The BBC shreds its own credibility by putting Pat Nevin on the air.

I am sure Pat Nevin has not exactly been in hiding since the closing game of last season, when he smeared the Celtic support with a lie about Hearts players being assaulted.

I am sure he has still been hanging around somewhere, appearing on the BBC, doing the rounds of those podcasts which still seem to think he is an intelligent analyst simply because he has picked up the occasional book in his spare time.

I have never been impressed by Nevin.

What a football media industry we have now.

It has been a long time since it was afflicted by that thing we used to call standards. If the football media in Scotland still had standards, Nevin would not have a job after that reprehensible claim against our supporters.

In other media environments, you do not get to make a mistake like that and then continue as though nothing happened. This is a guy who manufactured his own news story. This is a guy who had plenty of opportunities to go back, review the footage and report the facts, and he did not do it. Instead, he saved his so-called apology for a podcast over a month later, where it passed almost unnoticed.

It took him all that time, apparently, to do something he could have done almost immediately. He could have watched the footage a couple of times after making the claim, realised that what he thought he had witnessed had not happened, and corrected the record.

There are few things more brazen than somebody who makes a claim like that and then falls silent in the hope that the whole thing will somehow go away. I do not know when Nevin realised that he had not seen what he thought he saw. I do not know when he realised he was not going to get away with claiming he had witnessed something which clearly had not happened.

And I do not really care.

What I care about is that he did not correct the record properly and that he allowed this claim to remain in the public discourse far longer than was necessary.

Nothing says BBC standards quite like putting a man who lied about Celtic supporters back on the sofa to commentate on the games of the club whose supporters he lied about. I am not going to attempt to put this any other way.

Nevin had multiple opportunities to retract that claim publicly. He made it publicly, on the air of the national broadcaster. The correction should have been every bit as public and aired on the same platform.

He was not the only person who made claims that day, of course. I do not expect Peter Martin ever to have to make restitution for the number of dishonest statements he has made about our club and our supporters, but the BBC is supposed to hold its people to a higher standard than that.

Or at least it used to.

I have never understood what Nevin and others thought they were doing that day. Did they genuinely expect their statements and their words to be the final word on what had happened?

Nevin claimed he had witnessed an incident. He later admitted that he was mistaken. How can you be mistaken about something that serious and then not immediately go back and review the footage just to make sure?

When people are accusing you of having lied – and he was getting accused of lying from the first minute after that statement – surely the very first thing you do is check to make sure that you have not in some way over-stepped? Or are you too arrogant to do that? Are you too stupid? Either way, it’s not a good look, is it?

If I wrote something and was accused of being a liar, I know exactly what I would do. I would go back and double-check what I had written. I would scrutinise the facts around it and establish whether what I had said was correct.

And because I know that I do not write lies, I would have absolutely no problem correcting the record if I discovered that I had got something wrong.

I certainly would not wait weeks to do it.

So even if you accept Nevin’s explanation that he genuinely thought he saw it, how is that guy still a credible commentator after putting an incendiary allegation like that into the public discourse without double-checking it, without establishing it as fact and then leaving it there for weeks?

How can you retain enough credibility after that to sit on a BBC sofa and analyse Celtic matches again? Does that organisation have any balls at all? Does it have any discernible standards left? Because if it does, I want to know how putting Pat Nevin back on the air satisfies them that their editorial process is robust.

What happens if he suffers from another hallucination and makes another incendiary claim? What happens if he is so convinced that he saw or heard something else that he gets them into serious trouble by making that claim on their airwaves?

I listened to his so-called apology the other day, after I saw his smug face leering out of my TV after the LASK game. It cut no ice with me whatsoever.

His explanation amounted to saying he had made a mistake. He acknowledged that, at the end of the Hearts game, he thought Celtic supporters had punched a Hearts player. But I do not accept that as the end of the matter.

It is not as though there was no way to check this afterwards. There were hours of footage, some shot by mainstream broadcasters and much more filmed by supporters on mobile phones. Those events were captured from multiple angles.

As we said from the beginning, if there was evidence of an assault, it should have been easy to find. So, I want to know when Nevin started looking for it. And I want to know when he discovered that it was not there.

We have all used the phrase that something is an easy mistake to make.

This does not qualify. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. Nevin offered no evidence because there was none. He says he thought he saw it. So, what exactly was it that he thought he saw, and how do you mistake whatever that was for what he claimed that it was? What happened in front of him that led him to conclude that Celtic supporters had punched Lawrence Shankland?

There is nothing on the footage I have seen which would could possibly lead me to believe that a Celtic supporter did what Nevin described, and so it sounds to me like he simply made up a story without ever expecting it to be completely blown to pieces by the subsequent evidence, by Hearts players, by Police Scotland and by Martin O’Neill.

And it seems to me that the best defence the BBC can offer for its guy, and for having him sitting on that sofa again, is that he saw something which never happened, continued to allow that claim to stand long after dozens of us had refuted it and has still not admitted that he was wrong with anything approaching the same fanfare with which the original allegation was broadcast. That is the best interpretation of events.

So, what exactly does that say about the national broadcaster?

Why has it not told him that his services are no longer required? Why has it not said that it relies on accuracy in its reporting and that he fell so catastrophically below that standard that there have to be consequences?

A lot of people with poisonous mindsets saw what they wanted to see that day. That is how I have always viewed it. Those who did not claim to have witnessed assaults nevertheless believed what they wanted to believe, and barely a handful of them went looking for contradictory evidence.

The lie is still repeated in certain places to this day. The Ibrox club itself hinted at it again in its statement last night. This stuff does real damage.

That is precisely why the national broadcaster cannot simply put somebody back on the air after he puts a story like that into the public domain and then fails to correct it immediately when the evidence does not support it.

We no longer live in an era where you only get one shot at this. The evidence to support or refute Nevin’s allegation was freely available on the day. It was freely available when the words came out of his mouth.

If he thought he had seen an assault, he should have asked for the footage which proved it and kept his mouth shut until he could back it up.

In the immediate aftermath, he should have gone looking for the supporting evidence and retracted the claim on air the moment he failed to find it. That would at least have come close to the definition of journalism.

It would have come close to the definition of journalistic standards.

As it is, he does not look as though he has any.

And neither does any organisation which simply puts him back on the air.

If the BBC allows presenters to lie, or to get things so egregiously wrong that there is not a whole lot of difference between that and lying, then we have to wonder what else they bend, stretch or invent facts about.

We have to wonder whether there is a single thing some of these so-called journalists say which we can actually trust.

New media often defines itself through a hatred of old media. I personally don’t. But we are frequently accused of using any pretext we can find to attack mainstream outlets.

But it would be completely pointless inventing excuses to go after old-media organisations when there is more ammunition in simply covering what they actually do than there will ever be in inventing things they do not.

This is a clear-cut example. That man should not be on the air. The fact others were just as bad does not exculpate him in any way.

There was a time when this stuff mattered.

There was a time when mainstream media organisations guarded their reputations for probity, editorial standards and journalistic integrity because they understood that credibility was the only currency they really possessed.

Now they do not seem to bother. Now they will put anybody on the air. They will give any eejit who wants to screech a microphone.

They will overlook misinformation, mistruths or harmful mistakes, whatever terminology people want to use to dress this up.

Nevin’s conduct was outrageous. The BBC’s decision to continue using him amounts to saying that it is prepared to live with it. And that is everything.

That is the whole argument.

That is the whole reason so many of us do not trust these people anymore.

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