Celtic Legend And Ex-Ibrox Player Come Together To Accuse The Record Of Lying.

Yesterday, The Daily Record “quoted” Craig Moore where he appeared to suggest that Leon King, Ibrox’s new “wonderkid”, had an agent who was up to no good and basically indulging in the sort of naughty behaviour that some of these guys do.

The implication was that he was trying to drum up transfer interest in the kid, at a time when Ibrox is trying to get him to sign a new deal. The Record report was pretty explosive in that regard.

Well, today Craig Moore has expressly denied saying any such thing.

He says he’s been misquoted on one hand and taken out of context on the other. Normally a little blue-on-blue action would be fun to watch; it’s not every day, after all, that an Ibrox icon turns on their favourite rag.

The thing is, Moore has an unlikely ally, or perhaps not.

John Hartson has weighed in to defend him.

It turns out, you see, that Hartson was part of the discussion panel where Moore is alleged to have made those quotes and Hartson has backed his claim that he did no such thing.

We all recognise this tactic well. The Record has done it consistently.

They’ve done it repeatedly with people at Celtic. Their lack of journalistic integrity, and their utter failure to uphold even the slightest standards or insist on them from its writers, is appalling.

Our sympathy should always be with anyone who that rag misquotes, no matter who they are no matter the context. As someone pointed out, misquoting and misrepresenting people amounts to inventing the news. It amounts to lying. There was a time when that paper took that seriously. There was a time when all the media did.

But we have a media culture now where lying is no big thing, and I always said that if you can’t trust what a newspaper puts on the back page then there is no way in Hell that you can trust them when it comes to what they put on the front.

If a newspaper’s commitment to “standards” allows its sportswriters to make stuff up, imagine what it lets its politics writers away with, when the stakes are so much higher?