The Celtic fan media conference with Ange Postecoglou last week was a success. No question. Apart from “that” question at the beginning (was it a question or was it a statement?) aside, the people representing the fan media section asked questions the fans wanted answers to. It was 55 minutes of excellent and professional cross examination.
The conference was professional, inciteful and gave the fans the answers to the real questions that would never be asked by your mainstream journalists.
Those that attended (I wasn’t one of them) held themselves to excellent standards and by all accounts, the people that the conference was created for, the fans, were extremely positive about it.
So why is it then that those in the mainstream media seem to want to attack the fan media conference? Or more specifically, why are the journalists attacking the fans who attended?
In his column today in the Daily Record, Hugh Keevins seems to suggest that if Postecoglou lost the first Glasgow Derby of the season, somehow, the fan media representatives would turn into some form of uncontrollable hysterical cross examiners, “The quickest route to the cancellation of fan press conferences, I would suggest, would be for Ange to lose that derby game.
“In any conventional press room the manager would be asked in a business-like manner for his thoughts on what went wrong.
“Any fundamentalists’ forum, post Ibrox, would throw up an altogether less constrained form of social discourse.”
I’m guessing main stream journalists are either threatened by the uprising of fan media representation, or they could simply be jealous that ordinary fans are allowed access to major figures at the football club.
I can understand that. Spending years studying for a journalistic degree to allow you to work in the media to then look at the ordinary punter in the street being allowed the same privileges without the requirement of years of study would be irksome.
But it is what it is.
Journalist just need to suck it up and live with the fact that people like me and the brilliant people that attended the fan media conferences are here to stay.