Last week was a dreadful one for our media in how they covered Ibrox.

Last week was a bad one for our media—a bad one even by their own lamentable standards. It was a stinker. It was god-awful. Their standards have slipped so far that if they’re not hammering on the bottom of the barrel, they’ve already smashed right through it and are halfway to the centre of the earth.

It started with the Ibrox EGM, and the media’s handling of that was a flat-out disgrace. There’s no other word for it. A flat-out disgrace.

They focused solely on the £20 million and the so-called vision put forward by the club’s new owners—although that “vision” amounted to little more than a few vague slogans. There was not, by any stretch, the outline of a plan.

And yet every single outlet expressed itself hugely impressed by these people—apparently because they speak in complete sentences. Other than that, and the fact that they’ve been successful in one business or another, I didn’t see a single thing that justified the gushing headlines. There’s been no blueprint, no strategy, no detail—just vague promises punted into the future.

Even the stadium plans—which the press heralded as “well in hand”—are nowhere near it. when you actually listen to what Marathe and his new boss, Cavanagh, said, the club has no intention of dealing with that issue any time soon. It’s another one of those “maybe we will, maybe we won’t” promises. Kick it down the road and we’ll see.

And the press could have written it like that.

There’s no shame in reporting what was actually said. But instead, it’s all being spun. Just as the £20 million is being spun as a transfer war chest—when the owners themselves have repeatedly said it’s not that. The media is telling Ibrox fans what it thinks they want to hear, even when the club itself, in some ways, is being more open and honest than the journalists are.

They chose not to focus, of course, on the real story of the week—how the EGM was actually set up to facilitate the passing of new Articles of Association which are a disaster for those who want transparency and accountability. Don’t take my word for it. You have Sir Brian Donohoe—former chairman of the Westminster Rangers Supporters Club, founding member of the Rangers Trust, one of the first Club 1872 board members—raising those same, serious, crystal clear concerns.

One newspaper covered his comments. Just one. The Herald, who he spoke to directly. The rest of the media? Silence. Hugh Keevins mentioned it in passing—only to dismiss it as of no concern and no consequence.

Try telling that to the shareholders who’ve just been stiffed out of their entitlements. Try telling that to the folk who poured money into Club 1872 every month thinking they were helping build influence—only to find themselves locked out. Small potatoes? These people know better.

In time, that’s going to be one of the most embarrassing aspects of this whole affair—the way the club’s small shareholders have been blatantly, openly, and brazenly locked out. The club claims it’ll still hold fan meetings, but anyone who’s seen Celtic’s open forums knows exactly what those are: a talking shop.

The club stays in control of the information. They decide what you hear and what you don’t. They pick the audience. They set the limits.

If you think a few carefully choreographed meetings, where the chairman sits down with hand-picked fan reps every few months, equals openness and transparency—sorry, but it doesn’t. The company has confirmed it will no longer hold AGMs. So, the only voices that will be heard are the ones the club chooses to hear. And they’ll know exactly how far they can push things before they stop getting invited.

The media doesn’t want to focus on that. Too negative. Too awkward. Too real. And so, they ignore it. But when someone as high profile as Donohoe speaks out, people should listen. This blog flagged the issue weeks ago—now it’s being openly discussed by people with serious credentials, people who gave real service to that club. The media still pretends that it’s not happening.

As if that wasn’t bad enough, last week also saw the publication of David Murray’s book. And not just the book itself, but a co-ordinated campaign to rehabilitate one of the most reprehensible men Scottish football has ever known. Worse yet, he’s being allowed to do it through the pages of a book put out by Reach PLC—the owners of the Daily Record. They’re publishing this thing. They’re platforming it.

You will never read a more desperate attempt to rewrite history.

The book presents Murray as the victim of charlatans and schemers. It casts him as some innocent who only wanted the best for Rangers and was thwarted at every turn. And when you’re presented with something so blatantly false, something so insultingly revisionist, it makes the mind reel.

Murray is the last person this game should be trying to rehabilitate. A huge number of the problems our game faces today can be traced directly to him. He didn’t just kill one club. If you were an Airdrie fan, you might argue he killed two.

He drove up prices. He escalated wages. He dragged the whole league into an arms race. The knock-on effects of that still linger today.

I’ve dived deep into this before, but here’s the headline: the total cost to the taxpayer of Murray’s time at Ibrox is somewhere between £180 million and £250 million.

That includes the money he siphoned from the Exchequer via the EBT scheme. It includes the money spent pursuing those cases. It includes the administrative costs of liquidation. And it includes the malicious prosecution cases—ongoing still—that have already cost tens of millions and could rise to £100 million before it’s over.

And that’s just the cost to the taxpayer of his Ibrox adventure.

Because Murray funded that entire era—all of it—with money from the Bank of Scotland. Cheap, easy, reckless lending. Loans he should never have been given. Loans that became the subject of one of the biggest financial scandals in Scottish history. And at the heart of that scandal? David Murray himself.

When you break it down, what you find is this: the bank paid for years of wild overspending over there. Then we paid to bail out the bank.

Bank of Scotland was taken over by Lloyds. Lloyds realised—too late—that they’d bought a toxic asset. It cost the taxpayer £70 million plus just to write off Rangers towering debts. Add in the £50–75 million in tax cases, £10 million in administration and litigation, and finally £50–100 million more in payouts for malicious prosecutions tied to the club’s collapse.

That’s just the football-related part of the cost. That’s what Murray’s Ibrox years inflicted on the country. But Murray himself is on the hook for more.

A whole Hell of a lot more.

Let’s go deeper.

HBOS existed for just seven years. Journalist Ian Fraser charted its meteoric rise and spectacular collapse. When HBOS was bought by Lloyds, it required an £11 billion bailout—half of the £20 billion Lloyds itself got from the Treasury.

That money was there to cover toxic assets—companies who owed the bank billions they could never repay. And what do we know? That 10% of those toxic assets were Murray-owned or tied to him. So, £1.1 billion of that bailout went to cover Murray’s debts. Written off. Gone. £1.1 billion from the public purse.

To put that in perspective: this Labour government is currently tearing itself apart trying to find £6 billion in welfare cuts. They’ve already halved that total with concessions, meaning they’re still chasing £3 billion more. Murray’s share of the HBOS bailout is more than a third of that entire target.

Let that sink in.

This isn’t a “benign individual” whose worst sin was wrecking a football club. Murray inflicted real, measurable harm on the entire country.

And for all we know, he still is.

So, no—I don’t want to hear his rationalisations. I don’t want to hear his excuses. That man wrought colossal damage. And this week our newspapers are rushing to publish his story, and our radio stations are falling over themselves to get him on air.

It’s an atrocity. And it shames the media.

So yes, last week was a bad week for them. But it’s just one in a never-ending parade of bad weeks. All we get from these people is a revolving door of the same nonsense—world without end. Because if it sells a few newspapers to desperate Ibrox fans, that’s apparently good enough.

And that’s why the Scottish sports press is in the state it’s in. Because of weeks like last week. Because of the lionising of people like this. Because of the constant polishing of Halos that were tarnished beyond repair a long time ago.