Rangers blogger should make himself known

Anyone interested in the collapse of Rangers will by now have come across the blog at rangerstaxcase.com, where an anonymous Celtic supporter has spent nearly two years explaining why the financial problems facing Rangers were much more serious than you might think had you been following the story through the mainstream media.

In fact, the blog is as much a critique of the Scottish media as it is of Rangers’ creative accounting.

The recurring phrase “succulent lamb” refers to a 1998 article in which then-Rangers chairman David Murray dictates to a Daily Record journalist, like God handing the stone tablets to Moses on the mountaintop, as they share gulps of “the finest red” and mouthfuls of “the most succulent lamb”.

The blogger describes a world in which tame journalists, glutted with succulent lamb, uncritically relay trivial stories provided to them by Rangers insiders while missing — or worse, ignoring — the gigantic scandal unfolding under their noses.

In a piece for the Guardian last week, he wrote that the blind passion of Scottish football fans “serves as the growth medium for the bacillus that infects the news business in Scotland, which in turn serves as the carrier of the disease that threatens to kill Rangers.”

So he sees his work partly as a form of public hygiene, fumigating the dark places where journalists, power and succulent lamb ferment together to create a putrefying stench of corruption.

No doubt there is a problem in Scottish football with journalists getting too cosy with the power structure. The same problem exists everywhere there is journalism, it is not unique to Scottish football or Scotland.

It is in the public interest for such collusion to be exposed.

However, it’s a bit rich for rangerstaxcase to criticise the Scottish media for withholding information from the public, while withholding from the public the most basic information about himself, such as who he is.

He has written contemptuously of the Rangers support that they unquestioningly follow what they read in the press: they “are fed this diet of regurgitated lamb and foolishly lap it up like it is a kebab at closing time.”

Not all readers are so uncritical, and one of the pieces of information they use to make judgements about what they are reading is: who has written it? If the reader doesn’t know who is talking to them, they are put at a disadvantage. Newspapers sometimes put their readers in this position by running blind quotes, but in that case the reputation of the reporter, under whose name the report appears, serves as a proxy for the bona fides of the anonymous source.

The blogger claims that his desire for anonymity is understandable in the dangerous world of Scottish football with its “stabbings, live bombs sent through the post and even murders”.

But if it really is the case that anyone who publishes bad news about Rangers is putting themselves in harm’s way, you would think he’d be more forgiving of mainstream journalists’ reluctance to do so.

As it is, other journalists who have been critical of Rangers, like the freelancer Phil Mac Giolla Bhain, seem able to operate in public without fear of reprisal.

The rangerstaxcase blogger has produced a body of work to be proud of. A pity he’s not yet prepared to stand over it in public. Until that day comes he might be better advised to concentrate on presenting the facts, and spend less time pouring scorn on journalists who, whatever their other failings, are at least prepared to be personally accountable for what they’ve written.