Are there doubts about the Ibrox investors? Is our media sitting on the story?

Here’s my thing.

Five years from now, when the Ibrox club is in the midst of another takeover crisis, when the current owners are bailing out, or the Ibrox fanbase is trying to force them out but they’re refusing to go, we’re going to get a lot of revisionist history from the mainstream media. What they’ll say is, “We had a lot of questions at the time.”

Yesterday, I watched a clip of Jon Stewart—the fantastic American comedian and anchor of The Daily Show —talking about Jake Tapper’s excellent new book, Original Sin, which I mentioned the other day.

It’s the book about Biden and his health crisis, and how the White House and his staff tried to cover up the extent of his cognitive decline—even after the whole world saw how pronounced it was during the debate with Trump.

Stewart, of course, has great professional respect for Tapper and the CNN team. But he said something that was as funny as it was insightful. He played a montage of moments when Tapper was pushing the book before its release—countdowns like “3 weeks out,” “19 days out,” and so on—until finally he promoted it as coming out on Tuesday with the words, “You won’t believe what we found out.”

Cut to Stewart, pulling that mock face of disbelief he does so well, and he said, “Don’t news people have to tell you what they know when they find it out? Isn’t that the difference between news … and a secret? ‘You won’t believe what we found out …’ Well, that’s why I’m watching you … ‘Breaking News … in a week!’”

I loved it. I found it hilarious. Later in the show, he came back to the theme and hammered the news media again for sitting on a story they obviously had and obviously knew, but for reasons of their own decided to sit on.

I couldn’t help but think about the Ibrox takeover and the near certainty that, at some point in the future, we’ll hear claims that doubts were expressed about it in the highest echelons of the Scottish news media and elsewhere.

Let’s be honest, this won’t be the first time.

How many times in the last few years have the media confirmed things we had already written and discussed? Long after we wondered how they could be missing it, or why they weren’t covering it, only for them later to admit they did know some or even all of it—and just chose not to bother?

I read Tapper’s book and I enjoyed it thoroughly—if that’s the right expression for something that turns your hair an even grayer shade of gray.

Some of it was genuinely disturbing. Like the discovery that Biden’s decline was obvious to some even while he was running for his first term. The lapses during Cabinet meetings. The lapses at private events where Democratic Party fundraisers were shocked. The news that they even considered whether they might have to put him in a wheelchair for much of the second term.

Incredible stuff. Horrific stuff. All of which makes it clear that people in his inner circle knew it was untenable but were willing to go through with the con and only reveal it after the election—if he proved successful.

What they would have done then is the real question, because the book suggests certain members of his inner circle were happy to use his declining cognitive ability to push their own policy agenda. That’s a sobering thought.

But there have been Ibrox scandals over the years that were equally obvious to those at the centre of them. It’s a lie to suggest otherwise.

We know, for example, there were people on the first Ibrox club’s board who were strenuously opposed to Craig Whyte buying the club, and the media was fully aware there were serious doubts about him in the internal Ibrox operation.

So if there are people on the current Ibrox board who oppose this takeover and are concerned about it, that might explain why you haven’t heard their voices yet. Because who are they going to tell?

We can’t rely on the media to tell the truth about this stuff.

We know they’ve sat on stories before, some of them quite recently.

A year ago, we were writing about obvious splits in the Ibrox dressing room, which you could see from player comments and from stuff we heard over the summer about Butland wanting to be sold, being turned around by promises of the captaincy, only for it to be handed back to Tavernier, who had found out through the papers he was losing the it and stomped his feet until he got it back.

All of that was known to us as outside observers.

But when did the media admit those problems existed? Not until months into the season, when it was “Oh yeah, there have been some problems behind the scenes. We just didn’t tell anybody.”

And if the media is going to sit on news like that, then what good are they? How can we believe in the external reality they present when we know there might be stuff happening behind the scenes they just won’t tell us?

For all we know, there is serious disquiet about the takeover in the media and at Ibrox. There has to be some around the 23 June meeting and what it will mean. But for whatever reason, they just don’t want to rock the boat.

Is it cowardice? Is it expediency? Maybe they know these people will take total control at that meeting and don’t want to upset them because they’ll have to deal with them one way or another. I don’t know.

But I do know this—if something goes wrong here, if these people turn out not to be on the level, if it turns out that things were happening behind the scenes and the media later must admit that it knew that all along … all sorts of people will try to rewrite history when that comes out.