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- How the policies of ManC and Arsenal are affecting which club players want to sign for
By Tony Attwood
There is something very strange going on in some of the English media, and it doesn’t bode well for how Arsenal are going to be treated next season – with the start of the season now being only a month or so away.
I’ve stopped subscribing to the Telegraph as I think it is now getting totally out of hand, but as a non-subscriber I can still see their headlines, and those on their site at the moment that I am typing this piece up (around 10am on 15 July – they may have course have been removed by the time you go looking – if you do), are both disturbing and annoying. For example,
- Watch: Argentina fans fight each other before England match
- Scotland is embarrassing itself by backing Argentina
- Argentina hate the English more than we hate them
- Fifa to break rules with 30-minute half-time show at World Cup final
- England and Argentina have disliked each other for 64 years, here’s why
- Kane accuses ITV of trying to create rift in England’s World Cup camp
Those are the headlines leading to six different articles, the headlines all appearing on the front page of the Telegraph’s website on 15 July. And I was just thinking, maybe aside from telling us quite a bit about what the Telegraph’s editors think we want to be reading about, they are also, between them, doing something to heighten tension between supporters of England and supporters of Argentina. Or maybe Argentine and English people in general.
And I think this is important, because when the Telegraph starts reporting about disturbances or violent behaviour in football matches in the coming season, I think it is worth looking back to those headlines.
Now, when newspaper writers ever bother to think about the influence they have on footballers, club managers, supporters and the like, they tend to report the issue by saying that they do just that – they report the issue, they don’t make events happen.
But the fact is what they choose to report has an enormous impact. If they write about disturbances at one club, there will always be some at other clubs who seek to organise greater disturbances. In a sense that is not the newspaper reporters’ fault, but nevertheless I do think the media has a responsibility to think about the consequences of what it says. And there is no doubt that if supporters of club X see a report that says Club Y supporters have caused damage at another ground, there will be some in Club X that want to show “we are as hard as they are.”
In the current situation, we have a whole series of reports wherein half of the current headlines about the forthcoming international between England and Argentina, as shown in the Telegraph, are about crowd trouble and violence.
Now, as I have said many times, what the media chooses to report is what we then define as news. News is not something that is automatically out there, but what certain organisations define as being worthy of inclusion on their blogs and in their printed editions.
Of course they are not the only newspaper that has a particular attitude when it comes to football. The Guardian today has the headline, “Love and hate collide: England v Argentina is not simply a grudge match,” which is available to everyone to read (unlike most Telegraph articles).
The journalists’ argument is that they just write about what is out there. My argument is that they choose to emphasise certain issues and that makes them news. They choose, these days, never to mention the 110+ rule-breaking cases that ManC have been found guilty of, and the fact that the issue has not been resolved. But they mention possible trouble between England and Argentina.
They may be able to justify their choices; I am certainly not denying that such justifications can be made. But the point is, justifiable or not, what issues are put before the public on TV, the radio, websites etc, influence how people see the issue.
Now if we expand this issue and consider the way that the media write (or don’t write) about, for example, Manchester City and its legal cases, how certain referees get to oversee the same clubs over and over again during a season, how certain referees get to oversee a much higher percentage of home wins than others, how maybe 10% of fans of a club are complaining about the manager (while not mentioning the 90% are not complaining) or anything like that, then that gives an opinion to readers. And that is before the reader takes into account the brief comment picked out in the headline (which is generally not written by the article writer).
The media is not neutral. It has an impact. And it has an impact as much in relation to football as it does to the building of nuclear reactors, the danger of walking down the high street after midnight, or whether we should stop paying benefits to people who turn down the jobs they are offered.
The media influences how people think by which news stories they choose to run. But we generally we don’t get that message, because, well, it isn’t reported by the media. If we read a newspaper’s website or its printed edition, we get the impression that what it includes is the news, and that is that. And that is misleading – and quite often deliberately so.
