Keevins Continues Trying To Slither His Way Around His Epic Rodgers Humilation And Climb-Down.

This morning, Keevins filed his latest piece of absolute tosh. That his bosses think he’s worth the salary is astonishing to me. They might think he’s a controversial character; he isn’t. Keevins has never sparked a single proper debate, except about whether there should be a minimum IQ requirement before someone is allowed to be considered a pundit.

What does qualify someone to have a newspaper column?

Well, believe it or not – and I’m sure you do – the bar is actually set staggeringly low across right-wing newspapers and in the tabloids. And when I say low, I mean that you could find an average person typing away in Costa Coffee whose opinions and coherence and logic are superior to some of those making a living spreading ignorance and bile across newspaper pages and the internet.

This is not new by the way. We’ve always had these people. We had Kelvin McKenzie before we had Richard Littlejohn and we had him before we had Katie Hopkins and there will be someone, at some point, who makes her sound moderately less batshit.

These aren’t “controversialists.” They are cynical bigots playing on the fears, paranoias and ignorance of their audiences and at the same time revealing their own shallow, surface level understanding of the world and the subjects they write about.

Let me give you a “controversial” view so you can clearly see the difference.

A bad columnist makes a bad newspaper.

There are people in publishing who will say that if your paper can hire one of these rabid individuals and this drives readers in their direction that it’s all good.

But the minute you start treating your readers like absolute morons, when you start bombarding them with easily provable lies and gutter propaganda, you change the nature of your publication, because the only way you can keep those readers is to go lower, stupider and angrier. In the end, you lose all the readers you had who were there for your insight and honesty, and that forces you to hire even more lunatics in order to keep the shrinking demographic you have left.

There are segments of the right-wing press in Britain, as in the US, which have built their audience shares on being so divorced from reality that it’s difficult to see how they can ever pivot back towards sanity without a profound, wrenching shock which upends their whole business model and forces them to rebuild their customer base anew. Most of them would go out of business overnight if such a radical turn in their coverage took place … and it all starts with hiring that one “controversial” columnist, in a grab for the lowest rung of the ladder.

I have read genuinely “controversial” pundits, and I know the difference between someone who is smart and trying to provoke a debate and someone who is so uninformed that you read their writing and come away from it wondering how anyone can ever hold such views. Some people who think of themselves as “controversialists” have come to that conclusion because they are so colossally stupid and their work is so incredibly poor that they provoke contempt and derision.

Keevins is one of those guys, a guy who is the journalistic equivalent of a swarm of midges. You definitely know they are there, because they are a source of constant irritation. You cannot imagine what function they have in the natural order and you wish to God you didn’t have to encounter them. Does that make them important? Relevant?

His column today is part of his effort to airbrush his entire season of anti-Rodgers criticism out of the narrative. In this case he’s holding up his hands about a single incident, when he wrote off our title challenge at Kilmarnock, because a Radio Clyde listener sent him a cake with his comments inscribed on it, to literally make him “eat his words.”

A more appropriate thing to send him would have been a bag of shit, as it has the general flavour of his remarks over the course of the campaign, and the pitiful efforts he’s putting in to pretending that we all imagined that. But all that stuff is on the record.

“Brendan Rodgers has only dropped two points in seven away matches this season. And just two points out of a possible 15 in the league at home. But the Celtic manager is under tremendous pressure, starting today when his team play host to Aberdeen. It wouldn’t be hard to feel a sense of a season unravelling.”

You know when he wrote that? On 12 November.

We were eight points clear at the time, albeit the Ibrox club had a game in hand.

But there was Keevins, talking about a crisis at Celtic and a campaign starting to unravel.

“Today they play (Aberdeen) … Rodgers now has a “domestic” on his hands. One false move and it could trigger mayhem among a support who need no more reasons to be apprehensive and pessimistic … If Brendan’s still at Celtic next season I’ll be astonished. The manager has been sold a dubious package. If he doesn’t win the league title, Rodgers will be scanning the Situations Vacant column on a voluntary basis.”

This was the story the media was trying to feed us from the minute Rodgers came back. We were being told that he was a busted flush, a shadow of the manager he was, and the rest of that article was basically a love-letter to Clement who they had embraced as a hero after jettisoning the last guy they had branded a hero without missing a beat.

Keevins thinks it’s a joke that someone has had to resort to those measures to get him even to admit that he got something wrong. I’ll tell you what would be cheaper; getting cakes inscribed with the things that Keevins gets right.

You could probably fit that on a single Greggs chocolate eclair, and only then because his predictions out-with Celtic are so scattershot that he has a broken clock chance of being right once in a while. His newspaper is the real joke, because it employs him.