Thomas Tuchel reaction shows how irrelevant newspapers have become

John Nicholson

You’ve probably noticed that our media, including an increasingly crass BBC (the Newsnight ‘Taylor Swift’ piece was so embarrassingly shallow, it looked like a dads-in-jumpers Instagram video – they’d probably take that as a compliment – and in a fair world, should end some careers) focuses, indeed obsesses, about trivia while serious matters are ignored.

Hence last week we had all the ridiculous, to the point of surreal, ‘blood and soil’, Nazi-adjacent Thomas Tuchel hyperventilating garbage and little scrutiny outside of The Guardian of the cultural attitudes, financing, experience and economics of the supposed St. Georges Park pathway providing a route for aspiring coaches and why the FA said ‘bollocks to all that, we’ll just buy someone good instead’. Thus not perpetuating the model they claimed to be following. When push came to shove, they refused to own their own failures.

If they’d ever been serious about development, they’d have appointed someone on this fabled pathway, regardless. But no, they fell for the undefined elite coaches hype even though, time and again, nations have been successful without one from this mythical elite, including England, ironically. This is a multi-layered issue, ripe for detailed and revealing investigation of those charged with developing coaches and failing, but no, instead we got shite about the national anthem and the GERMAN.

I still believe that appointing anything other than an Englishman is essentially cheating.

Which leads me to wonder who these shallow, stupid, not-to-say bigoted stories are for? Who are they meant to appeal to? People who don’t realise the royal family is German, I assume? They turn my and doubtless your stomach. It’s easy to say the football press is lapped up by complete idiots who have no powers of reasoning or thought, but is that true for more than a dwindling demographic? And what must it do to the self-worth of the journalists involved?

This seems to be a theme. There’s plenty of grist to the economic and cultural mill to be analysed about, say, tax policy. After all, Denmark, one of the most consistently happy countries in the world, has a high tax take in order to properly fund public services. Could that model be something which benefits Britain? We will never know as the right-wing press and others baulk at tax as though it’s a fine for being alive and it’s never seriously discussed, in favour of moaning about any increase in a duty or tax, to such an extent that everyone has to pretend taxes are not increasing even when they are.

In a mindless unvirtuous circle the same people will vociferously complain about poor treatment in the NHS or anything else, because it has consistently been under-funded. There’s hand-wringing about pensioners freezing to death after withdrawal of the winter fuel allowance, with no discussion of the fact pensions increased this year and will do next year by a much greater amount. There are serious questions to ask about the paucity of pensions being such that we need a winter fuel allowance at all – and that comes back to lack of tax and other unaddressed issues.

But seriousness is ignored, and the incomplete picture is obsessed over like it’s the whole truth. It’s dishonest and the point isn’t to accurately inform anyone, but to provoke cheap emotion. They interview people who clearly have been told or not disavowed of the notion that they’ll be worse off when the truth is they are not. Of course you can think it’s still disgraceful, but it’s hard to do it from an informed position when so much of written and broadcasting media is lying through omission. It doesn’t matter. Lie and make them cry.

Or they’ll print a picture of a man pointing forlornly at a pothole, without any analysis of the state of council budgets. They don’t care as long as the bloke has got a miserable expression. Discussion of the availability of tax money to fix potholes? None.

So for weeks they’ve been wittering about free Taylor Swift tickets, ignoring important, serious issues for yet another story about freebies, or worse, pretending it’s of national importance, despite ignoring heinous naked cronyism which actually cost us billions, and is partly responsible for current financial strains. It’s like that con never happened if you read some papers.

The idiocy of it is depressing from all angles. But who thinks ‘this is the important stuff’?

Apart from the relatively small percentage of genuinely thick, bigoted people, the answer is no one. This, and endless thick-for-money broadcasters, are all for the self-interest of the paper or broadcaster, either in sales or to more broadly satisfy their owners’ agenda. Think about it, the whole shooting match is only going one way. People are reading fewer papers and increasingly not even watching much TV. Even old farts like me don’t. On Sunday night I spent two hours watching the excellent Rick Beato on my telly, on YouTube, talking in detail about guitar playing to Warren Haynes and Yngwie Malmsteen. That’s the kind of excellent niche content you wouldn’t ever find on a television channel.

So when there’s a pre-match press conference on Thursday about Saturday’s game, the press are just pretending it’s still 1957 and they are the news gatekeepers, when the truth is that anything the manager, or anyone else, wants to say, will be on the website. The press just isn’t needed for the facts anymore and there isn’t as much money for investigative, unsensational journalism, only money for the exact opposite and years of obsession with trivia and ‘gotcha’ questions have destroyed any credibility they may have had. You reap what you sow. Don’t expect to be taken seriously when you haven’t been serious for years.

It might cost thousands and weeks of time to investigate the culture that fails to produce top-class coaches, but almost nothing to confect outrage about a GERMAN or to bully, say, Manchester United’s manager. That’s the economics.

So while it is outrageous that the general press and football press twist, distort and outright invent things that have been said, or not said, and try to hold people to account against their idiotic inventions and get stroppy when a manager or player ignores their bullshit or calls it out, the public is not even considered. All the shite they agree in their huddles and then puke out is largely for them to justify the fact that they still have a job, albeit in decreasing numbers.

Circulation figures prove the waning relevance or interest in anything a newspaper says. They know this. They know that many of them get fewer readers per day than we do. But it’s like the press is a big old, once popular, station hotel which hasn’t got money to renovate, so slips further downmarket, relying on tea and toilets coach tours at a discounted price, driving away everyone else, but still not generating enough cash to improve standards, yet afraid to lose the coach tours by upgrading to more expensive, attractive premises.

Some say we get the press we deserve, and that can sometimes be true, especially when they establish a false narrative that the inattentive or hard of thinking believe. How many people talk like Jeff Powell talks about non-English managers? There are some, sure, but they’re out on a limb and loons.

The press has more attention than it any longer deserves, and it frequently offends. Ignore them and their fabricated realities. They don’t care about you, or anything else, so why care about them?

Except, keep reading Mediawatch. Please.