The media betrayed our game in 2012. That’s what ended their relevance.

I didn’t realise when I started this series of articles on 2012 that, for the last two pieces, the evidence for my thesis would be so splendidly and spectacularly put into the public domain, even as I was preparing them.

At the start, I knew I was going to write five pieces. I knew what each of them was going to be about.

I knew the first one would focus on how the events of 2012 changed Celtic.

I knew the second would be about the theory that, in 2012, we won the war. I wanted to refute that theory completely and point out the simple fact that all we did was stand and watch as a club across the city collapsed. We played no role in that collapse, although we could have—and we could have helped it on its way.

I knew the third would be about how 2012 represented a genuine opportunity for Scottish football to change: for some of its structures to be reformed, for its policies to be improved, and for safeguards—obviously not in place at the time—to be introduced. I wanted to explore why those changes weren’t implemented, who was to blame, and what I believe the root causes were. That was yesterday’s article.

The last two? I had intended to write about the media’s role in 2012 and how they betrayed all of Scottish football.

That’s this piece. And it’s been given a real shot in the arm by the events of yesterday and all this takeover talk surrounding the club across the city.

Because, of course, part of this piece was always going to focus on Craig Whyte, Charles Green, and everything that followed. You don’t have to look far to see that the same mindset is alive and well in the media today.

Tomorrow’s article will be about how the Ibrox fans are the people most responsible—not only for what happened in 2012, but for all the years of suffering they’ve endured since. Most of it has been caused by their own refusal to accept what happened in 2012 and what its implications were. Once again, their reaction to all this American takeover talk has been so hysterical and over the top that you just know they haven’t learned a damn thing.

So both of these pieces—today’s and tomorrow’s—are now unbelievably relevant to where we are at the moment.

Both of them are about huge mistakes, misjudgements, and arrogance. And all of those mistakes are being repeated right now in relation to another Ibrox club, which has gotten itself into huge trouble and is waiting for someone else to pay the bill. The more things change, the more they stay the same.

Let’s start from the beginning.

From almost the first moment that some of us realised Rangers were in serious financial peril and started writing about it, the media was in full-scale, flat-out denial. Even after Walter Smith admitted that the bank was running the club, nobody wanted to face what the implications of that were—or what the consequences might be if they lost the Big Tax Case which was hanging over them.

This was exemplified in a moment that none of us who heard it will ever forget: the heated debate—if we want to call it that. I’d prefer to call it an argument—between Chick Young and Jim Traynor on Radio Scotland over whether the then-Ibrox chairman had indicated that the club could go bust by nodding his head. It really has to be heard to be believed. So I went out and sourced a version of it, and you can check it out here. Honestly, if you’ve never heard it, give it a listen.

For those of us who sat through all 20 minutes of it that day, it felt surreal. We didn’t need the Ibrox chairman to confirm that the club was in deadly peril—some of us already knew. Some of us had been writing about it for a while.

We were well aware that the club was in mortal trouble and that if that £50 million tax bill landed, they couldn’t pay it. It was as obvious as anything in the history of the game. It was written in letters 50 feet high—so clear that even the dumbest hack should have been able to read the writing on the wall.

What that exchange proved was that they were all living in a kind of collective denial about the very real possibility of financial ruin. Young seemed to believe he had broken a major story. In fact, all he had done was get the Ibrox chairman to obliquely confirm what we all already knew. Even then, Young wasn’t confident enough to stand his story up properly, and Traynor dismissed the idea completely.

That exchange happened in early 2011.

Less than a year later, the Ibrox club was gone.

In many ways, Young was vindicated—or would have been, had he actually led with the point that all the Ibrox chairman had done was state the obvious. In reality, the only people truly vindicated were those on Celtic sites who had been confidently predicting such an outcome since 2009.

Yet from that moment in 2009—when the penny dropped for some of us—all the way through to administration itself, people in the media still refused to confront the looming reality. Even as everything we had theorised could happen started to happen, and as the proof was freely available, they ignored it.

They just didn’t want to see it.

In doing so, they let down the Ibrox fans. They could have, if they had wanted to, sounded the alarm long before it went off on its own. They could have started preparing that club’s supporters for a really difficult time.

They might even have forced the club itself to radically change course before it was too late. But they did none of that. Instead, they watched as the club drifted, Titanic-like, towards the iceberg.

Everything prior to the moment Craig Whyte walked out of Ibrox and announced that the reports were true—that the club would go into administration the following day—is on them. It’s on the way they misled the supporters and failed to provide the proper context for the situation surrounding their club.

Even when they finally woke up to the reality of who Craig Whyte was and started writing about it, it was already too late.

It still didn’t dawn on them that the club was facing an existential risk—something that was so clear and obvious to some of us at the time that we were writing about virtually nothing else. It was glaringly apparent that he had no means to pay those bills. Anyone who had looked into who this guy was could see that.

