hackwatching

Neither Honest, Neutral or Objective: Another Bad Week For Scotland’s Sporting Press.

As tends to happen once in a while, Peter Martin (McGuire) has produced a piece of writing which has made him the focus of attention for the Celtic supporters. Martin (McGuire) enjoys that. Unknown outside of football fans in Scotland, like many others in his chosen profession, he will take it where he can get it. He really is a poor excuse for a writer.

His latest piece in the Evening Times, entitled “No more bets for Tony Mowbray if results do not improve” is like Bad Journalism 101. Martin (McGuire) does not support his assertions with facts, he re-hashes rumours, goes on flights of fancy and makes assumptions, all in the space of 17 short paragraphs, and less than 500 words.

Whatever school of journalism he attended should have taught him better than to open an article with a call for people to stop talking about Tony Mowbray being sacked only to dedicate the rest of said article to why those calling for it might have a point.

Martin (McGuire), like Keevins, like McNee, like others I could name, labours under the misconception that because people pay attention to him he is influential and important. He believes his writing to be the focus of debate, that he provokes the thought processes of his readers, that he can spark discussion. He is dead wrong.

What Martin (McGuire) is, is the focus of is derision. What he provokes is contempt. What he sparks in us is not anger – he would like that – but a profound disbelief that someone of such limited skills makes a living in the field for which he is semi-famous.

There was a time when sports journalism in Scotland was important, when it commanded respect. There was a time when sports journalism in this country had credibility, because those who worked in the profession knew their business, and knew their responsibilities and took those seriously. We are a long way from that benchmark.

Martin (McGuire) might not realise it, but he is a symbolic figure. His two principle media roles – his Clyde Superscoreboard “commentary” slot and his Evening Times column – are demonstrable proof of how far the standard has fallen and about how low the profession has sunk.

Martin (McGuire) has become a joke figure in Scottish football circles.

Over in the blue corner, Rangers fans detest him – I don’t think that’s overstating the case – believing him to be a gossip merchant and teller of tall-tales. In fact, they’d go further, and call him an outright liar at times. Their hatred of Martin (McGuire) is indicative of their hatred for anyone in the media who criticises their club, but it has an extra edge because they believe that he is a Celtic supporter. They are right. He is a Celtic supporter, but Rangers fans should look past that. After all, if we can do it, so can they. They see any criticism of their club from this man as proof that he’s out to get them, when actually the explanation is much simpler than that.

Martin (McGuire), like his Clyde colleague Hugh Keevins, is in the business of sensationalism, not journalism. No right-minded person can take someone like that seriously, whichever team they call their own.

Celtic fans have long since looked past Martin (McGuire), knowing what he is about. He is one of a number of “Celts in the media”, a group including Keevins, Nicholas, Walker and even Keith Jackson, whose behaviour is such that they are vilified by their fellow Celtic supporters.

When Celtic fans are asked to choose targets from the press, these guys often feature on the list, alongside rent-a-quote Rangers men such as Hateley, Johnstone, Chick Young and Jim Traynor, the latter two of course claiming to support other sides. Young, allegedly, is a St Mirren fan, who according to some sources needs a map and a guide to find their home ground, whereas Jim Traynor is supposed to be a follower of Airdrie United. Oddly, for a neutral, he seems to have a strange fascination with what goes on at Celtic.

The word neutral is used deliberately in this context. It is used because it’s what so many in our media claim to be. They are broadly grouped together in two categories; Rangers fans who wish to pretend they’re not, and Celtic fans who are trying to deny they are. Amongst that number is our friend Martin (McGuire), who long ago decided that “neutrality” meant slamming us hard, every chance he got. He thinks this makes him look as if he isn’t taking sides, as if he is above the fray, and in a sense he is, which, if you’ll pardon me for saying it, is the problem.

There are those in the media who basically are what they are. They are the sports journalists who are hopelessly partisan, in a sense more like political writers in the sense that what they write is clearly spin.

