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Official: Scotsman now a joke paper 106

Posted on August 13, 2013 by

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.

scotsmanidiots

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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Category comment, idiots, media

Tendentious tendencies 60

Posted on August 13, 2013 by

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.”

deweytruman1

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

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Tags:
Category analysis, comment, psephology, scottish politics, stats

Tiny cracks in the silence 33

Posted on August 13, 2013 by

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.

radioscot

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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Category comment, media, scottish politics

Spot the bawbags 146

Posted on August 12, 2013 by

(No, that’s not a reference to David McLetchie, who was by all accounts a very decent chap and a sad loss to the world of Scottish politics, whatever your persuasion.)

silverh

We’ve made a couple of slight changes to this front cover from tomorrow’s Scotsman. Amazingly, neither of them is the headline story. That one, hilariously, is all real.

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Tags:
Category comment, media, scottish politics

Quoted for truth #28 58

Posted on August 12, 2013 by

Simon Jenkins in the Guardian, 12 August 2013:

“Labour’s senior figures, notably Ed Balls, have assuaged their contortions of guilt with much sound and fury, but little by way of alternative policies. Miliband and Balls have concentrated on noisy performances in parliament, with some effect, but have failed to emerge as plausible national leaders.

Their programme has been a pale imitation of the Tories. They are for cuts, but not too deep, for glamour projects, for monetary caution, for the Afghan war. A fear of seeming too leftwing has led them to fudge every opportunity the ineptitude of the coalition has offered them, on welfare capping, on immigration, on the NHS, on housing.

It is hard to see the British Labour party as a leftwing party at all.”

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Category comment, uk politics

The last Home International 142

Posted on August 12, 2013 by

There’s one last bit of data from our poll that we haven’t revealed the results of yet. That’s because, unlike the rest of the survey, this one absolutely WAS a leading question. We asked it partly to satirise the ridiculously slanted nature of those used in some “Better Together” polls, such as this one, but also to make a more serious point.

hutchison

If you’re looking forward to Wednesday’s game at Wembley, this one’s for you.

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Category comment, football, scottish politics, sport

It’s not enough to spectate 163

Posted on August 12, 2013 by

The Scottish media has adopted a uniform silence over the results of last week’s Panelbase poll. We can simply accept that, or we can stand up and challenge it.

bbcscot

The BBC is funded by a compulsory tax, enforced by law. You pay for it to serve you. If you think it’s been abdicating its duty, why not ring BBC Radio Scotland’s phone-in show “Call Kaye” (presented by stand-in Louise Smith) this morning from 8.50am – lines actually open at 8am – and let them know how you feel about it?

By phone: 0500 92 95 00
By text: 80295
By email: callkaye@bbc.co.uk

Please be polite. If you call but don’t get on, or your text or email isn’t used, please tell us in the comments section below. (In the case of text or email, include a copy.)

Category comment, media, scottish politics

Bullet points 26

Posted on August 12, 2013 by

The crowdfunded opinion poll this site commissioned from Panelbase last week was a wide-ranging one which covered numerous aspects of the independence debate in some depth. We had to break up our reporting into several pieces to keep it a manageable read. Here, however, is a quick summary of the top ten major findings.

polls1

The full data tables can be downloaded directly from Panelbase via this link.

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Tags:
Category analysis, scottish politics, stats

Quoted for truth #27 117

Posted on August 11, 2013 by

George Orwell, “The Freedom Of The Press”, 1943:

“‘If publishers and editors exert themselves to keep certain topics out of print, it is not because they are frightened of prosecution but because they are frightened of public opinion. In this country intellectual cowardice is the worst enemy a writer or journalist has to face, and that fact does not seem to me to have had the discussion it deserves.‘”

We hear you, George.

Tags:
Category media

Closing ranks 279

Posted on August 11, 2013 by

When we commissioned our poll, we were about 50/50 in terms of whether the mainstream media would cover it. When the results came in, we cautiously shifted to 60/40 in favour. No matter how piqued the press was about this site’s scrutiny of it for the last year and a half, we reasoned, these results were dynamite and surely couldn’t be ignored by any journalist with a shred of conscience or dignity.

monkeys

Who would have thought that we, of all people, could be guilty of so over-estimating the integrity and professionalism of Scotland’s newspapers and broadcasters?

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Category analysis, comment, media, scottish politics

Data mining #5 112

Posted on August 10, 2013 by

A series of super-short snippets from our splendid survey.

————————————————————————————————

VOTERS WHO EXPRESS ANY OPINION ON MEDIA BIAS

Men: 60%
Women: 37%

————————————————————————————————

Tags:
Category media, scottish politics, stats

Data mining #4 11

Posted on August 10, 2013 by

A series of super-short snippets from our splendid survey.

————————————————————————————————

VOTERS WHO HAVE HEARD OF THE WEBSITE “LABOUR HAME”

SNP: 6%
Conservative: 4%
Labour: 4%
Lib Dem: 2%

————————————————————————————————

HAVE HEARD OF THE WEBSITE “LABOUR FOR INDEPENDENCE”

Labour: 12%
SNP: 12%
Conservative: 10%
Lib Dem: 6%

————————————————————————————————

Tags:
Category scottish politics, stats

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