Do you take any notice of, or consume the mainstream football media?
I ask because last week they were in typically grotesque form over Jack Grealish. Although their models are slowly dying, millions still buy newspapers and they can’t be spending that money in the belief that they’re reading a dystopian version of the truth. They must believe it to be on some level true, because who pays money to be lied to?
We will soon be subjected to an avalanche of the most dumb-ass sports news piggery when Thomas Tuchel takes his first game as coach. The Second World War will be relitigated, even as the real enemy lies to the west and the assembled snouts will invent bizarre questions that exist only in their own soiled corner of the media farmyard.
[**We’ve already seen their xenophobic instincts**](https://www.football365.com/news/tuchel-england-manager-germany-missing-games-mediawatch), only shared by some of the outer fringes of talk radio, which relies on these blood-boiler crazies for content. He will look on, like many before him, with astonishment at the sports news pigs’ unique sort of stupidity in pursuit of content.
Last week the focus of attention was on Jack Grealish and what he did on a day off, even to the extent that his manager was quizzed about it. It’s a non-story about a man in a couple of pubs and the look, frequently seen on Pep Guardiola’s bewildered face, of disbelief as he struggles to comprehend the fuss, as any sentient adult would, showed how the press is divorced from reality and live inside a kind of sports news pig fart, with only sports news pigs for company.
This, though, is quite typical. Things of insignificance are dwelt on for days and are blown up into a big story to further feed the sports news pigs’ cravings for content. And that’s it – content. Not quality or truth or facts, just content.
I can’t be the only one who finds themselves astonished that the public has anything to do with these organs and their battle between truth and dystopian distortion.
As we know only too well, the need for traffic to provide advertising money distorts everything. Everything gets reduced to reporting on a few big clubs and most everything else is simply ignored. You might be critical of that and few of us would wish it to be the case in the best circumstances, but that’s simple economics.
But if you’ve got pretensions to be a newspaper of record, you’d think they would have a broader vision beyond making up stories that aren’t of any interest e.g. ‘famous footballer spotted in restaurant just hours after defeat’.
As [**Mediawatch**](https://www.football365.com/mediawatch) points out every day, the football pages have their own peculiar relationship to words, both in terms of how they’re used and what they do or don’t mean. They imply untruths, they invent improbable speculations, they overstate nonsense like it’s important, as per the Grealish thing. They write ‘five things we learned’, four of which are self-evident. Claim records that are not records and any amount of fictions and twisted contortions, all delivered in a lexicon of words that barely make sense. Imagine being these people making this sh\*t up? Look what the sports news pigs have become.
Fifty years ago, tabloids always produced sensationalist tittle-tattle but there was always genuine news. They wouldn’t have produced the modern typical sports news pig slurry and I don’t believe anyone was interested in reading about a footballer in a restaurant or in a pub. It’s just…nothing. Reporters had relationships with players and protected footballers from public scrutiny, instead of exploiting them.
Why read that at all? To do so, you must think, to some degree, that it’s going to contain truth. But their words don’t mean anything. Words should have a meaning and not just be tools to create a bizarre fiction. Their history of being liars or truth distorters is long and storied so why fill your synapses with it?
Obviously, it’s clear that their approach is, ironically, one of the reasons behind their decline. The narrow focus, the shallow sh\*te, the distortions and dishonesty all work against them in the long term. Obviously, their websites attract traffic and that’s where they see their future but why click on anything? Why waste your time? It might not cost you any money but it costs you in intelligence, creating a dystopia where the news and reality is subsumed by the ceaseless lust for clicks.
It doesn’t matter how or what distortions and lies get you to click, as long as you click. Standards? Never mind such legacy principles. Click clicks clicks. Why does any business want to be exposed to that traffic? I’ve never understood why anyone continues to advertise on stupid, not to say dishonest websites? Is it because they want to attract people that are gullible and easily manipulated?
Numbers surely don’t matter if the large majority of them are disengaged. So surely newspapers would be better off producing interesting intelligent content that leads to longer dwell times and engagement and reflects well on brands placed on that content. Is that just naive? Do they keep writing it because people keep clicking on it? If so, stop. That will end it, I guarantee it. Are we living in an idiocracy?
Is there more money in stupidity, made-up rubbish, endless witless speculation or pointless observation? Maybe there’s a constituency for it? In which case, God help us all, we’re surrounded by idiots who’ve surrendered their minds to garbage.
Where are we going? Is it a race to the bottom, appealing only to the unquestioning and intellectually unambitious with intelligence and thought confined to a few ‘elitist’ places, led by the news pigs? Or are we already there?
I think you know the answer.