BBC CREDIBILITY PLUMMETS WITH LATEST SCOTTISH FOOTBALL “SOURCES”
- BY LIAM CARRIGAN
- Jul 1
- 3 min read
I have always said, there is a rule that any decent writer should apply to a story before you run with it.
Does the story have at least 3 independent and unconnected sources that you trust verifying the information?
If it doesn’t then you don’t have a story, you have hearsay and conjecture. At best you have an educated guess. You don’t have journalism.
BBC Scottish Football News Round Up Reads Like a Who’s Who of the Dregs of Online Journalism
We all know that the likes of the BBC, the Daily Record, The S*n et al have a clear mission each morning: give at least one morsel of positivity to the rabid Rangers support to keep them appeased.
So, in today's Scottish football round up, the BBC decided to lead with this:
“Rangers Agree to Sell Igamane to Lille.”
They also add that his previous club in Morocco will get 30% of the fee. Funnily enough no mention is given of what the fee actually is, or when the deal will be completed.
But surely the BBC must have some solid sources to back this up right? Right?
Erm, no. Their first source is a Moroccan football fans twitter account KoraMaroc, whose whole raison d’etre is to provide positive coverage of Moroccan footballers at all levels of the game.
Hence, the emphasis on the fee that AS FAR, Hamza Igamane’s previous club, will receive.
Well, surely they must have a decent secondary source if the primary one is so flimsy, right?
Nope, wrong again.
Their other source is football insider, a site notoriously unreliable and prone to just making stuff up in the absence of any actual news.
They are to football journalism what Rod Stewart is to diplomacy.
They also cite the same source for another work of fiction linking Jamie Vardy with a move to Ibrox.
Yeah, I’m sure Vardy is going to turn down the numerous, far more lucrative offers from the likes of the MLS, Saudi Arabia and others to head to Ibrox.
After all, who needs sun, sea and sand when you can have sectarianism and staunchness?
Finally, we have FussballEuropa, which I’ll freely admit is a German football site I have never heard of, but which does not register very highly on any Google searches.
The BBC cites an article on this site as claiming that Beskitas have submitted an offer of between 8.5 to 10.3 million pounds for Rangers midfielder Mohamed Diomande.
There’s just one problem. The article the BBC link to doesn’t say that. It says Besiktas are “rumored to be interested” in the player. It makes no mention of any specific fee, so I guess the BBC just made up that number?
I suppose it’s a bit like the Daily Record and their frequent, willful mistranslation of stories coming out of Japan. They assume because the original story is in “some foreign language” that no one is going to have the time, patience or intelligence to actually check the source.
All I can say is I’m glad I don’t pay a license fee. If you do, it might be time to get onto the Citizens Advice Bureau, because you are being scammed.
