Stuart Bathgate: Trigger-happy tactic smacks of diversion

Published on Monday 24 October 2011 03:37

SHOOTING the messenger was once a preferred pastime with a certain type of ruler. Getting rid of the bearer of bad news, they felt superstitiously, was the first step towards changing the news itself.

We live in more rational times these days, of course. Everyone knows it is a pointless diversion to attack the messenger, don't they?

Well, almost everyone. For Hearts and Rangers, shooting the messenger – or, more accurately, refusing to talk to him – still seems to be a viable tactic. And so, in the past week, we have seen Hearts decree that no-one at the club will have any official dealings with any branch of the media, while Rangers owner Craig Whyte has cut off all contact with the BBC, and pledged to sack any employee who speaks to the broadcaster even on an off-the-record basis.

With both clubs facing varying degrees of financial difficulty, Hearts again having been late in paying their staff and Rangers awaiting a crucial tax case, you would think they had more relevant things to worry about than how to deal with branches of the media which reported things not to their liking. Or rather, you might conclude that banning the media was an attempt to distract attention from those more important things, and to curry favour with the more impressionable section of the clubs' support.

In the case of Whyte, if this has been the approach it has met with a certain success. Yesterday at Tynecastle, some Rangers fans chanted their disapproval of the BBC as well as voicing their opposition to a longer-standing target, the SNP.

Apparently they distrust the government of the country, and think the national broadcaster has an agenda against them. At this rate it can only be a matter of weeks before they add the Church of Scotland to the list of establishment organisations whose sole raison d'etre is to do down Rangers.

It should be said, however, that there is a rationale to Whyte's approach which makes it more understandable than the one taken by Hearts. The Rangers owner has banned the BBC, and threatened legal action against them, because of the contents of a documentary which was broadcast on Thursday. It may still seem strange to outsiders that football reporters should be banned because of a programme which they had nothing to do with, but Whyte has concluded that because the BBC threw its resources into the programme, it is only right that he should take action against the company as a whole.

The attack came from the BBC, so his argument goes: the counter-attack shall therefore be against the BBC. We might think that the best way for Whyte to mount that counter-attack would be by immediately publishing evidence that refutes the allegations made against him, but he has opted to do otherwise.

In the case of Hearts, the withdrawal of co-operation with the media is because of the club's dispute with the SFA over referee Iain Brines. The role of "certain elements of the media", according to a statement on the Hearts website, was to contact the SFA and to ask them what they were going to do about statements made about Brines by Paulo Sergio. The Hearts manager made those statements voluntarily, in public, at a press conference. They were reported in newspapers, on radio and television, and on the Hearts website.

At least some of the reporters present felt that if Sergio's account of events at his club's match against Ayr was correct, his case was a good one. However they felt, though, they were within their rights to ask the SFA how they planned to respond. It is absurd to presume that the SFA would not have responded at all without being alerted to Sergio's comments by journalists.

But that's a side issue. Even if Hearts know for sure that some journalists did contact the SFA, they have not advanced Sergio's cause in the Brines case one jot by issuing a blanket ban on the media.

Indeed, they have possibly retarded it by refusing to talk with a few voices who were inclined to side with them. Sometimes, in shooting the messenger, you also shoot yourself in the foot.

Taken from the Scotsman