But from the moment he made that announcement onwards, the media wasn’t just engaged in an act of deception against the Ibrox supporters.

From that moment on, they were actively working against the best interests of the Scottish game and all the supporters of every other club in it. They ran the full gamut of disinformation, spreading lies and malicious falsehoods against individuals and institutions. They spread fear and amplified risks, without ever considering a single possible upside to the new Ibrox club starting at the bottom.

I believe that at least one media career was completely derailed by the conduct of an individual during that period.

The person I have in mind is Craig Burley, whose comments about all the other clubs in Scottish football were so inflammatory, derogatory, and unacceptable – he said that tiny clubs run by pygmies had no business deciding the fate of a massive one like Rangers, although their “fate” was pretty well established – that it was no surprise when the outlet that was paying him dropped him.

And he has never been back—not at that outlet and not at any other one. That is a staggering collapse when you consider some of the people the mainstream media still employs to this day.

A couple of years later, when I set up my pro-independence blog Comment Isn’t Free and got seriously engaged in the independence campaign, I spoke to a lot of people who asked me where I had developed the ability to read and dismantle the lies being pumped out by the No campaign’s Project Fear.

I was very clear that I had seen it all before. 2012 was a year in which a lot of blinkers came off for people who had hitherto trusted the mainstream press. I was not surprised that mistrust was highest among Celtic fans and people in our community when, during 2014, the media used all of those same tactics again.

Operation Save Rangers was one of the most grotesque and irresponsible things I have ever witnessed the mainstream media in this country do. A lot of it involved the wilful spread of misinformation, much of it aimed at Rangers fans who were clinging to hope, but plenty of it was directed at the rest of us.

Much of it was designed to intimidate and scare us into dropping our vocal opposition to the new proposals, which would have seen the new club start in the top flight —proposals being pushed not just by the governing bodies but by the national news organisations themselves. T

his was a collective effort. Make no mistake about it.

People had varying motivations for spreading those lies and taking the positions they did. Some genuinely believed that Scottish football would be wrecked if there was no club called Rangers in the top flight, clinging to the misguided view that they were somehow protecting the game.

I regard that as one of the most short-sighted interpretations of the situation out of all of them. It was clear to many of us that there were going to be all sorts of knock-on benefits from having them start in the bottom tier—particularly in terms of financially securing the futures of many of the clubs in those leagues. The TV interest, the Ibrox fans filling grounds twice a season—it was obvious that money would be spread through the lower divisions in a way that had never been done before.

So the idea that it somehow threatened the financial existence of Scottish football was always preposterous.

There were others who were motivated solely by the interests of the new Ibrox club. They had a stake in the outcome because they were fans. They had skin in the game, and they weren’t going to write anything that presented the other side of this argument, nor were they going to allow that argument to be had within the pages of their newspapers.

Some of it was simply parts of the media taking the side of a so-called big institution; craven toadying up to those perceived as having all the power. Those people might be the worst out of the lot of them, the sort of people primarily responsible for the mess our world is in right now.

I’ve never cared which side individual journalists came down on during that debate. What mattered was that the Scottish media ecosystem at the time—still largely dominated by mainstream voices—was almost wholly united in pushing a gigantic fraud against the sport and its supporters.

What we wanted didn’t matter to these people. They would have happily ridden roughshod over the wishes of every single fan. And they tried very hard to intimidate the clubs into ignoring fan opinion.

One of the most obvious, grotesque, and easily disproved lies was the media’s initial insistence that HMRC would accept a CVA offer of pennies in the pound. Many of us were very clear that this was not the case.

The Rangers Tax Case blog went out of its way, day after day, at every instance, to refute that claim at every turn, with its writer pointing out that HMRC’s publicly stated policy was to refuse any such offer if they believed tax had been wilfully withheld or an attempt to defraud them had taken place, and it was very clear at the time that HMRC did believe there had been concealment and that the club had lied to them from the outset.

The key was in the phrase “disguised remuneration.”

What do you disguise something for, if not to hide what it actually is?

Yet almost every media outlet was united in claiming that HMRC would accept it—primarily on the basis that Rangers was too big an institution to fail. Again, this could only have been, for some of them, a deliberate misrepresentation.

HMRC has never considered any organisation too big to fail. In fact, because they believed the EBT use at Ibrox was only a small part of EBT use in football as a whole, it suited them for the first major case to go the whole way. If that meant the liquidation of a club, they were perfectly prepared to see it done—to hold up the bloodied corpse of Rangers as an example and incentive for others to settle.

This was telegraphed so clearly that you had to be deliberately closing your eyes to it not to see it. So, people in our mainstream media were deliberately closing their eyes to that fact. They chose not to acknowledge it. They wilfully opted not to bring it to the attention of their readers just how much danger the club was in.

