Jim Traynor, Director Of Communications For The Rangers


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This obviously raises massive questions about the impartiality of his reporting in the press and on the radio over the last few months. There was a very significant and noticeable u-turn in his opinion over the summer, when he went from criticising Rangers to suddenly being on their side and having a real go at anyone who said anything against them. Would be very interesting to know if that happened at the same time as he first heard about this job being in the pipeline.

If so, it almost feels as if Charles Green may have dangled this job in front of him purely to get him onside. It doesn't take a huge stretch of the imagination to see Green arriving in Scotland, picking out Traynor as the most influential man in the Scottish sports press, and essentially "buying" his opinion by offering this job. Hasn't he played Traynor like a cheap trumpet, in exactly the same way as he's played the Rangers fans? After all, Traynor's not exactly a prime candidate for this sort of position, is he? Sure, he's certainly a good journalist and has loads of contacts, but he openly mocks modern and social media of all kinds, and has never hidden his disdain for blogging, tweeting, etc. Most of his background is centred around an outdated, dying form of media. In this day and age, there really can't be very many people like him being handed 'head of media'-type roles at significant companies. Then again, I suppose this isn't a significant company - it's a Third Division football club. :razz::twisted:

Incidentally, one thing that says everything we need to know about the Record: even when they knew he was off to a PR role at Rangers and there was a clear conflict of interests in allowing him to write about them in the press, they still quite happily published his final rant which was essentially a free advertorial for the supposed moral standing of his new employers.

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Seriously? I always thought he was an argumentative bigot.

Red top "journalism" at its worst

Yeah fair point - probably bad choice of words on my part. I really should have said "successful" rather than "good", as he's been one of many old school Scottish journalists whose "succulent lamb" approach to dealing with Rangers allowed their behaviour to go unreported and unquestioned, and let us all down badly. In effect it probably also let their employers down too, because in the end it's only added to the distrust many of us now have for the Daily Record and its kind. It says a lot for Traynor's attitude that, in his final column, he bemoaned the loss of that very style of journalism, as if all those sickening banter-filled days out on the golf course with David Murray somehow represented some sort of golden age of cutting edge reporting. Personally I'd far rather read an honest view on a reasonably well-informed blog, than some inward-looking Weegie who lives in David Murray's back pocket regurgitating what he's been told by his "very good source".

Interesting how the stereotypical justification for this fawning over the Old Firm is always that it "sells papers"... yet newspaper sales continue to plummet, so how do they know?

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