Poisonous BBC Hack Lets His Frustration Get The Best Of Him During Comfortable Celtic Win.

For years, growing up, I was led to believe that the BBC was some special thing to be revered. I was told that the BBC was a fantastic organisation which this country would be poorer without.

Why was this? Why was I told that? Because unlike other media organisations, the BBC served a public interest and was there to promote that idea.

It didn’t rely on advertisers, so it was not beholden to them. It was not afraid of politicians, and gave all the parties equal scrutiny. It had no agendas. It had no bias. The very nature of the BBC rendered those things impossible. To be there, you had to be neutral, an outstanding professional and thus someone worthy of respect. Because they only hired the best.

When did my eyes get opened? It would have been a politics thing, for sure, way back in the sands of time once I got interested in that stuff. It might have been a book I read called The Propaganda War, about the conflict in Ireland and how the British government used this “neutral” news service to spread misinformation and even outright lies.

In Scottish football terms, 2012 was the year the veil was ripped from a lot of people’s eyes, but my own realisation had come much, much earlier during the reaction to Rangers being penalised by UEFA over the behaviour of their fans.

Listening to the BBC at that time was actually surreal. Half of them didn’t even know what the problem was; that’s when I fully came to the realisation that our “national broadcaster” football department was biased to its core.

Nowadays, the idea that it was ever any different would come as a shock to most people of a certain generation. They’ve grown up knowing exactly what the BBC is, and you look at BBC Scotland, with the shameful role it played during the referendum of 2014 – where it fully lived up to its name as the “British” broadcasting corporation – and the makeup of its sports department you can see just how utterly ridiculous the idea of its neutrality is.

Our long-standing joke, of course, is that you only need one qualification to get a gig at BBC Sports Scotland; some connection with Ibrox. Those who remain of the “professional” punditry are little better though, a mixture of the craven and the corrupted with the exceptions of a tiny handful. One of the most notorious is Tom English. He’s in the news today.

This is a symptom of what ails the BBC in its own right, of course; their journalists are supposed to report on events, not thrust themselves into them.

They are supposed to debate issues, not cause them.

The only side they should be on is the one with the facts on its side. In a professional culture someone like English, with his penchant for stirring and sensationalism – as well as being a moral coward – would never last. Here, he thrives.

Today, his Tweet when Celtic scored their opener was a shocker.

Utterly gormless, utterly uncalled for. Bitchy, snide and just plain nasty, it’s as if the frustration at seeing us get a goal overwhelmed him and provoked him to a reaction that a deep breath might have stopped in its tracks. But this was reflexive, betraying deep rooted feelings.

Everything about that Tweet screams “I am hurting!” From the reference to Livingston’s league position to the bitchy nature of the attack on the fans. At Easter, too. Cause if the descendants of Irish immigrants can’t sing about their country and its history on a day like today, when are we allowed to do it? When this Brit-Nat says so?

Honestly, these people make me want to vomit.

The hypocrisy of them stinks to high heaven. They haven’t changed since that debate on sectarian singing at Ibrox where the Whataboutery was off the charts and some of them were so vocal in demanding to know what the problem was that no less an Ibrox toady than Jim Traynor himself actually asked one of them “Which part of F@@@ The Pope do you not believe is sectarian?”

(The guy he addressed that point to? Gordon Smith, who went on to become CEO at the SFA. Another organisation which never evolved past its employees sending sectarian emails.)

The BBC is a national embarrassment.

The Biased Broadcasting Corporation is right.