In this case, however, there is no excuse. The limp-cocked forehead typist said it was Brian Marwood who took the call, according to his 'unnamed source close to the club' and then proceeded to ask anyone and everyone, bar Brian Bloody Marwood if it was true. Its not exactly journalistic rocket-science to lift the telephone and dial up Citeh and say "Andy Hunter here at the Grauniad, I would like to speak to Brian Marwood... No, that's fine, I can hold... Hi Brian, just wanted to ask you if the rumour of the Liverpool approach to swap Carroll for Tevez is true?" I mean, **** me, what do they teach journos at college? Bullshitting 101? No story, make it up? Always make your source 'unnamed' and 'close to the club'? How to write headlines that bear no relationship to the story? It all sounds like the Daily Sport has gone mainstream...
And i firmly believe that in ALL sports hacks (and that included pundits and interweb writers) sit down and bloody well make up everything. I have seen documentarys where you see red tops bascially holding creative meetings. Honeslty they are pigs in muck.. they are not talented and don't need to be. They simply need to be able to sound contraversial and make the best sounding things up. How many times have you guys seen internet rumours taken up by the press as facts? Good writers write, bad hacks just work in sports.
The best one was last year when some idiot started up a Royston Drenthe facebook page,and said he was just about to sign for LFC Within an hour the Daily Star had it on the website, Drenthe to sign for Liverrpool, within a couple of hours of that all the national press where reporting it Then it emerged the Drenthe facebook page was fake Nice to see the press check out there sources!!!!!!!!!!
At the end of the day it is purely and simply, shoddy and lazy journalism. This is the reason I can't be arsed with the papers anymore, very rarely buy one these days and I certainly don't believe much I read online or hear on talkshite either. The transfer rumours rarely come to pass and the match reports in the main are worse than I'd expect from a ten year old. The vast majority of sports journos have some sort of hidden agenda (usually to get as far up Slurgie or 'Arrys ringpiece as humanly possible) and quite frankly they are about as reliable a source these days as my mate Baz who knows a bloke who's got a mate who's a relative of a bloke who sits next to a fella at work who drinks in the same pub as a man who works in the ticket office (etc etc) and has apparently seen more different players flying into JLA than I've eaten either hot or cold dinners. If a story appears in The Echo then i'll probably pay it some attention but not until I see a player at Kennys side being paraded around do i ever think a deal is done...and frankly that's how it should be
Here's the easiest way to tell if a story was submitted 4 minutes before the deadline and contains less facts than the s*n. If it uses key words such as "could" or "might" then it's simply wishful thinking. If it calls upon unnamed sources, then there are no sources. If it starts with "according to" then the writer is distancing himself from a lie. If a story contains attempts to connect facts such as "Liverpool want to buy Rooney because Rooney is mad at United and Liverpool need goals" then it's easy to see there is no correlation between the two and it is a stretch of the imagination simply to put together a story. I propose a database that records each story reported by the media corporations and verifies it's outcome. It then gives a percentage of correct stories. Any news corporation with a less than, let's say 10 percent correct story percentage should be forced to display a yellow badge of poor journalism next to each further story until they pass 10 percent. Of course this may be undue hardship on their business but I really, really hate the media anyway so I don't really care.
I can confirm something. I think most Reds are aware that my mate is the Liverpool and Everton reporter for a daily paper. When I left my ex-wife, I stayed at his for 18 months. On slow news days, he would phone round his journo mates, they'd make a story up between them and then all write the story in their own styles. This is a FACT
Its not the Troll Bascombe, is it? The one that had his nose so far up Gerard Houllier's "cul" that when Ged farted, Chris reported smelling roses? The one who, when he wanted Fowler out of the club, Ged briefed him and Chris obligingly stitched up God??
