Untold Media: The press is not reporting issues – it is the issue « Untold Arsenal: Arsenal News, supporting the club, the players and the manager

By Tony Attwood

It seems it doesn’t matter how many examples of media nonsense is printed about football, some people go on believing the press.  Each day if you look on any of the news accumulator sites you will see article after article about the players that Arsenal are going to sign.  We all know the club won’t sign them – or at least won’t sign all of them, and we all know that virtually none of us guessed correctly who was signing for us last summer until about 3 days before it happened.  But still it goes on.

We are going to sign full backs, because all our full backs are injured.  We are going to sign a midfielder because Jack won’t be back until March.  We are going to sign a forward because Robin is all we have.  Oh, I never thought of that.

In one sense it is all ok – just a bit of fun.  But the trouble is that some people take it seriously.  When Ivan Gazidis addresses the AGM of Arsenal Independent Supporters’ Association in August he stressed that there would be transfers but it was a difficult market, but many of the audience (all members of AISA) grumbled and protested, clearly not believing him, preferring to believe the media that proclaimed that Wenger had lost it, and could not sign anyone because of his dithering, incompetence, ineptitude etc etc.

Of course by the AGM of Arsenal they couldn’t come back with the “spend some fucking money” approach, because clearly the club had, and by then we were seeing what excellent purchases had been made, so the protest took a different form – demanding that Mr Hill-Wood should stand down, and that money should be sought from the Usmanov/Dein camp.

All of which feeds into the papers, and off they go again – building up to the transfer window with stories and more stories.   If Arsenal doesn’t buy anyone in the January window, it will be another Arsenal failure, another example of Wengerian stubbornness, and the criticism will start up once more.

Yet what all of this criticism does is ignore not only the fact that the media’s stories about who we are going to sell and buy are just invented tripe, but also the way the media in the UK works and what it is.    Because every time a web site re-runs a story from the press, it is giving the press credence which it doesn’t deserve.

And we can show the press deserves no credence for we have been hearing day after day, week after week, the most shocking revelations of how journalists have hacked into phones on an industrial scale, have tormented the bereaved, have stolen and lied.

It is simply not logical or reasonable in any way to separate what we now know are the tactics and techniques used by the press throughout 90% of the paper and then suggest that they are not the tactics and techniques used in the sports pages.

I must add, by way of background for non-UK readers that there is still a major government enquiry going on into the criminal activities of the press.  Every day we get new revelations and I won’t try to repeat even 1% of the stories that have been heard in the enquiry.  But here is just one as a taster.  Hugh Grant, the actor, has been a strong critic of the press and the way it operates.  When he appeared on a serious BBC investigative programme on TV about the closure of the News of the World (the paper that was the most read paper in the UK and which was forced to close as the phone hacking story broke) the mother of his  daughter received endless threatening phone calls.   The message over and over again, repeatedly, was,  ‘Tell Hugh Grant he must shut the fuck up’.  In abstract some people might feel that they would be able to shrug this off.  In reality most of us can’t.

The enquiry has heard endless tales of stories run in the press which are complete fabrications, and how photographers push and prod people endlessly to make them angry so they can get the picture which supposedly represents them in a drug induced state or whatever they are suggesting.

Yet despite this evidence day after day about the appalling nature of the British press, and despite the fact that day after day the press print stories about football transfers and the like, there are lots of people who willingly reprint them day after day, without making the connection.   It is simply inconceivable that the news and features sections of the press are “as bent as a five bob note” (as we used to say – meaning [for the younger generation] utterly and totally bent) while the sports section is doing an honest job to uncover the truth.

To believe this is in fact a form of denial.  A form of denial that anything is wrong with the press which allows the reader to believe that something is wrong with Arsenal.  A form of denial that the transfer rumours are based on fact.

To illustrate the case there’s no point going back through them all, one need only remember one that was so eccentric that it ought to ring through history as an example of the genre.  The Daily Mirror on 26 June 2008  said:

“Arsene Wenger is considering a shock move for Peter Crouch to replace striker Emmanuel Adebayor, it emerged last night.

“The Arsenal boss is also watching Euro 2008 Germany flop Mario Gomez and Blackburn hitman Roque Santa Cruz as he prepares to sell Adebayor to AC Milan.”

Yes, well hindsight is good, but awareness is good too.

Every time a web site repeats one of these mindless rumours it bolsters the press a little more, and enables those trying to defend the press in front of the enquiry to say (as I heard from a journalist this morning), “Look, we have a media that is the envy of the world…” as if that is true.   Even if in some bizarre way it is true, would that make everything ok?  Of course not.

The press is not reporting issues – it is the issue, and the more web sites repeat their wild stories as if they are true, the worse it gets.