Our media pushed an anti-Celtic narrative some of them knew was false.

Yesterday was one of the most shocking days for the Scottish sports media in its modern history.

I say that knowing full well what some of these people have done before.

They have pushed agendas. Ignored controversies. Simplified complicated issues to chase headlines. Manufactured stories. Twisted words. Launched vendettas against people who somehow did not fit the established frame. Some of them have even denied the liquidation of the first Ibrox club and helped construct the toxic Victim Lie to support the Survival Lie.

Everyone knows I believe the media in this country has an anti-Celtic bent, and at times it is quite extraordinary. Give any 50-50 call in favour of our club and you will get days of outrage over it.

I have seen Celtic stories blown out of all proportion.

I have seen Celtic stories which almost defy description.

There was the case involving Brendan Rodgers a few years back, where he was accused of misogyny because of an off-the-cuff remark he made to Jane Lewis of the BBC. It was exactly the kind of manufactured controversy every Celtic manager has to watch for, like a man walking through a minefield.

We have all seen these things. We have seen stuff that would be deemed almost unbelievable in any other media setting.

This week has eclipsed all of it.

Until last night, most of us believed the conduct of the media over the last week had been merely embarrassing. Yes, there was some gilding of the lily. Yes, there was some pushing of stories further than they needed to go. Yes, there was the usual whipping up of hysteria.

But what we found out in the aftermath of the SFA and SPFL releasing the audio took this to a whole different level.

The media has spent the last week pushing, platforming or indulging a narrative which the audio now shows was fundamentally false.

They cast doubt on a match result which was not in any serious doubt at all.

Last night on Twitter, broadcaster Graham Spiers spoke about the SFA audio as something which confirmed what he and some of his colleagues already knew: that Derek McInnes and Hearts not only knew the game had been brought to an end by the match officials, but that they were involved in the discussion around that decision at the time.

The released audio confirms that an official told referee Don Robertson: “Hearts are happy to finish. Derek McInnes has told me they are happy to finish.” It also says Hearts wanted their players off the pitch.

That is not a detail. That is the whole story, and much of our sporting media knew this the whole time.

Spiers tried to hide the issue under the convenient cloak that the media could not disclose it until it had been corroborated.

As was pointed out to him by several people on Twitter, including myself, that caution was not afforded to Celtic fans when allegations that Hearts players had been assaulted were carried without proof.

No such corroboration appeared to be demanded in that case.

But where the corroboration argument collapses completely is not simply that some of the media remained silent about what they believed had happened. It is that certain outlets continued to press a version of events which the audio now shows was manifestly untrue, and many of them knew it was untrue as they promoted it.

Let me repeat that so it is clear.

There are people in the media who either knew, or should have known, how the game ended and that Hearts had played a role in bringing it to an end, yet they continued to indulge the idea that the governing bodies’ version of events was in dispute. That there was some dark conspiracy going on behind the scenes. That the public was being lied to. That Hearts had a legitimate procedural case.

In one part of that, they were correct.

The public was being lied to.

Only they were the ones involved in the lying.

In all my years doing this, there has never been clearer evidence that sections of the media in this country act in a dishonest fashion.

I’m not talking about random lunatics and assorted goons who latched on to this subject for their own reasons. I’m talking about people in the mainstream media with responsibilities to their audiences and to the outlets they represent. People whose job is to present facts to readers, listeners and viewers.

Some of them chose instead to present a story they either knew to be fictional, or had made no serious attempt to verify before amplifying.

Incredibly, these are the same people who have insisted the governing bodies take responsibility for the events of this week. They have demanded that those running the game behave as though they have some kind of higher duty.

Under normal circumstances, I would wholeheartedly agree with that sentiment.

I have expressed it on this blog many times. The governing bodies in this country are a joke. They don’t want to govern, and since governing is not just their job description but the actual job itself, I find it appalling how often and how consistently they hide from taking major decisions.

But this is very much a case of the media saying: do as we say, not as we do.

