Good morning. I’m not sure if it’s escaped people’s attention but the Arsenal media team appear to have upset the media. Scene: Daily Mail troll writes an article claiming no Arsenal players would get in a combined XI. Fine. Nonsense, but absolutely within rights to say that. Arsenal dominate Spurs and the PR team posts a GIF of Mesut Ozil sipping from a cup of tea in reply to said journalist (Adam Crafton). They replied only to him and not to everyone.
To say it has triggered him is an understatement. Quickly followed by absolute nonsense from the like of Neil Custis, Miguel Delaney (who appears to be having a breakdown over it) and Henry Winter. Appalled at the lack of respect shown by Arsenal to “one of their own”
Ignoring the remarkable irony of a Daily Mail writer complaining about respect, they are claiming that Arsenal have a responsibility not to trigger internet morons. The only possible way to counter this argument is to simply point someone in the direction of the Daily Mail comments section underneath one of their articles.
The main point seemed to be the amount of abuse Adam Crafton was getting from AFC fans. I agree that death threats, personal information releases and personal abuse are vile and somehow should be made illegal. But what has been most amazing about this incident is, that there is simply no evidence of anything other than a fanbase, rather brilliantly I might add, sticking up for its club. In an age when even deleting a tweet after 5 second is often not enough to save you, there has quite literally been no evidence at all of said abuse. Not one screen shot.
It’s been a pathetic response from the media. The implications of their attitude to free speech is breath-taking in its ignorance.
However, you would be wrong in thinking that Arsenal are the first club to ever tweet something mildly amusing to the public. Chelsea promoted this seasons Arsenal game with footage of Alonso flattening Bellerin. Classless, sure, but nothing worse than that. And did the media pick it up? No. Bayern Munich made a ten to two comment after thumping Arsenal 10-2. Funny, but was Neil Ashton outraged by it? No of course not.
This has been a very distasteful display from the media who appear annoyed that Arsenal didn’t get rolled over by a fairly decent Spurs team this weekend. They’ve been abusing people. Neil Custis, weirdly obsessed with why people have blue ticks, was particularly abusive toward a young journalist who was questioning why this issue was such a big deal.
In an age of click baiting and triggering you cannot poke a lion with a stick then complain when it bites your arm off. If your lack of imagination and journalistic creativity means that your only source of success is through trolling Arsenal football club in a national media publication, you have no right at all to cry foul when they troll you back. Will this be a watershed for 6th form journalism, I doubt it, but it’s held a mirror up to the old boys club that forms a large part of our written press. The worry is, that when they look in that mirror they don’t see the devil, they see Jesus.
Enjoy your week.
40-something Surrey-based Gooner. Passionately supporting The Arsenal since the 80’s.
I was incredibly incensed reading some the jouros’ biased viewed. One of them stated, it is okay for a big account to engage another big account (like Munich/Chelsea twitter trolling Arsenal), another stated, it was okay for news publications to publish click-bait articles or engage anybody they wanted because their followers were not partisan. I mean, it is a joke beyond belief! It just shows what a self entitled, hypocritical bunch of morons we are dealing with. They are happy and feel entitled to dish it out but do not want a taste of their own medicine. If anything, I think the root cause that needs to be addressed here is the clickbaiting, second rate articles that are circulated on the internet. People circulating them should be banned.
Well said Brad, In their shoes I think their best response would be to say nothing. You have pretty much hit the money with this article and I can`t think of anything they could say that would help to remove the egg from their faces.