The Aribo Lie and the Connell Contrast

SamTeàrlachH said:
We're all used to it by now. Anyone who reads the Scottish football media during the transfer window will know that one of their most loved tropes is the 'Rangers [sic] pip Celtic to [insert any player they sign] signature'. Now, it's not as if I'm sitting here crying into my cornflakes about this stuff, but I just find it astounding. And while I'm not making light of genuine totalitarianism, this endeavour of the Scottish football media to upkeep the delusion that Sevco are beating us to signings reeks of the kind of cognitive dissonance that you find in authoritarian and totalitarian systems. Where entirely invented non-realities and superficial narratives that serve organised agendas are maintained and perpetuated, very effectively, by the media. No, I'm not saying we live under a totalitarian system, but some of the techniques used by the media come straight from that playbook. It's much more instinctive in this country and this concerns football and not mass social manipulation as you get in genuinely totalitarian or authoritarian polities, but the comparison with totalitarianism concerns the ubiquity of it all - the ceaseless pushing of these narratives across a broad spectrum of outlets. Forget total football, this is totalitarian football. They attempt, often successfully, to turn fiction into 'popular belief'.

Those who find this stuff fascinating will have known for a while that the media claim, repeated multiple different times by multiple different outlets (it was ubiquitous and has become accepted among the media and less discerning consumers), regarding Celtic losing out on Aribo to Sevco was nonsense. There was never any indication from Celtic that we were interested in Aribo, while his former manager at Charlton stated quite clearly that the only other club that had made a solid query about him was Brentford. Now Aribo himself has let slip that Celtic's interest in him was entirely non-existent. He has confirmed that Celtic were never interested in him.

So the same outlets who have been banging on about how Sevco gloriously beat us to the signing of Aribo are now all doing u-turns all over the place, pretending as if it wasn't them who cooked up this rubbish to begin with. In very brief fairness to the media, there is every possibility that the Ibrox club's PR squad are simply making this shit up and feeding it to all-too-willing newspaper hacks. We all know of the history of Scottish football 'journalists' and their tendency to take any info that emanates from Ibrox as gospel unworthy of journalistic or even just mildly critical scrutiny. In fact, forget the 'PR squad' and perfectly willing little journalist henchmen, Slippy Gerrard himself peddled the 'Celtic wanted Aribo' lie in one of his little deranged press conferences. Whether he was basing that on what the media were writing or whether he was basing it on lies concocted by Sevco's PR team were saying is impossible to discern. Does the tail wag the dog?

People like to call us paranoid, but this entire narrative is explicitly anti-Celtic. There is a concrete example of how this is so. Way back at the beginning of silly season, Sevco were linked with a specific player. He was young. Exciting. Attracting EPL interest and was scouse. His name was Luca Connell. Go onto Google and do the necessary searching, you'll find Connell was linked by the media to Sevco before he was linked to us. Now, I have absolutely no idea if Sevco were ever seriously interested in Luca Connell, but, by the media's own standards, here you had a literal and concrete case of us signing a player that the media claimed Sevco were interested in. Where were all the articles about how Celtic had 'beaten', 'pipped' etc. Sevco to the signature of Connell? You won't find any. Not one. Not one question to Connell about why he chose Celtic over Sevco. None of the rubbish that has been spouted about our entirely false pursuit of Aribo has been applied to our signing of Luca Connell.

The reason you won't find any of this stuff regarding Connell or any signing made by Celtic is because, shock horror, there is a leading core, an advanced guard if you will, of 'journalists' in Scotland who have an obvious and pathological hatred of Celtic and/or a conviction to constantly portray our club in a negative light - almost always to the benefit of the Sevco outfit. In a country determined, to some extent, by ethnoreligious chauvinism, it's hardly a huge surprise that many of the hacks that comprise our hyper-Unionist, British-loving media want their beloved Queen's 11 to rule the waves again against the f**ian upstarts. Not every journalist, pundit or writer, of course. But a significant little cabal.

The Aribo-Connell contrast proves this. It's pathetic.
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Excellent post sam
 
Theverdict1 said:
One of the major issues I have with the false narrative they come up with, to appease their hordes and themselves, is our failure as a club to call it out.

Also, it doesn’t matter how many people believe something, that has no bearing on wether it’s true or not. Millions of people claim to have been abducted by aliens. Many millions more believe them. People can believe what they like, but that doesn’t mean it’s true.

People say Celtic play a dignified silence game in the face of slurs. I am not in the group that thinks this is the way to proceed. If you tell me a story of what you believe to he true and I know or suspect it’s all in your head, I will ask you to justify it with evidence.

Celtic should have a part of their PR operation that fact checks any shite written, that includes us in the narrative being spun and challenges and ridicules it.

We cannot complain about lies being written if we allow those lies to be left unchallenged. To ask what is the motivation? To name the journalist involved to back up their claims with evidence and to state in that challenge that it is nothing short of trying to make their team look better.

To let this stuff go without humiliating the journo involved, to me is an abdication of responsibility to defend our name.

My strategy would be simple. You try to create a false narrative about my club and we know it’s bollicks I’m going to call you out by name. I am going to collect all similar articles you have written and expose your lies. I am also going to ridicule your professionalism and expose your motivation as no more than partisan propaganda. And I’m going to keep doing it. I would brief Lenny on how to call them out at press conferences.

We are not a fucking punchbag for their shite. Like any bully you need to take them on. To expose them, to ridicule them. To let them know that once you have exposed their lies then if you think we are going to give them the time of day, they are in for a shock.

Fuck dignified silence. It leads to nothing but the manufacture of more lies and tells them they can write any shite they like.

Get the fucking gloves off. Put the knuckle dusters on and steam in.

We enable this shite through our failure to stand our ground and call it out.

That old saying about all that is required to let evil triumph is for good men to say nothing is spot on.

I am more fucked off, much more fucked off in fact, that we don’t call it out than I ever am reading what they concoct.

If anybody at Celtic is looking in and would like me to head up this counter intelligence operation I am available. :)
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I 100% get your angst over all the bs that's written but I don't think we should have to devote time , energy and money to discredit their lies. Merely because the lies are found out to be just that soon enough as with aribo, and the phantom Chinese offer for moral-less . We do our talking on the field. If its the SFA then that's different or any governing body then Celtic should call some things out. As angry as I get with SMSMs nonsense id be aghast if we had a department solely responsible for shooting down every nonsense 'story'. We the support can do that ourselves on great forums like this one and others. That department if it existed would be a 24 hour job no doubt haha. They've just received a kick to the softies by aribos statement, one of their own dismantling a non story fiction is sweet justice. And they are always found out in the end. To quote the late great CEASER "always felt our club to be underdogs in our own city" is as much true now as when he first said it , more so even perhaps. Let the the SMSM continue with their lies as we continue to dominate the game on all levels. Trophy after trophy it's unprecedented our success and long may it continue HH
 
Niall J said:
Sit down before you read this TV. QED. From E-Tims today
Which reminds me, there was further evidence that at least one reporter isn’t really a reporter at all, but a fantasist, or a bloody liar, depending on which way you look at it.
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Chris “Union ” Jack, the Ibrox cheerleader in the Ibrox cheerleading Evening times, had this piece pulled, to prevent him pulling anyone else’s piece, after he got all mixed up about who “rangers ” would play next in europe should they get away with fielding improperly registered players against St Josephs…wait until after the second leg before hurling your complaints to UEFA…
Shenkdija are Celtic’s next potential opponents, something you’d have thought the Shkendija manager would have been aware of…
Unless, of course, Jack is lying and he never spoke to him at all…
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