Media Matters

[martin@]

The relationship between football and the media has always been one of necessity. Football needs the exposure while newspapers need to be sold, Pay-TV subscriptions need to be taken out and listening/viewing figures need to be attained in order to attract advertisers. This gets more apparent especially as the line between football and celebrity gets ever more blurred.Anage-old debate among football fans is that a certain media outlet is against them, favouring negative stories about their club while running more positive stories about other clubs - Phil Heath did a good rundown of the local media in his article Our Favourite Shop in the last H&V so excuse me if I go over some of the things he touched on. This perceived bias has often been said about the Birmingham Mail in relation to Villa with the graphic of a torn club badge with the legend ‘Villa in Crisis’ being somewhat of a running joke among supporters, alongside signing Carlton Palmer and winning the FA Cup.Some will also suggest that the Mail will produce a special pull-out whenever the club from the other side of the city advance past the initial round of a cup competition. Strangely, some Small Heath fans think exactly the same and that the Mail favours Villa. This would probably indicate that the Mail is fairly neutral in its dealings with both clubs. However, and I could be wrong, but I think it was during an interview with H&V a few years ago that their then-Villa correspondent Bill Howell said that Blues stories on the back page sell more copies of the Mail than do Villa ones. If this is true, and their employees would know more about it than I do, you wonder why the reason might be. No matter what they might say, there is no way on earth that more of them live in the city than us, so the reason must be a bit deeper. Perhaps it’s because a Villa story wi