Celtic Fans Were Reminded Again Yesterday Why We Hold The Media In Contempt.

There are entire sections of the US media which have strayed so far from the path of sanity that they’ve become like the left-wing parodies which once mocked them in exaggerated fashion as lunatics and conspiracy theory nut-jobs.

Ten years ago, if you’d watched Saturday Night Live you may have seen hilarious sketches featuring right-wing figures almost literally foaming at the mouth as they ran through the gamut of lunacy; climate change denial, anti-vax insanity and the great replacement theory, and we’d have pissed ourselves laughing. Now nobody is laughing.

Because all you have to do is switch the channel to Fox News and you can see it all on there, for real, every single minute of every single day and millions of Americans get all their “information” from a “news channel” which has become a watch-word for racism and bigotry and, yes, madness. It is horrific and it poisons the public discourse.

Here in Britain, we have any number of desperately deranged characters who would like nothing better than for us to have our own Alternative News, and they’ve tried and they continue to try. GB News is just the first such outlet we’re going to have to live with, but even they are nowhere near Fox levels, because we actually have a regulator here who keeps the crazies from completely taking control of the conversation. Some of the time anyway.

I only mention this because yesterday Celtic fans had to grit our teeth as a ranting, raving, enemy of our club was given acres of media coverage for suggesting that Ange Postecoglou leaving Celtic would be good for Scottish football. It isn’t that he said it, because he’s an attention seeking yahoo and he does this stuff all the time.

No, my gripe’s not with him, as this is what you expect from the Village Idiot, and he’s their poster boy. My gripe is with the outlets, which is most of them, which promoted those views as if they were to be taken seriously, when everyone involved must know they’re not. My gripe is with the editors and writers at national titles who pretended that this was something other than a crap joke and that his career in the media is something other than a crap joke.

I’m still astounded that these people, the editors and the sports editors, the folk who run the newsrooms in this country, don’t yet grasp that he drags their whole profession down at least one rung of the ladder. That his presence amongst their ranks degrades what it is that the rest of them do, like Fox News does with the level of public debate in America.

This guy shouldn’t be on TV or in the papers being taken seriously as offering a neutral viewpoint or even just a sensible one, any more than the BBC should be putting some mouth-piece for an oil industry PR firm on the telly to “balance” a segment featuring a climatologist talking about global warming. That’s not balance at all, that’s putting some industry leech spouting bullshit on the same level as a scientist trying to inform the public with facts.

The sports desks in this country do themselves no favours with this stuff.

They are despised by the Celtic support largely because of garbage like this, with promoting the views of utter goons whose intentions are obvious to even the stupidest person, and it was bad enough when these people only had crap once a week columns in the papers from which to spout their puerile idiocy; now every rival publication also broadcasts their work … and some of them, like this clown, have even made it into the broadcasting studios, where he doesn’t belong any more than a well-trained chimp.

Standards have never been this low.

We have titles in the so-called mainstream media turning out articles every week now about how they “simulated” matches on their consoles.

Bloggers have higher standards than that and I can’t express clearly enough my utter contempt for the so-called writers who do it or the organs which allow them to publish it and charge advertisers for the space around those “stories.”

When the industry in Scotland gives credence to a story like the one we saw yesterday, a story which doesn’t even try to hide the contempt in which it holds everyone who reads it, there are some in the industry who will tell themselves that it’s a joke and the joke is on the reader. But in fact, the joke Is on them because this demeans their whole profession.

To put it bluntly, they are the joke and it ceased being funny long ago.