Okay, with the fundraiser now closed (at a fabulous £5,797) we’re about to send our second poll off to Mystery Professor X for some serious expert scrutiny, but there are still a couple of available slots for good questions.
Now would be a good time to fire suggestions at us in the comments.
About the poll, that is.
Alert readers will be aware of the occasional service provided by this site whereby we help out time-pressed citizens by letting them know when they can safely stop reading an article in the Scottish media. This morning we noticed a tweet from Unionist/Tory commentator Alex Massie, drawing attention to a Scotsman piece he described as “a v important column on banks. Not ‘Scaremongering'”.
Despite the obvious we respect Massie’s views on a lot of subjects, so we had a look.
This was waiting when we got back to Wings HQ this evening:
“Dear Sir,
Thank you for taking the time to write.
I agree the leader column should have said Labour introduced the policy and we are printing a clarification. However, we are making no apologies for highlighting the ConDem witch-hunt against people like Anthony Walker.
Kindest regards
Allan Rennie
Editor in ChiefMedia Scotland
Daily Record and Sunday Mail
Scottish & Universal Newspapers”
Fair enough. Can’t ask for more than that, and we’ve got no desire to see the Record apologise for continuing to highlight the appalling reality that is WCAs. It’s the paper’s finest quality. Nice to see part of the Scottish media holding up its hands and righting a wrong, too, rather than responding with censorship and tantrums. Naming no names.
…about the sales figures of “regional” Scottish newspapers, released today:
Numbers (for Jan-June 2013, compared to the same period in 2012) are below.
We’ve recently been documenting the No campaign’s increasingly-panicked attempts to avoid, or entirely shut down, the Scottish independence debate by various means.
We were on the sharp end of it again last night, as the usual small group of frothing extremist BritNats and psychopathic stalkers (accompanied this time by a tiny handful of “useful idiots” from the SNP’s youth wing) tried to smear and discredit this site by crudely misrepresenting things I’ve said in a personal capacity over a number of years.
But it’s not just us the anti-independence camp is trying to muzzle.
This site has on several occasions praised the Daily Record for its sustained – and almost alone in the UK media – campaigning against the callous savagery of “Work Capability Assessments” carried out for the Department of Work and Pensions by the ironically-named Atos Healthcare, though we’ve also pointed out the Record’s curious reluctance to mention how Atos came to be in that position.
Today, though, mere economy with the truth has evolved into all-out lying.
As befits quality investigative journalism, we’ve had our shadowy agents scouring the streets of Glasgow since yesterday looking for the location of the No campaign’s top-secret “public meeting” on Saturday. We think one of them may have stumbled across it, as we just received this encrypted image on our special secure email account.
(Apologies for the low resolution, but we’re having to use an old dial-up connection to stop “Better Together” hacking into it and revealing that we surreptitiously gave the milkman a £5 “bung” last week to bring round a daily pinta for our tea break.)
There’s a lot of cobblers talked about independence, so with only a limited number of hours in the day it’s important to know when you can safely stop reading something, because the person being quoted is clearly a clueless buffoon who’s forgotten to take the little green pills again and can be ignored without fear of missing anything.
In the case of the Herald’s lead story today, it’s four paragraphs in:
Yeah, thanks, Sir John Elvidge. Don’t call us, we’ll call you.
With the official campaigns now over a year old, we can’t help wondering whether “Better Together Glasgow” shouldn’t have been launched before now.
But this is a funny sort of “public meeting”, isn’t it?
We haven’t had one of these for a while, but it’s a peach. Phil Welsh is an official of the Unison trade union in Dundee, though we notice he’s recently removed that fact from his Twitter bio. We’ve had to block him now for associating with our hate-crazed psycho stalker, but earlier this week we were having a chat about the bedroom tax and Labour’s evictions policy when this happened.
See below for the rest of the conversation.
Alert readers will be aware that we like to occasionally have a bit of light-hearted satirical fun pointing out the gulf in numbers between grassroots campaigners on the Yes side of the independence debate and their counterparts in the No camp.
But we’ve been gathering evidence of a much more sinister side to the phenomenon.
This site spends much of its time highlighting major outbreaks of misrepresentation, spin, distortion and outright lying in the Scottish and UK media. Readers will be aware that we very rarely find ourselves short of material.
Which means that we don’t often have time to report the small stuff.
Wings Over Scotland is a thing that exists.
