Yeah I flogged this title from FourFourTwo's june issue and with good reason. I think it's a brilliant article as to how the media works in relation to football. So is the pocket book supplement on the last 5 English managers, including Robson.

Maybee it explains why the media love taking the piss out of NUFC and its' executives.

I think it explains why the media do not like Shearer and delight in doing him over. Why the media now like writing positively about Bobby. Why they hacked down Gullit and supported Rob Lee.

If you haven't read it, get hold of it. If you keep questioning why? as to the media read it. If you've read it and keep asking these stupid questions as to why they won't get off Als' back, you need to be hit on the head with a plank of 4x2 to knock your senses back to where they belong after you were dropped on your head to begin with.

-- Anonymous, June 07, 2000

Answers

Spill the beans. Can't you republish it here?

-- Anonymous, June 07, 2000

Sorry after the effort I just put in, which I'm sure you'll all find interesting, I'm drained.

;-{

-- Anonymous, June 07, 2000

All right.

The article talked about how the media react to how players and managers relate to them. They provide an example of how Rob Lee has always been willing to give them some time, and how Gullit brushed them off. So when Ruud was treating Lee like a disgarded sock, and subsequently quite, the media painted Lee as an innocent victim and Ruud as a tosser.

The moral of the article, if you give the media the time of day, there more likely to be sympathetic towards you in their articles.

-- Anonymous, June 07, 2000

You mean like the US media studiously ignoring the extra-marital wanderings of one William Clinton ? He who has given the press far more - and more consistent - access than any previous President ?!? Nah mate. They just love to build up any public figure they can get their talons into, so that they can lop off their heeds at some later date ("Sorry guv, no anaesthetic left by the looks of it. You'll just have to tough it out.")

-- Anonymous, June 07, 2000

As is amply demonstrated in their treatment of Bobby Robson when England Manager, Graham Taylor and now Kevin Keegan. 3 managers who always went out of their way to make time for the media and provide them with access to information. Sorry Tre, but I think you'll find that they are just slime. They got it as badly wrong as they ever could after Hillsborough, and they are overdue another mighty fall now; hopefully this is it.

The problem with people in their position is that they command attention since they disseminate the information we all want. This attention goes to their heads and they begin to feel that they themselves and their views on what is going on are the cause of the interest, and not the information we are after. It happens in far more than sports journalism.

'Q' magazine had been trundling along enjoying a huge readership until they got seriously complacent. Forgetting that they had become popular as an alternative to vaccuous hit parade magazines, they began to think that their in-jokes and editorial spin was more important than the music they were reviewing. They totally panned 'What's the story Morning Glory' and got butchered for it when it became the album for that Summer and pretty much retracted the original review after admitting that they had only listened to it once and that it had grown on them. Hmmmm.

Empire magazine did the same thing with 4 Weddings, but were savvy enough to let Kim Newman slate it from a cinematic perspective with 1 star and get Angie Errigo to view it from the entertainment side and give it an unmissable 5 stars.

That's one of the main problems with the British media. Horribly opinionated (said Mr Pot) and abjectly failing to provide any balance. It's not even as if these jokers are prepared to tag-team so that the Mirror and the Sun intentionally take a different stance. If any good comes out of Euro2000 it will be Shearer scoring a hatful and making them write one of their minging "We were wrong!" headlines which so utterly fail to convince.

-- Anonymous, June 07, 2000

Loony

Ah, but the US media and politics is a different kettle of cod. They like to believe themselves to be the Fourth Estate and act as some sort of self appointed guardians of the public. Ever since the Washington Post stumbled into Watergate (which was a followed up government leak and hardly investigative journalism) the press believe they protect the people from bad government. Crap. They support the status quo and the oligarchic dictatorship.

As if 'news' is some sort of objective concept! That makes me laugh...as if an 'investigative' journo walks along the street looking for small furry things called 'news'. The media is an industry which means they produce, make and sell their news.

Where's my 'Manufacturing Consent'???

-- Anonymous, June 07, 2000

Ah, doesn't everyone like Noam Chomsky.

-- Anonymous, June 07, 2000

It's the self-righteousness of them that appalls me as well as the "moral majority" stance. Look at how they reacted when Sereny Gitta wrote that book about Mary Bell. Despite Mary's daughter being a ward of the state and there being a ban on the press revealing where Mary lived as she had been hounded out of most towns in England in the past, the press still managed to find her and bring to her child's attention the fact that her mother was a murdered. Cue Blair et al talking in the tabloids about criminals making money out of their crimes etc. Whatever anyone's views on the rights and wrongs of the Mary Bell book(s), they were written by a massively intelligent woman who had worked in the concentration camps, weren't remotely sensationalist, Mary had got very little money, all of which had gone into trust for her kid, but the tabloids acted in that predatory way (and themelsves made far more money than Mary out of her crimes) that occasionally makes you sick to be English.

-- Anonymous, June 07, 2000

I remember an article in the Chronical during the Gullit era which- on the assumption that lee was about to leave - said (Alan Oliver I think) what a plonker he was as he didn't talk to the press and was the most obstructive person at SJP etc etc

-- Anonymous, June 07, 2000

Who Gullit or Lee?

-- Anonymous, June 08, 2000

Lee.

-- Anonymous, June 09, 2000