Why is it that so many newspaper stories about Arsenal turn out to be untrue

 

 

By Tony Attwood

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• Why goals scored isn’t the measure it is cracked up to be

Very sorry we went down for a while today – we really are trying to find the cause of these occasional interruptions, checking the logs and so forth, but so far the fix has alluded us.  In technical terms I am told the problem is professionally known as “a bit of a bugger”.

Anyway, here, just a little late, is the lunchtime tale.

Untold has from the very start been very critical of the media and the way it treats football.  Not just because the media can show bias in how it selects and handles stories, but also because of two other factors which actually are much more sinister.

One is the issue of which stories it chooses not to report and follow, and the other is what appears to be a growing tendency to create stories out of nothing.

Thus for example a story which proclaimed that in effect Manchester City had won its recent case against the Premier League is a biased story.  It is clear that Manchester City won a couple of points, but also that the League won some points too.   Serious reporting has been that which considers the points won and lost in detail.  Repeating a press release is not serious reporting.  

The alternative approach is a story that says that Arsenal are close to signing a specific player could well be totally made up, especially when there is no credible evidence given to suggest this is the case, and when, as the transfer window comes to a close there is no sign that there ever was a transfer.

However that totally false tale, the make-believe transfer, is still itself a story of interest.  One can ask, how did the media get sucked into running that tale?  In fact how do they get sucked into so many false transfer tales that only 3% of the transfer rumours reported each window, turn out to be true?

This then is a story that the media don’t touch, which heightens the bias within their stories: the question of why the football media gets so much, so wrong.

Now that is an interesting issue in itself, and it leads to two more issues on top of this.

The first is that some football clubs will encourage journalists to write certain stories by phoning them with “insider information” provided on the basis that “you keep my name out of it”.

For the journalist, this is a free story, which can be typed up and handed over to the editors with very little effort.   The editor, with a ceaseless demand for new online stories, will run such tales without checking validity, and then when the predicted transfer doesn’t happen, or the club transformation or any other change also doesn’t happen, it is quietly forgotten.

That is how it has been for ages.  But now it is getting worse, and for two reasons.

First readers are becoming not only more aware that most stories are untrue, but also becoming somewhat resentful of the way they are being treated as idiots who can’t tell a made-up load of tripe from a real story.

And second, this unwillingness to believe what is generally utterly false journalism is leading to a decline in readership of the newspapers and their web pages.

In response to this “Reach” journalists are being asked to write up to eight articles per day each according to a report in the Press Gazette   This, it seems, comes “in response to Facebook and Google referral declines.”

In fact, the Reach group were previously getting “huge traffic” from “referrers like Google and Facebook.”   Now they are not.   Quite why they are not we are not told (as ever changes like this are blamed on a “change in the algorithm”), although one very likely reason is that so many of the stories are palpably untrue.  Another is that they are often so hastily written, that they actually don’t make much sense.   A third reason is that in order to read the article one has to plough through so many adverts, that it can become impossible to follow what the story is about.

I’m (thankfully) not a Reaach employee, but I do sometimes read their stories online and I have to say that there are so many advertisement interruptions to the text that it becomes impossible to follow what’s going on.

Reach owns the Mirror, Express, Daily Record, Daily Star, and multiple local sites such as MyLondon, BelfastLive, Manchester Evening News, Birmingham Mail, and Liverpool Echo – 130+ all told.   In the past these publications have gained a huge amount of traffic via Google and Facebook. – but the down-market quality and disregard for both coherence and truth may have knocked them quite a bit.  At least that is what some who are closer to that side of the industry than I am, are saying.

Now I am of course aware that some people attack Untold for mistakes, but then we are a tiny operation, dependent on volunteers giving of their spare time to send in stories, generally on the ground that we never mention who they are.  Professional journalists and researchers have we none.

But I think we can still tell a load of codswallop from something that has some semblance of truth..  As can most football fans.