Barry Ferguson’s Pro-Ibrox Board Comments Are A Nonsense His Industry Should Not Permit.

I read Barry Ferguson this morning in an angry state of mind. I read it with utter disgust, not at Ferguson for talking the nonsense that he did but for the newspaper which printed it. Talk about bending reality to suit a narrative. It was woeful. But there was a time when a national newspaper would never have allowed that to appear without a rebuttal from one of their best writers, laying out the reasons that it was absolute rubbish.

Last night, for my sins, I watched the US Presidential debate between Joe Biden and Donald Trump, and like most other viewers I was appalled by the performance of the man who stands between that country, and much of the world, and the nerve-shredding prospect of an autocratic, bigoted, rapist and convicted felon getting his sweaty, grasping hands on the nuclear launch codes for the second time. It was only this morning, after I’d drunk several cups of strong coffee, that I started to think a bit more about how America has ended up where it has.

The problem is bigger than the 81-year-old man who stood on the stage last night and asked America to re-elect him. It is bigger than the guy who stood on his left and who lied with every breath that he could muster, most of it self-aggrandising claptrap, some of it – like when he claimed some states are so pro-abortion that they murder newborns – so incredible and removed from reality that you wonder that anyone sane and rational person could mouth those words without feeling a deep sense of personal shame.

That problem runs deep. It runs into a discussion about how social media amplifies lies and half-truths. It runs into a discussion about whether or not we are safe, as a society, or doomed as a species, by the way some people get lost in personality cults. It’s entirely obvious that we’re trapped into some bad patterns, and it’s not clear how we escape from them.

But there is one industry which could still change our direction of travel, and it’s the media. There is no subject I cover in greater detail on this site. The Fourth Estate is a mess. It has never been in a deeper crisis or a darker hole and the health of the media is essential – absolutely essential – to the functioning of democracy, and when you consider the state of the press you can start to understand how it is that we have ended up in this awful place.

I do not hate the media. I hate the abject state of the media. I hate what our media has been reduced to, and what it has reduced itself to. It is not for nothing that I express my contempt, and at times my fury, at the stuff that appears in our mainstream press. We need these people to be better than this. We need them to hold a light up to truth.

There has never been a more important time, not in history, for that industry to be at the top of its game, to be holding power to account, to presenting the public with the facts they need, not the comforting fictions and outright fantasies that so many people cling to.

One of the problems with last night was the format which allowed one man to stand behind a podium and spew a torrent of lies with no comeback and no consequences. In the name of “fairness” and in the name of “balance.”

How is it balanced to have one man try to impart facts whilst another vomits out a river of fictions? CNN gave both of those men the same megaphone, and that creates the impression that their statements should be afforded the same respect, and no matter what you think of Biden’s age or his ability to do the job, that is simply not a credible position to hold.

But this is the thing; our media gives as much space to falsehoods and nonsense as it does to hard-headed analysis. How is the public supposed to know the difference? Not everyone is a media obsessive like myself. Not everyone is able to go digging for additional information when we are presented with two opposing versions of the same story.

That crisis in the media is not the fault of our sportswriters, but they reflect the trend, and it shows up today in the way The Record allowed Ferguson to present the ludicrous argument that the Ibrox board deserves credit for its openness in levelling with their fans and laying out “the full facts” over the situation with the Copeland Road stand.

“What I like is that the club have been open and honest about the entire situation,” Ferguson wrote today in his column. “They have come straight out and laid the full facts out to the supporters. They could have strung people along and said it might be ready. But all that would have done is create confusion. Now everyone knows what’s happening.”

That does not meet any of the “fact-checking” standards as the media once applied them. The same paper has Keith Wyness on the other side of the debate today kicking the Ibrox board whilst giving credence to every rumour he has heard, including far-fetched claims about them having to look for a new place to build a stadium, which is as crazy as anything Trump said last night.

That interview appeared in Football Insider.

We all know what their level of credibility is. The Record didn’t need to run that at all.

They did it to sensationalise the story in the most lurid way.

I can readily dismiss that as the sort of stuff Wyness frequently comes out with, and the sort of stuff Football Insider tends to produce.

But Ferguson’s comments are something to be amazed by just the same.

For a start, the Ibrox board didn’t demonstrate openness. At all. In fact, I now know that they lied about this for weeks. One Ibrox fan site spoke to a senior figure at Ibrox last month and asked that person directly if there was anything to be concerned about in relation to the work being done, and was told a flat no, and that turned out to be absolutely untrue.

They haven’t “come straight out.” The season’s been finished since the end of May and they must have known early on that this wasn’t going to be finished on time. As is common with organisations which are trying to sit on an unpleasant story, they delayed as long as they could, right up to the week before the fixture list came out, at which time they’d have been forced to own up whether they liked it or not. They simply ran out of road here.

Nor have they laid out “the full facts” to the support.

They have claimed it’s a problem with the suppliers, but they sacked a member of their staff, the project manager of all people, for the delay … so they’re openly misleading people as opposed to laying out the facts. That is almost a Trumpian claim.

And as I’ve said, they did, in fact “string people along” with the idea that the project would be completed on time, and they continued to do that even when one of their own fan media outlets asked the question directly to them.

As to his point about how any other course of action would have “created confusion”, this would be true if they had done what he says they did, and been wholly transparent. But they weren’t, and they’re not being transparent.

I mean, is he claiming that there is actually clarity here?

Fans have not been told what the situation is.

Read their forums. They’ve had the same brief statement as the club released to the media, and nothing else. They have not been told how long it will last. They have not been told what ground they will be watching their games at. They have not been told whether there will be compensation packages for those affected. Not a single member of the fan-base knows “what is happening”, yet Ferguson claims “everyone” does.

The Record has never held itself to the highest standards, but to allow Wyness to spout such nonsense from one side and Ferguson to spout his rubbish from the other leaves a big gap in the middle where most Ibrox fans, and most Scottish football fans, are left wondering what to make of it all, with many reduced to wondering which of those stories is true, because they have been offered no competing context.

So, the Ibrox board has either behaved with the utmost professionalism and told the fans everything they need to know, or they are sitting in the middle of a sinkhole and the club will very soon be vacating the ground permanently; these aren’t just extreme versions of the same story, they are deranged nonsense on two different ends of a spectrum on which truth is nowhere to be found.

I think that club is in serious trouble here.

I have good reason to believe that there is an even bigger scandal underpinning all this, one which has played directly into these events. I have serious doubts that they will have the ground ready by the end of August and think that if they were being straight with their fans they might even prepare them for a return sometime in October … I also recognise that there are unknowns which preclude them from offering any assurances at all.

On some level, though, they are well aware that August is optimistic and perhaps even unachievable. As I said previously, at least three firms turned this job down on the basis that the timeframe was completely unrealistic. The media should be getting some of the people from that club on the record to discuss this stuff so that people might know the full scope of it. Instead, it is running hysterical claims from the extremes. It doesn’t serve our game well.

Why is that important? Well, our national side just crashed out of the Euros after a calamitous performance, and only a handful of journalists – like Ewan Murray – have suggested that our problems might be larger than they appear. Not only do I not see any appetite for the debate needed to examine those problems and thus reverse them but I don’t see any sign that our media is even capable of having it, far less to be leading it.

And that impacts on all of us. This is not just about the Ibrox situation and how it is covered. That’s one issue amongst many. The media has ceased to be part of the solution. Indeed, when you see their output today it is clear that they are part of the problem. A big part.