"ARSENAL PLUNGED INTO CRISIS last night in the wake of Robin van Persie’s £22million move to Manchester United," the Sun on Sunday offers. 0-0 and Alex Song leaving for Barcelona are the last straws in reporter Anthony Kastrinakis' eyes.
(I wonder what he'd make of Queens Park Rangers or Norwich City who let in five goals each in their opening games, QPR at home, even.)
"ARSENAL COULD BE HEADING INTO THE DARK AGES if they don’t find their mojo, and quickly," is one of the conclusions of John Richardson of the Sunday Express. Bizarrely, he continues:
"In these hyper days of instant judgements and little patience Wenger will be up against the wall if the 30 Premier League goals of Robin van Persie aren’t replaced – and quickly."
This about the second-longest serving manager in the Premier League, working in his 17th season at a club renowned for predictable solidity.
These are just two examples of the over-the-top reporting-cum-commentary that newspapers and websites pour out. Not just on the day after match day, but all week, all year. Hyper days of instant judgments and little patience, indeed.
No wonder that readers, with the new tools of social media like Twitter, have began commenting back at the reporters. As we shall see, not all reporters take kindly to that kind of attention.
This blog started off because I as a reader, myself a journalist and editor, grew tired of the hyperbole. And especially of the lack of journalistic ethics and principles in the reporting of transfer rumours. In my two years of blogging, I've regularly vented on these issues while patiently collating the realistic and the not so realistic Arsenal transfer rumours being reported first and foremost in the major English newspapers and on their websites. The pages you can navigate to via the top of this blog speak for themselves. 166 players have been linked with Arsenal for this transfer window alone.
Today, for the first time in these two years, a newspaper has posted a riposte to all bloggers, supporters and tweeters who are fed up just like me. Dan Silver of mirror.co.uk spends close to 40 paragraphs attacking all those who in their turn have attacked his paper for reporting on the Robin van Persie rumours.
It's not only self-congratulatory chest-beating and shoulder-patting of Daily Mirror colleagues getting their story right. (Their track record aren't any worse or better than most other papers, after all.)
The piece is also a self-congratulory finger-pointing lecture of what the football transfer market looks like. It's aimed at readers who Mr. Silver doesn't hesitate to call "parrots", "the masses", "naysayers" and not "commerce savvy".
(Coming just a few days after the Daily Mirror's chief sports writer Oliver Holt's astonishing personal attack on comedian Alan Davies, it could point to something odd in the water coolers by the sportsdesk.)
My issues with Mr. Silver and his colleagues across the English media industry aren't that they make up lies. It's that they vacate basic journalistic principles in too much of their work.
The reporter's ABC: when you get a tip, you check it for facts. If you have a source, you consider its value. When you report on an argument, you ask both parties for their view. When you hear a rumour, it's just a rumour and not fit to print until confirmed or corraborated by multiple sources. When you have more sources, you consider their value again, as well as the value of the rumour itself.
In Dan Silver's rant, very valid arguments are made about the fluidity and unpredictability of football transfers. Just because a deal falls apart, it doesn't mean that reporting on the discussions and the repercussions of a possible deal are lies.
As Mr. Silver puts it, "... none of our reporters invent stories - for kicks, or otherwise." I have no reason to think they do.
But I do have reason to believe that the Daily Mirror, like other papers and media outlets, often stop short of checking transfer rumours, fearing that fact would come in the way of a good story.
From this summer's many stories, I could pick out Arsenal's supposed interest in Hatem Ben Arfa, as reported in the Mirror 21 June. The gist of the entire article is the sentence that Arsenal "have emerged as rivals to Chelsea's interest." No source is quoted, with or without what Dan Silver contemptuously calls "those magic quotation marks". OK, I can buy his line that not everyone involved would like to be quoted. Football is a business, after all.
But what kind of source is speaking? How many are speaking? What do he/she/they really mean with "emerging as a rival"? Have anyone tried to get a comment from the player, his agent, his club, his potential new club, from anyone with any authority at all? Sadly not. If they did, they would have written that no comment was available or forthcoming. At least they should have.
Perhaps Mr. Silver himself says it best:
"Rebuttals from one party or another often muddy the waters."
In the Sun on 17 March, Arsenal's interest in rookie goalkeeper Jack Butland is quantified to £3m and 10 scout trips from Arsène Wenger himself. Tottenham are also interested.
Says who? Obviously not the player himself, nor his club, nor any of his prospective suitors, nor any of their representatives, nor the player's representatives... unless they won't step forward, of course. As a confidential source, you are anonymous and can be anyone. You can even be anyone you claim to be. And you can have an agenda, for instance trying to raise interest in your player/client, hike up the asking price or the wage demands. Or simply make the football world aware of Butland's availability.
Having just one source in a journalistic piece can get a reporter landed in court if the story doesn't stick. But would two separate sources have the same interest in sharing this very same story? Only if it were an agent and his colleague in the next agent's office. That doesn't count...
Transfer rumours aren't likely to upset anyone enough to end in court, but the principle remains. And when Dan Silver invokes Woodward and Bernstein of the Watergate scandal (I mean, honestly!) it's made very clear that he at least takes himself and his work very seriously.
In 28 May, the aptly named Caughtoffside.com reported that Arsenal were considering signing Dutch international Nigel de Jong of Manchester City. The website is a well-known peddler of hearsay wrapped in platitudes. Just a quick glance is enough to tell you that entertaining as it may be, it's no beacon of journalism.
Yet both the Daily Mirror and the Daily Mail within hours have put the story on their own websites, using the phrase "reportedly" instead of outright quoting Caughtoffside.com. They not only take their rumour for granted, they withhold any credit to them. Checking any of it themselves seems out of the question - they've written "reportedly", haven't they?
The only losing part in transfer speculations are the fans, never knowing what to believe or disbelieve in the papers. But, lo and behold! The transfer rumours are just for the fans, Silver maintains!
One of my aims when I launched MirrorFootball.co.uk three years ago was to reflect the opinions, debate and banter of real football fans...
The fact of the matter is that football fans love discussing transfer rumours and gossip. Sometimes the more outlandish and unlikely, the better.
So checking facts can't really be top of the agenda, can it?
The problem remains: why should the fans - who are their readers - believe what's written about their club or any other? Perhaps journalists would reply that their good names as reporters should be enough?
Sadly, when the Daily Mirror feel the need to reprimand their readership, they need instead to understand that our confidence in them is shaken. By themselves. And they need to be humble enough to start looking for reasons among their own.
Replacing a troublesome audience with a new, easier one is a far harder task.
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