Bad Journalists Part 1

Is Tom McGurk Ireland's worst journalist? Quite possibly. Now RTE doesn't let people on to complain about the toilet facilities in (hypothetically) the parish hall in Swinford, Co Mayo. But someone up there in Montrose thinks that it's okay for Tom to waffle on air about how he won't be able to get his pre-match pints with his rugby chums in Jury's anymore, even though it's just as parochial. But he's often worse in print. This week in the Sunday Business Post Tom's noticed about fifteen years after everyone else that:

The Premier League is all about money and the clubs are little more than huge brands...Football is now quite simply a vast global merchandising industry, still stretched across what were the bones of the old professional game in England....[T]he English Premier League...is now less a domestic league than a world one.

And just in case you think Tom's being excessively anglocentric he notes that:

It has also overhauled the Spanish, Italian and German leagues in financial terms and, because of its enormous wage levels, attracts the very best players in the world. It’s no wonder that, as a consequence, the England national team is in the doldrums. Rather than attempt to produce homegrown players, the English clubs are now more likely to sign foreign talent.

Well by that logic shouldn't the French, German and Italian national teams be in the doldrums too? Now soccer isn't really my thing but I seem to remember those three making semi-finals of the World Cup last summer and one of them winning it.

Then he just gets is plain wrong:

Since the inception of the Premier League the big four [Arsenal, Liverpool, Manchester United and Chelsea] have won all the major silverware

Now Liverpool have never won a Premier League title. And Blackburn have won one in 1995. So that makes you wrong Tom. Not just wrong in your opinions. But in facts that would take a minute to check.

Then he gets it wrong again:

The Premier League, of course, is effectively owned by Rupert Murdoch in all but name,

Well not quite. Sky used to have the rights to broadcast all Premiership games. Not any more as Setanta have quite a few. So that makes Tom wrong. Plain wrong. And then he mentions that the Premiership is 'the biggest viewed sporting event in the world'. Nope Not the World Cup, the Superbowl, or even the Olympics.

But then it gets curiouser. Tom writes that:

What further complicates the coverage of the game is the fact that not only does Murdoch effectively ‘‘own’’ it, he also owns the principal television and newspaper outlets covering it.

What, essentially, we have here is some sort of cartel effect, with the vast financial resources in the game keeping everybody happy, and with the scale of Murdoch’s press ownership preventing journalistic scrutiny.

Now in fact the Premiership is owned by the twenty clubs which comprise it. Previously I thought that Tom thought that owning BSkyB meant that Murdoch effectively owned the Premier League. Now he says that that 'Murdoch effectively ‘‘own[s]’’ it {the Premiership]' but controls all the media coverage as well. So how precisely does Murdoch effectively own the Premiership? Puzzled? Me too. And if Murdoch 'owns' the Premiership that makes it a monopoly, not a fucking cartel.

Even more bizarrely Tom obviously thinks he's the first to notice the commercialization of soccer. He congratulates himself on a job well done:

Few are prepared to break cover and say it, but the truth that dare not speak its name is that, increasingly, the emperor may have no clothes. Today’s English Premier League is less and less about sport, and more and more about marketing.

Despite all the mistakes and confusion there does lurk in the article a truth that dare not speak its name, that someone is a pretty bad journalist.