they paid their money for, to be the dancing bears at a freak show watched by even bigger freaks.

The clubs other “official media partners”, the snarling villains of the past week, would have had nothing but contempt for them … and for once that contempt would have been wholly justified by their even being in the room.

Ange Postecoglou was asked about vaccine passports in his Friday presser, something over which he has no control at all and which has as much to do with his job as a moon landing. The only issue worth even an iota of discussion at Ibrox was the story that had dominated the whole week, but with that ending in a beat-down who was going to bring it up?

The triumphant “victors” of that sordid episode doubtless lorded it over their mainstream “partners”; I know I would have found it hard to resist doing so.

The shame those so-called “professional” writers should have felt, the sense that even being there disgraced them and more-so when they failed to ask a single serious question, ought to haunt those people for the rest of their careers.

Every time they set foot in the Ibrox press room now their humiliation and ignominy only grows.

After this week, they’ve reached the point where they can no longer deny what that £25,000 has bought them.

Or what it’s cost them, above and beyond the money.