Not one Celtic fan believes the media, or Ibrox’s, fake outrage over Sunday.

You’d never believe—given the way I slate the press here in Scotland—that I’ve spent my adult life (since my late teens) revering the media as a whole.

You might find it odd that I consider some of the greatest heroes of all time to be journalists and brave investigative reporters, many still alive today and working in the industry—but they are the exception, not the rule.

Far too much of the media is craven and servile.

The media industry was supposed to be founded on fact, supported by evidence, and structured around the idea that audiences wanted information. Now the media panders to clicks and shares and acts out of fear of the very power it is supposed to be holding to account. Most outlets today are staffed by cowards.

Regular readers know I’m a cynical soul when it comes to the world we live in and the state we’ve gotten ourselves into as a species. I’m deeply concerned by much of what I see and hear—not only in the mainstream media, but in the wider world.

Journalism is supposed to shine a light into dark corners and expose hidden truths. Instead, I’ve seen it bent to the will of the powerful. There have been numerous scandals over the years in national titles that unveiled how the mighty influence public discourse; I’ll give you just one example.

In 2015, political commentator Peter Oborne—author of some tremendous books on political lying—resigned from his position at the Daily Telegraph after discovering they had spiked several stories about the banking conglomerate HSBC on the grounds that HSBC was a major advertiser with the paper and its publishing arm.

Incredibly, some of those stories linked HSBC to major criminality, including money-laundering for international syndicates like the Sinaloa Cartel, dealings with sanctioned governments and even terrorist groups.

“It is a rule of journalism that editorial content should be dictated by what the reader needs to know — not by the demands of the advertiser…” Oborne wrote in his resignation statement.

In a later piece for Open Democracy he said; “The coverage of HSBC in Britain’s Telegraph is a fraud on its readers. If major newspapers allow corporations to influence their content for fear of losing advertising revenue, democracy itself is in peril.

I’m a great admirer of Graham Spiers. Regular listeners know I’ve appeared on his podcast a few times, and I respected his work long before that. There was a superb episode in which he explained why he left The Herald: he’d written a story the Ibrox club didn’t like, and they attempted to spike it by pressuring his editor.

One of their threats was to pull advertising—not just their own, but from linked companies and organisations. When the paper tried to force Spiers into an apology and retraction of his claim that then-Ibrox director John Bennett had praised the Billy Boys, he refused and resigned once it became clear what they intended.

The conduct of the Telegraph and the behaviour of The Herald shed light on the appalling mess that is Scottish football journalism today. If it isn’t the colossally ignorant opinion writers, it’s the basic cowardice of nearly every major publication—and sadly even the BBC isn’t exempt.

On Sunday, as everyone knows, there were shameful incidents at Ibrox that form part of a larger pattern of conduct at that ground, making it manifestly unsafe for our club and our fans.

We’ve had players showered with objects, one member of our staff hit, and a high-profile incident where supporters were struck with bottles and other missiles on a previous visit—an episode that led us to refuse tickets until our safety concerns were taken seriously.

It remains to be seen how seriously those concerns are taken, even now.

But it’s not just the constant rain of missiles our fans have to endure whenever we visit there; it’s the bile that pours from the stands every single week without fail and almost always without comment or condemnation in the media.

That was true in Spiers’s time at The Herald, and it is true now: whichever club occupies Ibrox—Rangers or whatever its current incarnation—they hold a grip on the media that can’t be denied. People at the highest level of our national press are either in sympathy with the Ibrox club and unwilling to criticise it, or too scared to speak truth to power—although speaking truth to power is exactly what their role should be.

And as one blubbering wet-wipe of a journalist made clear not that long ago, this also applies to Celtic: when the Celtic chairman can summon a reporter out of bed to berate him for allowing someone else’s opinion to be heard, that’s a bad day for the media, and a bad day for all of us.

The fact that the individual rolled over fills me with nothing but contempt and makes you wonder how many others in our press would have reacted the same way.

But we know there are particular problems at Ibrox, and we know those problems could and should have been tackled decades ago.

There was an opportunity when UEFA launched its initial investigations into sectarian, racist singing at Rangers—and that opportunity was flogged almost immediately, by a handful of people at national titles and the national broadcaster who were determined not to focus attention on the Ibrox club as it deserved, but instead spent their time dragging us into the same cesspit.

Scotland—and Scottish football—lives with a sectarian problem at Ibrox because no one here wants to tackle it, and that’s just a fact.

If it weren’t true, it would have been done already. If the media got serious, if civic Scotland got serious, if the governing bodies got serious, this problem could be eradicated in short order—and it hasn’t been.