Take Mark Hateley for example. No-one could ever accuse Mark Hateley of sitting on the fence, and no-one, in the media or outside it, refers to him as neutral. He is very plainly, simply, unapologetically, a spokesperson for Rangers. His column for the Record is often indistinguishable from the content in the Rangers News; at times, the tone of his articles, especially those about Walter Smith, veers into outright veneration.

Derek Johnstone, on Clyde, is similar; he is unashamedly biased in everything he says, and it’s for this reason that Hateley and Johnstone must be immune from criticism here; they are what they are. They do not pretend otherwise.

There is a place in the journalistic profession for the drum-banger, the man or woman who shamelessly promotes a cause, or takes a side, and who each and every reader knows has a specific and clear agenda. These people do not trouble the wider world; they preach to the choir, getting through only to those who agree with the message. Trevor Kavanagh, in The Sun, made a career out of stumping for the right; Polly Toynbee, in The Guardian, has often been referred to as the media’s leading voice on the left. Readers know this even before they start to read, and it works. Indeed, the political slant of a newspaper, or a key journalist, often becomes a selling point.

The sports press is different, or it’s supposed to be. The sporting media is not supposed to be partisan; indeed, it can’t afford to be, because a paper’s sports coverage is often the main reason people - particularly men - buy it in the first place. To lean too heavily in one direction or another would put off large numbers of customers; after all, which football fan wants to pick up a newspaper which slams his or her side, stirs trouble in the dressing room and praises their rivals?

Sports journalists, in the main, strive to be one of two things; they must be either neutral or they must be objective. As Scotland houses two huge sides, and as both have a disquieting habit of drawing even non-supporters into their orbit, it is hard to find anyone who can maintain true neutrality. The people who can genuinely stand above the fray are a rare breed; rarer still are those who can look at the game and apply cold, hard logic to it, therefore objectivity is almost unheard of in Scottish sporting circles, and it’s that which we need the most here.

This is the area where so many, Martin (McGuire) and his cronies included, utterly fail to make the grade. They claim to strive for the first, but because they don’t possess the latter they can’t quite make it. Neutrality means not taking any side in a debate, but in presenting both sides of a case, no matter how ridiculous one of those sides is, and for those who are pretending to be neutral that is their Get out of Jail Free card, their back-stage pass to play at being respectable members of a respected profession. Under the guise of neutrality they can hide what they really are, which is to say that they are cowards. If they weren’t cowards, perhaps then they’d be capable of at least attempting to be objective.

This means that when controversy rages, or when, say, the Rangers fans engage in singing racist songs, those times when we need someone objective to call something what it is, the assorted hacks can put on their “neutral” hats and pretend to be outside the debate.

This appalling lack of conviction, this ignorance of their wider responsibility, has hammered the credibility of the Scottish sporting media into pulp.

The damage this does to the whole of the game is bigger than that which affects one club, and is the reason these people can be simultaneously hated by Celtic and Rangers fans alike. The contempt this inspires in their listeners and readers leads to their word being distrusted by everyone, and this weakens the standing of not only their respective media outlets but to the media profession as a whole. It’s not for nothing some are universally loathed; they do nothing to inspire faith in their word, or respect for their views.

Objectivity is a holy word in journalism, and a misunderstood one. Often mistaken for neutrality, in its purest form it is the opposite. Objectivity is about the search for truth, and it veers away from neutrality at any point where the facts or the truth mean taking one side or another. It is truly impartial, it sincerely stands above the fray, analysing and commenting on, and illuminating, the Search for Truth. In such an endeavour there is an ultimate loyalty, a loyalty to that higher standard journalism is supposed to represent. It is the antithesis of sensationalism, the silver bullet fired in the cause of informing the public – not entertaining them, as much of the news media is geared towards today.

Full text can be read on
www.celticparanoia.blogspot.com

More paranoid ranting available at www.celticparanoia.blogspot.com

 

TONY BANANAS & HACKWATCHER