The attempt to intimidate the clubs was blatant and extraordinary.

When Turnbull Hutton stood on the front steps of Hampden and called the conduct of the SPL and SFA corrupt, he wasn’t just talking about the governing bodies. He was talking about the entire atmosphere in which the debate had been conducted.

He knew the pressure being put on his club and others was coming primarily through the media, which didn’t care what they or their fans thought.

The media’s sole concern was ensuring that a club called Rangers started as high in the league structure as possible.

Every time a source at Hampden produced a scare story, the media went wall to wall with it, hammering the point home at every club in the country: Cease your campaign to prevent this, or your club will suffer.

To their credit, the clubs resisted it. Some will say they paid heed to their own fans, and that’s true for many of them. But for others, this was a purely principled stand. The club at Ibrox had gotten itself into serious trouble, including but not limited to cheating to win trophies, and they deserved what they got.

The idea that the rest of Scottish football should bend to their whims and needs was anathema to a lot of chairmen and directors. And they resisted for that reason. They didn’t need pressure from supporters to do so.

The handful of clubs that did bow to pressure from their fans deserve no less commendation for it because that, too, was a principled act.

I know that some of my Celtic cyberspace colleagues disagree with this, but I happen to know for a fact that Celtic’s stance from the beginning was one of total opposition to any grubby little deal that would have seen the new Ibrox club start in the top flight.

We were one of the first clubs to make our opposition public when we released a statement to that effect.

I also know that, initially, Celtic expected to be on the losing side of that argument. And that it was only through the concerted efforts of Celtic-minded fan media that the wider debate among Scottish football supporters was launched, which led directly to pressure being put on clubs by their own fans to distance themselves from any sort of deal. That is not an empty boast. That is a fact.

This community, of which we’re all part, started that ball rolling. And without it, the grubby deal would have been done. And Scottish football, as a competitive sport—something based on merit and on a standardised set of rules that everyone had to follow—would have been dead. Dead, dead, dead.

I know literally hundreds of people who would have severed their connections with their clubs and walked away from the game entirely had that been allowed to happen. And I’m not just talking about Celtic fans here. I’m talking about fans of clubs like Aberdeen, like Hearts, like Hibs, like Dundee United.

There are, without doubt, tens of thousands of us who would have been lost to this game completely, never to come back. We were simply not prepared to watch a rigged game—something that had been openly, publicly fixed.

There is no doubt that the national titles pushing all the scare stories knew this full well. They knew exactly what the consequences of disenfranchising all those fans would be. They knew that any faith in the game being run on the basis of respect for the regulations, and the notion of equality amongst all the clubs, would be annihilated forever if such a deal was done for the benefit of one club.

They knew it, and they didn’t care. Losing tens of thousands of fans from other clubs was the price they were willing to pay in order to see a team called Rangers compete at the highest level in the game, deservedly or not.

And for those who lament the age of spin and lies in which we now find ourselves—when politicians can be elected on the back of nothing but lies, when newspapers can routinely print lies and are no longer held to account for it—some of us were already preaching about the dangers of that back in 2012, as a consequence of what a media environment would look like if its members were willing participants in spreading lies for the benefit of the powerful.

That Trumpian term “alternative facts” was born right here in Scotland.

Rangers went out of business. It went to the wall. It was liquidated. It died. This is a fact. We all know this is a fact. The “Old Firm” as a concept died even before that, with our club’s very public repudiation of the phrase.

Yet we have a media that refers to Rangers and its “storied history.” We have a media that still uses the “Old Firm” term. We have a media that has embraced not only the Survival Lie—which is bad enough—but the Victim Lie that underpins it, which is both toxic and dangerous.

In the history of Scottish football, nothing has ever raised the stakes and the levels of hatred as high as the Victim Lie does and continues to do. The notion that all of Scottish football came together in a grand conspiracy to kick Rangers while they were down, to relegate them to the bottom league, is a gross falsehood—one that gives people a licence to hate everyone else, without fear of contradiction, either in their own circles or in the wider circles of our mainstream press.

Of all the betrayals, that might be the worst: that wilful deception, which exists for no other reason than to prop up another gigantic lie. For the Survival Lie needs the Victim Lie in order to stand up at all.

Because if you take away the Victim Lie, then you’re left only with the falsehood of Rangers’ survival and all its obvious contradictions.

The Victim Lie is the great fiction concocted to give the Survival Lie its context and stability. If they were, as they claim, not erased but relegated, how did that happen? By what means did it occur? By what regulations was it done? And because no-one can answer those questions then there had to be a conspiracy. And what possible motivation could Scottish football have for such a conspiracy?

Naked hate, of course. And so, from that lie, grows actual hatred.