Yesterday, the media rained condemnation on a section of the Ibrox fan base: the section responsible for the bottle-throwing and that horrendous tifo. Yet one newspaper, in a moment of sheer whataboutery, made the actions of a single person in the Celtic end its main headline.

I will not call that person a Celtic supporter; anyone mocking the deaths of ordinary people who were attending a football game forfeits that right. As far as I’m concerned, that piece of human excrement deserves everything he gets.

But to pretend there is no moral equivalence between that act and tens of thousands chanting about “killing Fenians” and being “up to their knees in Fenian blood” is bullshit. They are simply different points on the same spectrum of hatred—and none of it belongs in football grounds. To stomp your feet and express outrage over one while ignoring the other is hypocrisy, and that’s being generous.

Half a dozen news outlets posted pictures of that tifo on Sunday before Ibrox’s statement was released. Not one condemned it at the time, even though the message was clear and unambiguous: a direct threat of violence against our fans, suggesting they deserved to be murdered. Pure and simple—and there was no mistaking it for something else.

No condemnation was offered until the club itself released its statement. That means the reaction was to the statement rather than the tifo.

Those who saw it and knew it was unacceptable chose not to say so until the club had said so first. It’s almost as if our hacks—our newspapers, the BBC and others—needed permission from Ibrox before daring to speak out. They needed that sign of disapproval before they felt able to comment.

I therefore take no one seriously who only voiced outrage after the Ibrox statement was released. Tom English’s statement came three hours after the game finished, by which time the club’s comments were already circulating. He’s by no means alone, but publicly venting on Twitter after the fact hardly convinces me of his sincerity.

When I wrote about the Union Brats last night, I said they must feel pretty confused to suddenly be the targets of such vitriol in the media and elsewhere, when they’ve done far worse in the past—all without a single word of reproach.

They must wonder what’s so special about this occasion. Of course, we know the answer: the club itself is feeling the pressure.

What I’m saying is that the media has once again shamed itself. Its outrage is counterfeit—expressed only because the club approved it, and for reasons entirely unrelated to genuine contrition.

That board has a long history of excusing its supporters’ rogue behaviour and blaming others. They blamed the Hampden Riot and its pitch invasion on Hibs fans, as though it wasn’t entirely predictable after a century-plus wait for a Scottish Cup. In 2019, they even tried to blame Kilmarnock for their fans collapsing the Rugby Park disabled section to celebrate a winning goal.

Our own club has seen countless examples of Ibrox making excuses for its supporters—they’ve become masters of whataboutery.

After UEFA decided to investigate and sanction them for the Union Brats’ anti-immigrant tifo earlier this season, they suddenly found their voices on that and on racist, bigoted singing too. Yet they had allowed the “butcher” tifo from Gangs of New York—another explicitly anti-immigrant, pro-violence display—without uttering a word.

Only two things changed: the UEFA investigation, and the presence of the American investor arm they’re desperate to close a deal with. That’s why they were able to muster something that sounded like anger over Sunday’s bottle-thrower and the Union Brats—fear that the Americans might walk away.

If you look at Ibrox fan forums, they’re also filled with condemnation of the backward, 17th-century garbage that flows from much of the support. But it’s not genuine enlightenment—it’s fear of losing investment.

My piece from earlier this morning specifically mentions the Union Brats and suggests they’ll soon have a choice as this takeover gathers pace. And when the Americans finally get the keys they won’t tolerate a sectarian element in the stands they’ll do everything they can to remove it.

I suspect that if these people are serious, they’ll overhaul that club’s cultural ethos—and then the Union Brats won’t be the only part of the support forced to choose between standing up for that culture or backing down.

Based on the board’s previous conduct, I reckon many will choose the hopes of big money and success over the poisonous culture they claim to cherish.

When UEFA threatened sanctions before, those songs disappeared from the stands almost overnight. It shows they’re all talk—tough-guy posturing that evaporates at the hint of real consequences.

Which tells me one thing above all: if this country ever got real and tried to force that club to change, it wouldn’t take much. Ibrox and its fans would drop that vile stuff in two seconds flat—at least in public—if they believed there’d be repercussions. But they know there won’t be. And that knowledge has allowed it to continue.

The first time anyone truly challenges it, it’ll be gone for good. And that is the great disgrace of our media: they’ve had multiple chances over many years to lead a campaign to purge those stands of sectarian filth, and they’ve failed, because their outlets are filled to the brim with cowardice.

Yes, it’s been another shameful episode for the Ibrox supporters—one of many. It has cast a very bad light on them at the worst possible time.

But a far harsher light should fall on the press for abdicating their responsibility. And it’s not just them: the Catholic community in this country has been failed by more than just the hacks. It’s the governing bodies who are truly to blame, and that’s why the spotlight has to fall on them in the article later tonight.