Why the media hate the Old Firm (and King Canute was right)

OK, that's a click-bait title, written to get you to read this. They don't hate the Old Firm. In fact, they are as inextricably linked to them as a baby in the womb by its umbilical cord to its mother. The screenshots above and below from the BBC website show the problem. They are dominated by stories/headlines about Celtic and Rangers, with other clubs only getting a look-in occasionally (often when there is a tangential link to an Old Firm club)..

There are Facebook pages and WhatsApp groups that defiantly declare they are Old Firm Free Zones. Yet, sorry folks, for all your rage and bile against those two clubs, they dominate our game and have far more fans than everyone else, so unsurprisingly the media are in thrall to them. Journalists desperately need all the eyeballs they can get on their writing and all the ears and eyes they can get on their radio and TV shows. These eyeballs/ears provide the justification for their salaries, or the advertising/sponsorship that underpins their websites, podcasts and live online shows. The Old Firm have more fans, more eyeballs and more ears, hence the infatuation shown above.

Sure, some hacks hold the Scottish football authorities and the big clubs to account, but too many are seemingly employed largely to make a crisis out of a drama and to ask 'gotcha' questions in the hope of a headline and yet more eyeballs. They know their pay is, in many instances, more dependent on clicks than quality reporting or punditry. The media bosses know this too, which is why they also employ former players whose sole job is to 'tell it like it is,' whether they are right or wrong. Note: some of these people are hardly ever wrong in what passes for their own minds.

That doesn't mean there aren't some good journalists and pundits and the BBC Sportsound programme (others, as they say, are available) can be very entertaining ... but they are all farting against the thunder that is the soundtrack to the long-term decline of traditional print and broadcast media. Print media in particular are on their last legs. Online and clicks are what matter now, while betting apps are also part and parcel of many publishers' offerings, as is anything else that will shift the dial on revenue. Podcasts are everywhere. There is so much (too much?) choice, and, admittedly amidst some pearls, much mediocrity.

In my view, the media are unwittingly replicating the efforts of the famous King Canute, who, just in case you don't remember, sat at the sea's edge and commanded the tide not to come in, because his toadying advisers told him that, as King, he had that power. The tide has been coming in a long time for the media. The readers/audience that were taken for granted for most of the last century have moved on. A year ago, the Press Gazette summed up the problem...

"According to Ofcom, seven in ten UK adults consume online news in some capacity, with more than half using social media as a news source. These figures are significantly higher for younger readers; 90% of 16 to 24-year-olds use online sources for news, and eight in ten use social media."

Only the biggest publishers can still fund the quality and (just about) the quantity of news and investigative journalism that we desperately need in our country. The proliferation of small, parochial and club-centred podcasts, Facebook 'banter' pages and WhatsApp groups mean that we're nothing like as dependent on the mainstream media for our news and entertainment as we were even at the start of this century. The focus within the MSM thus goes even more to the big audiences - the Old Firm fans, the Premier League in England and the big, popular sporting events, while real sporting superstars are routinely ignored. A few weeks ago, there was a sporting event in Scotland that featured the World Champion and World Silver medalist, several Olympic Gold Medalists and many other Olympians and top sportsmen and women. There was nothing in the mainstream media about it. The resources and the interest are not there. Sorry to say, but the media are merely delaying the oncoming tide.

Alastair Blair, Operations Director, the SFU