Without fear or favour

Fascinating to see Sir Alex Ferguson trying to get a journalist banned from a press conference - let me say, by the way, that Ferguson can ban me anytime he likes, as based on his past utterances, I'm one of those who would rather stick pins in my eyes than be in his presence!



Apart from the obvious question, 'What on earth makes him think he has the right to do anything like that?', it raises questions about how we as journalists report.  It seems that if you ask a question he doesn't like, or say or write anything that hacks him off, then your access to him is withdrawn.  That shows a misunderstanding of his role in my opinion - it's not him as an individual that people want to interview, but him as the holder of the position of manager of a football club.  Once he retires I suspect journalists won't be queuing to hear his words of wisdom.  Shame on the management of the club for not spelling it out him that theyre the ones who decide what his responsibilities are - it's another example of the fairytale world that football inhabits.  He should have been told years ago that the BBC is the national broadcaster of the UK, and if he doesn't co-operate fully with them then he's in breach of the terms of his employment.

It happens in other sports too.  I once wrote about the now-retired racehorse trainer, Jenny Pitman, that she'd 'had a poor season by her own high standards' - that was my way of saying that it had been a disastrous year.  You see, I wanted to interview her again in the future, so I had to tone it down.  In that case it didn't work!

Sunday morning comes and I'm on the tennis court when the phone rings: 'Get home as soon as you can, I've got Jenny Pitman ringing me going apeshit!'  I did, and she was.  Apart from a lecture couched in terms that would make a trooper blush, my fax machine kicked into life, and a list of every winner Mrs Pitman had ever trained started to pour out...page after page after page.  She then rang me back to check that I'd received it and asked me - again in the bluntest of terms - what was I [expletive deleted] going to do about it, and told me I'd never interview her again.

In the end, I did nothing, and she calmed down - and I interviewed her again in the future.  But it makes you think doesn't it?  If you were the sports editor of a regional, or the editor of a specialist sports, paper, would you publish and be damned, or would you tread very carefully for fear of losing the access you require to do your job?

Think on this the next time you read the sports pages: are you getting the whole truth and nothing but the truth, or a sanitised version of it?  I think I know the answer to that one.