On The Kyogo Story And Others, Remember This: Japan Has Its Keith Jackson’s Too.

According to another fan media site, 67HailHail, Simon Donnelly has nixed the Kyogo rumour by checking out, with people he knows, the source of this tale which for a while yesterday had all of our friends – haha – in the media pretty excited.

The results of those enquiries are interesting; Donnelly says that the source is not credible. Is that a surprise? I mean, do we have a media which is known for spreading unfounded rumours and gossip or what? We all know that we do.

Let’s be honest; some of the outlets in Scotland take their cue from websites like Transfermarkt.com and others. There are sites which write nonsensical guff about “we played this weekend’s cup final on a computer game and the Ibrox club won …”

Others steal rumours from each other. The media landscape here is a mess of clickbait and uninformed nonsense, and when you are knee deep in this stuff every single day it is easy to imagine that we must have the worst hacks in the whole world here.

And maybe we do, but that doesn’t mean that we should allow ourselves to forget one thing; this is how it works now, everywhere. The internet has seen millions of sites such as Football Insider proliferate across the world. How can I put this? Japan has its Keith Jackson too.

Now, I grant you; their version of Jackson probably writes better and has a better standard of education. But his job will be to cover the local football scene, and he, like any Daily Record hack, will know that he has to produce content every single day, and especially when your bosses are forcing you to deal in volume rather than in quality, it can be tempting to pull stuff out of your backside, a subject I covered earlier on today.

Our media is extremely lazy and not inclined to change. When they are pulling stuff off Footballer Insider to fill column inches how closely do you think they check out the veracity of sources abroad? I would not put money on them getting much right.

It’s to Donnelly’s credit that he at least went looking for more information, and sought out the opinions of somebody who actually knows the media landscape over there, and knows who in it can be trusted and who cannot. That’s more than any of the outlets which ran the story yesterday bothered to do, and none of them would have either.

Instead, they would have resurrected this story, in various guises, all summer long and many of them probably still will. But do not let this stuff concern you. There will be plenty of rumours over the course of this season both about targets and who other clubs are targeting.

None by a handful will have the slightest shred of truth to them.

Our media either won’t know that or won’t care.

Thank God for those like Donnelly whose interest in this is more than just getting a handful of hits at Celtic’s expense.