Because if there were any similar sense of responsibility within their own industry, a lot of these people would be in serious trouble for what they have spent the last six days doing.

It used to be an ironclad rule in journalism that you were allowed to get facts wrong, provided you had acted in good faith and corrected the record when the truth emerged. What you were not allowed to do was invent the news.

You were not allowed to lie to your audience. You were not allowed to pretend that a story tilted one way when in fact it tilted the other. Those used to be career-ending behaviours back when the industry had professional standards.

Some in the media are guilty of brazen hypocrisy.

Tom English is one of those who comes to mind when I think about the last few days.

He tied himself in knots yesterday trying to defend an entire week of anti-Celtic spite, and his hypocrisy was hung around his neck for the world to see.

His contention that Celtic fans were deflecting because we asked for evidence in the assault allegations was a betrayal of journalistic ethics. It effectively suggested that facts don’t matter when the accusation is aimed at our support.

If the BBC is happy to have a journalist on the air who does not appear to think the pursuit of facts is central to the job, that is their lookout.

The Daily Record, on the other hand, has an even bigger problem with Keith Jackson, who pushed the “missing minute” line harder than anyone. The most generous interpretation is that he himself may have been misled by people at Hearts.

If that is the case, then saying so, condemning it, and doing it swiftly is the only serious defence he has.

I’m going to be perfectly honest. There is a moment in Casino where Ace finds out that his slots manager, Don Ward, has allowed three high jackpot wins to occur almost simultaneously. When the county commissioner comes to beg for Ward’s job, De Niro bluntly tells him that either Ward was in on the scam, in which case he’s fired, or he was too incompetent to be in that role, in which case he’s fired.

Measured against that standard, I don’t see much of a defence for Jackson at all.

He is not the only one who pushed the narrative. There are podcasters at the Sun. There are people south of the border. There are pundits on several online shows who all have questions to answer, if any of their colleagues are professional enough to stand above this scandal and put those questions to them.

Some of them will not be able to answer honestly. Considering their current conduct, that should not surprise anyone. Some of them have clearly forgotten what honesty is, if they ever knew in the first place.

The Scottish sports media were awfully excited in the closing part of this campaign. Their contention was that this title race had put Scottish football on the map, that it had made the world sit up and take notice of our game.

Those same people, because they did not like the outcome, have spent the last seven days torching the reputation of Scottish football with a flamethrower.

Any goodwill, any positivity, any enhancement of the game’s reputation, they were content to flush down the toilet by pushing not only discredited rubbish, but a dishonest version of events.

They have inflicted enormous reputational harm on Scottish football as a consequence, especially those who have insisted this is some kind of conspiratorial backwater where Celtic pulls all the strings and nothing that happens here can be viewed as legitimate.

It is an atrocity what these people have done, or tried to do, to our sport.

I have done this job now for nearly 15 years, and I have never seen anything remotely comparable to this in terms of irresponsibility and dishonesty.

These people have accused Celtic and our support of shaming Scottish football.

This morning, it is perfectly clear who has actually done so.

It is perfectly clear whose actions, whose conduct and whose lack of morality have damaged our game.

Last night, the walls came tumbling down. The dominoes fell one by one.

Not because some of them wrote what they did out of bias, anger or frustration at a result that did not go their way. That would be bad enough. Not even because some of them covered up what they knew to be a false narrative.

But because some of them willingly participated in it.

That is beyond the pale.

This is a world largely without consequences anymore, where no one expects any institution to operate with high standards. A lot of people have jobs today who do not deserve to have jobs today for that very reason.

But I will tell you this: they have damaged themselves and the institutions they work for more thoroughly than they could ever have hoped to damage Celtic.

As such, we will never trust some of them again.

They know who they are.

For some, this simply keeps them in the gutter where they have been for years. For others, they are going to feel the scale of the fall and the height from which they have plummeted. Because we are not going to let them forget it.

Nor should we.

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