Radio Clyde Was Certainly Not Doing “Journalism” When It Attacked Celtic’s New Signing.

Of all The Village Idiot’s sins, there is one area where he sails above at least one of his “peers” in the punditry world. He knows far more about the sport he is paid to talk about than Radio Clyde’s ageing desperado and weekly Sunday Mail “opinion writer.”

Being an ex-player might be something to do with that, but it’s more. He at least tries. His limited brain power and his inability to be unbiased even for a minute are obvious hinderances.

The subject of this piece is just an arrogant, ignorant joke who ceased being funny a long, long time ago. He doesn’t get named in this piece. Everyone knows who I mean. His column is one of the reasons for the incredible demise of that newspaper.

Any outlet which hires someone like this is revealing a certain amount of contempt for its audience and in his case that’s virtually off the charts. Which is why my particular scorn is reserved for The Mail and for Clyde above all others, yes even the right wing hate rags or Sky Sports Scotland and the BBC. The ones which employ him are in a class of their own.

Today, in his column, he’s attempted to defend Clyde’s recent attack on our new player on the grounds that it performed some journalistic function. This is the guy who when asked to look back and pick a career highlight from his time in a once noble profession, chose the story of how he was kicked out of The Celtic Club.

Not some big exclusive he wrote, not even something prosaic about how he met one of his idols. A spiteful, nasty little story about being barred from a pub, which he thinks of as some kind of badge of honour, never bothering to wonder why others in his business weren’t subjected to the same treatment although many of them were even more despised.

That’s how glittering and important a career he has had. Decades of utter waste. Resources being spent on him which might have paid for a real writer or a real broadcaster with intelligence and insight.

Well, of the many sins we might let this guy away with, the one which should not go unpunished, the one thing that cannot go unanswered, is when he pretends to be a journalist.

He’s not. He’s never been a journalist in his life. Even as an “opinion writer” he produces nothing but rancid garbage and one of the stand-out lines in his latest offering is the one where he says that it’s all about opinions and everyone is entitled to theirs.

But not all opinions are equal or should be taken seriously, as smart people in this business know full well. There are some intelligent people who deliberately peddle nonsense, but they have an agenda and it’s usually pretty transparent what that is.

Exhibit A is Boris Johnson, this very week, talking up the positives if Trump is re-elected in the US, a view not shared by a single rational person in the media who isn’t already a paid Putin bitch, especially as much of the column focusses on how Trump will ramp up support for Ukraine which everyone who has listened to him for even a minute is well aware he won’t.

That column betrays obvious contempt for his audience, many of whom are just dumb enough to think Johnson actually means a word of it … but it’s really only intended to rile people on the left, most of whom, in the commentariat, have simply reported on his comments without bothering to comment on them beyond that, because what would be the point?

Better to leave them there as the ultimate proof of what a bankrupt soulless bastard Johnson is.

I hear sometimes that the subject of this piece writes nonsense for the same reason; to get a reaction. I don’t believe it for one minute.

No, he is exactly as moronic, ignorant and stupid as he comes across in those articles and if you don’t believe me tune in to him for two seconds on that radio station and subject yourself to him for that time.

You will come away under no illusions at all.

His argument today boils down to how it was “journalistic practice” to, as he puts it, “unearth an expert from the country (a player) has just left to inform the public about what their club’s new acquisition will bring to the party …”

But that’s not what Clyde did. They brought on a guy from a website which everyone knows is nothing but a stats base, and one whose player valuations are so discredited that news aggregators won’t allow us bloggers to cite them as a “primary source” to do an obvious hatchet-job. There were actual experts they could have brought in had they wanted to do that, people who actually watch the game and know what they are watching, but they chose not to.

And you know, I can’t remember the last time I heard of the media bringing in an expert to talk about a new signing, and there have been plenty of opportunities for them to do it over the years. What would people who have watched Lammers have said? Nothing complimentary, that’s a fact. When Ibrox was trying to sign Cifuentes I couldn’t believe the rubbish being talked about him here, when over in the MLS he was barely rated at all.

So, it’s not even accurate to make that claim, in fact it’s a barefaced lie if he’s going to tell us that this is common practice in the media. It should be. It’s probably something the game here would benefit from, but what they actually produced that night was abysmal.

Criticism is fair when it is reasonable and balanced, and God knows that our club does not get everything right. But it was not reasonable and it was not balanced to have some stats geek critique a footballer he had probably not watched more than a handful of times. Because he’s based in Austria, we’re supposed to trust that he’s an expert?

There are people in Scotland who have spent decades covering the game and I wouldn’t trust their judgement on it one bit. Some of them still think Ryan Kent was a superstar, so what does that tell you about their ability to spot and analyse footballers?

If we’ve done our homework and gotten this signing right, we are going to make these people look even more ridiculous than they already are. But in any event, none of the people on that station are getting away with trying to pretend what they were doing was journalism.