2012 saw three essential things happen.

First, the death of Rangers took place—in full public view.

Second, Scottish football, in spite of its leadership, which cravenly wanted to promote a fraud and vindicate the actions of people like Craig Whyte, got its act together and did a tremendously principled thing: it put sporting integrity first. And it listened to its own supporters in doing so.

And third, trust in the mainstream media collapsed like a house of cards.

Fan media existed before it, but in the aftermath of 2012, fan media—and in particular, Celtic fan media—exploded. I formed my independent site, On Fields of Green, before the turn of the year. And the reason we all grew so popular and so relevant to the debate was simple: no one trusted anything anymore that was written in the mainstream press.

They attempted to bully and intimidate fans. Instead, they rendered themselves utterly irrelevant in the eyes of those same fans.

It is an act of self-harm so gross, so incredible, that it still takes my breath away when I sit down to think about it—especially when I sit down to write about it, as I have here.

I owe the living I make to the events of that time.

Without it, I wouldn’t be doing this. Not only did those events energise me and inspire me to pursue this course, but they laid the foundations for the entire blogging community. Something like this may have happened anyway—the trend towards fan media was growing. But militant fan media, aggressive in its pursuit of its own club’s interests, even if that means taking on its own club?

Well, 2012 was our foundational year.

I have long said on this blog that if the mainstream media did its job, I wouldn’t have to do this. We don’t ask a lot of these people, and we never did.

Treat your role seriously. Treat the word “journalist” seriously. Pursue that profession with the integrity it was built on.

Because I grew up revering journalism.

My decision to go to university and study media was more about being a press officer for a political party or a trade union than about going into journalism. But I revered what journalists did.

Two guys with typewriters—diligently, resolutely, and without fear—brought down a president. Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein are heroes of mine to this day. And I still love to go off and find brilliant examples of investigative journalism—cases where journalists have broken open big stories and brought down massive institutions.

But here, especially in Scotland, all of that has been replaced. By bipartisanship. Gossip columnists. Fantasists. Brazen liars. And people who care about the job only in terms of what it provides them—a salary and an expense account—and have no interest in serving the wider public at all.

If they can get by copying and pasting and producing clickbait, that’s what they’ll do. And so, the whole industry here is dying on its knees.

And 2012 is not what made that happen—any more than I can say that there would be no football blogs in Scotland without those events. The trend was going in this direction. And the media would still have ended up a pale imitation of what it once was. That’s just a fact.

But 2012 is the year the blinkers came off for a lot of people, and the smarter ones started to ask themselves a simple, but devastating, question: if we can’t believe what we’re reading on the back pages, should we really trust anything we’re reading on the front page?

2014 and Project Fear was the shattering of that particular illusion. And once that goes, there’s no coming back from it. There’s no un-ringing that bell.

The Daily Record’s scandalous “Pledge to voters” was as grotesque an example of outright lying as you could ever hope to see.

It was, for politics, what 2012 was for football fans. And the fact that so many people in the Celtic fan community recognised it instantly for what it was owes everything to what happened with the death of Rangers and all that flowed from it.

And nothing will ever be the same again.

With the loss of its credibility and the shattering of trust, the mainstream media could have given itself a shake, got its act together, hired some principled, decent people, and tried to fix the damage it had done to itself by wrecking its relationship with its readers. Instead, it doubled down. It hired only from the clown car.

It started to talk to its remaining readers with ever more condescension, ever more deceit, and a steadily rising contempt.

The entire industry is beyond saving.

It clings on as a vast repository of clickbait and mindless gossip. When someone breaks a story, as we were told happened yesterday, more often than not, we later find out that it didn’t involve anything like journalism but was basically someone sitting at a desk, taking a phone call that said, “This is what we’re asking you to write,” and then that journalist sits down and writes it, unquestioningly, uncritically, and gushes about what brilliant work he and his newspaper have done.

And the contempt that we have for them, they also have for us.

But it’s a contempt tainted by a weird kind of disbelief. “Why does anyone read these people? Why does anyone listen to them?”

They don’t understand it, and they never will.

Because they still think that the ivory tower in which they sit is the source of all wisdom and knowledge in the land, even as they deliberately and wilfully erase all the things that made that ivory tower stand in the first place.

Yeah, it would all have happened anyway, but 2012 accelerated it massively here in Scotland. 2012 changed everything in our media landscape.

And there are days when I don’t know whether to be grateful for that fact or appalled by it. Days when I don’t know whether to be happy for where we’ve ended up or disgusted at how we got here. There are days like today when I’m all of those things—when I look at what’s happening across the city and the way it’s being covered, and I understand that this is why some of us do this.

And ultimately, it’s good that we do.

Photo by Craig Foy/SNS Group via Getty Images

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