Blame It On The Media

So, farewell then, Steve McClaren. Your short, and not at all sweet reign as England manager comes to an end on the back of a team performance that brought a whole new dimension to the word ‘insipid’.

As seems to increasingly be the case these days when anything high profile goes pear-shaped, the blame game starts immediately – on whom can we pin this latest failure now that the main man has taken the bullet with his name on it?

In this case, is it the players, the FA, the pitch, the weather, the coaches, the system, the media?...

Ah yes, the media. It took until about ten o’clock on the morning after the night before for me to hear my first football pundit putting a generous helping of the blame for England’s Euro 2008 failure onto the media.

“They never liked him in the first place, they never gave him a chance, they over-hyped the team and then overplay the response when things go wrong” etc etc etc.

Probably true in this instance, but it’s also true to say that ‘the media’ have a funny habit of reflecting what their readers think – and in this instance, I would suggest that this attitude pretty much mirrored the thoughts of a large proportion of England football fans (including, as you can probably guess, me).

Blaming the media is a pretty thin tightrope to walk for celebrities, whether sporting or otherwise. The rarefied air that they breathe is supplied to them by the papers, magazines, programmes, websites and chat rooms that bring their glorious existence into the realm of us mere mortals.

Then something goes wrong – maybe a carefully-planted transfer rumour creates bad feeling amongst ‘the fans’ (another important, amorphous group), a business deal goes wrong, an indiscrete dalliance gets spotted or some sort of unfortunate brush with the law.

There often then follows a knee-jerk reaction of ‘the media blew it all out of proportion/made it all up,’ in an attempt to play it all down and get back on the right side of whoever they’ve potentially upset.

News outlets are, of course, a million miles from blameless, and regularly resort to highly dubious and underhand tactics to get the story they’re after.

But it’s reached the point where shouting “it’s the media’s fault” is simply a distraction device, the modern equivalent of crying wolf, or, as Eddie Izzard once put it, “look over there everyone, there’s a badger with a gun….”

Professionals in my industry will stress, when confronted with something that’s gone wrong for a client, that the one thing the client must now do is tell the truth.

Trying to skirt around, ignore or deny what’s happened is only, sooner or later, going to make things worse - and that’s a universal truth that all celebs, sports stars, entertainers, businesspeople and politicians would do well to keep in mind.

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