It’s a great shame- Keith Jackson’s frustrations at Ibrox media lock-out

Keith Jackson has highlighted the frustrations of being kept out of the official Ibrox media bubble. 

During the close season the Ibrox club introduced charging for media access which most of the big hitters have resisted with the exception of Newsquest which publishes the Herald, Evening Times and the subscription site The Rangers Review. 

Sky Sports have access as a rights holder with the SPFL which STV have paid up to try and get closer to the love-in led by Kenny Macintyre and the cast of hundreds at BBC Scotland. 

Rather than hosting separate conferences for broadcast and print media there is one all-in conference where the questions from Heart & Hand and Follow Follow tend to set the agenda. 

Videos tending to last about six minutes are uploaded to You Tube with the publishers on the outside trying to give the impression that they were inside putting the questions that their readers wanted. 

That approach clearly irks Jackson, in today’s Daily Record he writes: 

It’s a great shame Rangers prefer no longer to engage with the wider world. 

Press conferences at Ibrox and Auchenhowie these days have become rather torturous, insular affairs involving a great deal of happy-clapping and pointless questions eliciting the most humdrum of answers. 

It’s hardly how a big club is supposed to conduct itself. 

And yet it does seem as if, on the inside at least, Giovanni van Bronckhorst and his players are beginning to appreciate the benefit of straight-talking and of holding one another to account. 

That was the somewhat ironic message coming out of the training ground yesterday and even though it may have been lost on some, the importance of communication appears to have hit home inside van Bronckhorst’s dressing room following the feeble, mealy-mouthed capitulation in last week’s Old Firm derby. 

Record readers can head to You Tube to watch both interviews in full.