Wings Over Scotland

Newsnet Scotland this morning attacks some comments by BBC presenter James Naughtie in which he remarks disapprovingly on the aesthetic state of Princes Street in Edinburgh. To be honest, we’re with the Beeb’s man on this one – as documented by the splendid Facebook page Lost Edinburgh, the capital’s main thoroughfare is a living catalogue of grotesque crimes against architecture, and the additional havoc wreaked on it by years of needless tram works doesn’t need any detailing here.

The piece does reveal something much more interesting, though.

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We try not to bang on about our readership stats so often these days, but as some mainstream media types have been casting doubt on our figures this week and we’ve just passed a couple of nice round numbers, we thought you might like to know.

We’d like to say a big “Welcome!” to the 15,000 brand-new readers who’ve joined us in the last 30 days, a big “Thanks!” to those of you who were here already, and an extra-special one to those of you who told others. Keep spreading the word, folks.

We haven’t bothered covering the latest confected anti-independence scare from a clearly bored political media before now, because it’s such a weak effort that in the interests of at least a vague impression of balanced journalism they haven’t been able to avoid undermining it themselves, without needing our help.

But hey, there’s not much happening this afternoon.

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We were very proud of a terrific performance from Scotland at Wembley last night, in a highly entertaining friendly the national side was unlucky to lose due to a couple of lapses in concentration at set pieces. We also greatly enjoyed the tremendous atmosphere created by both sets of fans, which we read about in the Daily Mail:

“It seemed the days of booing national anthems had passed. But old habits die hard against the Auld Enemy so Flower of Scotland got the treatment and God Save the Queen was booed in response. Pretty unsavoury all round.”

And also in the Scottish Daily Mail:

“The sing-off was generally good-natured but the Scottish contingent let themselves down badly at the start as a cacophony of boos drowned out God Save The Queen after respect was afforded Flower Of Scotland.”

Wait, what?

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…to reporting of opinion polls in the Scottish media! These are all from today:

“More than half of Scots live on ready meals or takeaways at least three times a week, according to a new poll.”

Vital data, there. And definitely more interesting and important than learning that two-thirds of Scots don’t believe the promises of improved devolution after a No vote.

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Readers who haven’t recently suffered a blow to the head will probably recall that “Better Together” campaign director Blair McDougall was quoted in the Scotsman last week (in a story which WAS considered worthy of coverage), bitterly complaining that the Yes campaign had used the phrase “best of both worlds”, which for some reason he appeared to believe was his exclusive possession.

The fine gentleman above was pictured on Glasgow’s Buchanan Street on Saturday. He also appears to be toting some borrowed property. Can you spot it?

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A particularly alert reader contacted us this morning with an observation so subtle it had totally escaped us, even though we’d seen both the things in question.

On last night’s BBC News at Six, the lead story – taking up over six minutes of the 30-minute show – was a steep 4.1% rise in English rail fares. The in-depth piece explicitly noted (at 5m 45s) that Scottish rail users would have a lower rise, saying “Passengers in Scotland will be better off, with season tickets capped at the rate of inflation” and also noting that no rises were planned in Northern Ireland and the decision in Wales was still to be made.

Reporting Scotland, immediately afterwards, took a different angle.

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A quick update on how mainstream media coverage of our poll is going.

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We have a stalker. It’s a long story, pre-dating Wings Over Scotland and involving creepy, highly detailed rape/murder threats, sustained harassment over a period of months, a dedicated blog many tens of thousands of words long (including all manner of truly vile sexual stuff involving family members and ex-girlfriends), abusive phone calls to our home and far too much more to describe.

It eventually resulted in an arrest, and a report by Glasgow police to the Procurator Fiscal recommending prosecution, which to everyone’s surprise was declined, after a very long delay and for unclear reasons.

The main perpetrator, although several people were involved, was a virulent Unionist and Rangers supporter (he’s a proud advocate of “The Famine Song” and a big fan of Loyalist multiple-murderer Michael Stone) in his 20s called Murray Brady. He continued with the campaign even after he’d been arrested and questioned, but eventually went to ground after the discovery of a revived version of the forum on which he made some of the comments. It was all a pretty ugly business.

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Sweet mercy. We’ve been pretty scathing about the Scottish media over the last few days, but we had no idea that our jibes about the Scotsman in particular now being a spoof site were so literally true.

The image above comes from the Scotsman’s editorial leader accompanying its ridiculous Nate Silver decoy story this morning. We’ve highlighted a line for you.

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In so far as there’s any actual reasoning or hard data supporting the Scotsman’s front-page lead story today at all, it’s when the American pundit Nate Silver claims that “Historically, in any Yes or No vote in a referendum, it’s actually the No side that tends to grow over time, people tend not to default to changing the status quo.”

Shall we just check whether that does indeed “tend” to be true, readers?

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We had a listen to Radio Scotland this morning again. We only caught the end of Good Morning Scotland, but we were still in time to catch them cramming in a piece on today’s comedy Scotsman headline about American psephologist Nate Silver and his vague, generalised comments about polling.

With an absolutely straight face (so far as you can tell on radio, anyway), the GMS presenter asked Silver for his view on “how well the media handles statistics”, while carefully steering the discussion in such a way that neither Silver nor fellow live guest Professor John Curtice had any opportunity to refer to the Panelbase poll commissioned by this site and published last week.

(We have no idea if either of them would have had any desire to, but the presenter’s questions carefully closed off any avenues which might have offered the chance.)

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