Today BT Sport have confirmed
their axing of ex-Liverpool striker Stan Collymore as a pundit.
The media reports are all pretty
universal in their portrayal of the story, which makes me realise how truly
fabricated, false, and plain inaccurate news actually is, and how utterly untrustworthy
it is.
In short, you do not realise the
level of false reporting and news till you are the direct cause of the stories
they are discussing.
The Evening Times, the Daily
Record and the Daily Mail (so far) have all reported the Collymore axing story
as a borderline ‘unfair’ response to his initiating a battle against
sectarianism on Twitter, focusing especially on Rangers fans.
This could not be further from
the truth. Regular readers to this blog will probably know the reality but this
entry is for everyone else who truly believe Collymore just decided one day to
launch a campaign against sectarianism.
My point in the petition was this
was not the first time Mr Collymore had behaved inappropriately, unacceptably,
and unfairly, and that I, along with thousands of others, was going to
unsubscribe from BT Sport (one of his employers) because of it.
This gathered well over a
thousand signatures inside a matter of hours (it currently sits at 8000+), and
Collymore caught wind of it the next day with a ‘two can play the petition game’
type response and launched his own attack on Rangers fans over alleged
sectarianism and bigotry.
In short, Collymore did not just
do this out of a true desire to make the world good, he did it to
pettily respond to my petition. He even claimed he would prove rebuttal accurate live
on air tonight, something he now will not get the opportunity to.
Furthermore, Collymore did not
merely back the petition the media claim he has,
he started it. It is
his petition,
under the name ‘John Smith’ (since removed, of course).
The media has misreported my
petition as a ‘response’, rather than the root cause of all of this.
It is not often I urge anyone to
share my entries, but I would appreciate this one getting out there so the
truth does too.
Right now Collymore is playing
the role of martyr, when he is frankly not only the maker of his undoing but
richly deserving of all of it.