So we’ll just leave this here:
And then we’re off to bed.
[EDIT: Story confirmed with Jessica Bridges at Ladbrokes press office.]
As this site tends to focus mainly on the output of serious newspapers we haven’t previously spent a great deal of time scrutinising the Scottish Daily Mail, and we can only surmise that it’s upset them, because they seem to have been trying very hard this month to get our attention.
We must confess, it’s now become something of an addiction.
The media is positively jumping with analyses of Mark Carney’s much-anticipated speech about currency unions, with thousands of words being expended to discuss something we’ve already summed up accurately in eleven. It’s almost comical to watch the amount of anti- (and very occasionally pro-) independence spin being put on a text which went pathologically out of its way not to make any kind of judgement whatsoever on the subject.
(Something Carney continued to do at the post-speech Q&A with journalists, at which he frequently looked bemused as a series of political hacks asked him massively leading questions along the lines of “So, you said X…” which he then had to wearily but firmly point out he hadn’t actually said at all. If you click the image below you can listen to an audio recording of the session.)
However much of an awful grump he is, the best, most sensible and balanced analysis (okay, the second-best after ours) is probably David Torrance’s.
When studying the Press Complaints Commission Code of Practice, in truth one is spoiled for choice when considering the Scottish Daily Mail’s ongoing hate campaign against so-called “cybernats”.
It seems fair to say that the paper has blithely ignored Article 2, “A fair opportunity for reply to inaccuracies must be given when reasonably called for”, for example.
Articles 3 (i) (“Everyone is entitled to respect for his or her private and family life, home, health and correspondence, including digital communications”) and 3 (iii) (“It is unacceptable to photograph individuals in private places without their consent”) also seem to have been somewhat cavalierly treated.
So we pretty much just stuck a pin in at random.
The Mail is incredibly still banging away at its “evil cybernats” campaign today – we make that 19 days now – with another front page lead (this time, impressively somehow managing to turn SNP MSP Joan McAlpine being the victim of acts of online sabotage into an attack on the SNP) and another “Cybernat Watch” article inside.
One passage in an editorial, however, caught our eye. (Our emphasis.)
“It is not acceptable to make personal threats and insults under the guise of exercising the right to speak openly. It is an inescapable fact that while there are trolls on both sides, the so-called cybernats are more numerous, more vocal, more vituperative and act in consort.”
An “inescapable fact”? The Mail seems to have unaccountably failed to identify its material source. Who measured these things? Can we have a link to the study data? Is there an internationally-recognised scale of vituperativeness? Is there a shred of evidence to back up the assertion that these alleged abusers “act in consort”?
Because if the Daily Mail doesn’t come forward with the proof of these allegations, and instead just continues making insulting comments and doorstepping, frightening and vilifying innocent members of the public for posting perfectly legal comments on the internet under their own names, it’ll be hard for the people of Scotland to arrive at any other conclusion than that the paper’s reporters are a bunch of bare-faced liars as well as bullies trying to selectively intimidate and silence one side of the debate.
There’s been a nice graphic going round social media this afternoon. It’s a map of Yes Scotland activist branches across the country, and it’s pretty impressive.
So for tonight’s And Finally, we thought it’d be a chuckle to compare it to the nearest “Better Together” equivalent, which has a rather less nationwide coverage.
Now it all makes sense.
But how will we get by without our best undercover agent? We’re in trouble now.
Jim Murphy in the Daily Mail last week on the appalling “cybernats”:
And this is a Labour spokesman in 2012 when a user of a Labour Facebook page had wished death on Alex Salmond’s 90-year-old father:
So, as far as we can follow: it’s nothing to do with Labour if its supporters – in a Facebook group subscribed to by all the party’s most prominent Scottish MPs, MSPs and activists – wish for Alex Salmond’s dad to die, but as soon as some random nat calls Jim Murphy a “w*****” (whatever one of those is), it’s no longer a private matter and the SNP and First Minister must take direct personal responsibility and action?
Have we got that about right?
Yesterday’s Telegraph contained another example of something we’ve noticed becoming increasingly common in newspapers recently where Scottish independence is concerned – the incredible vanishing story. Check out these first two paragraphs from a piece about investment in the oil industry:
Just hold on a second, there, tiger. In the first sentence we’re apparently talking quite explicitly about something that IS ALREADY happening, but by the second sentence it’s immediately been downgraded to a “risk” and a “fear” that it “will be” happening in the future. We’re used to drastic and frequent revisions of UK government forecasts, but they usually take more than a single breath to collapse.
We’re endlessly told that the oil business is “volatile”, but that’s ridiculous.
We’ve been documenting lately the number of “Better Together” scare stories that have been horribly sagging under the weight of scrutiny since the turn of the year. But yesterday saw perhaps the No camp’s most significant boob yet.
Ladies’ foundation-garment manufacturer Michelle Mone has for some years insisted that she would pack up and leave Scotland – taking her factory and its attendant jobs with her – should Scotland have the temerity to vote for independence, causing much wailing and gnashing of teeth among the populace.
Yesterday, we’re delighted to report, she changed her mind.
…not to laugh. The Scottish Daily Mail, unperturbed by the waves of mockery, is still banging away furiously on the “cybernats!” drum today, with another front-page lead and another two-page spread inside.
The paper’s managed to rope gormless Labour MSP Kezia Dugdale into its one-sided witch-hunt, and she pens an article dramatically entitled “TWITTER AND A THREAT TO BAYONET ME” complaining of someone “recently” threatening her, although the offensive tweet in question turns out (not revealed in the piece) to be 15 months old.
The above picture is – really and truly – the story’s illustration.
Because if you don’t, your brain sort of refuses to acknowledge that certain things happened, and won’t let you dwell on them lest you lose your grip on reality.
So when we watched Douglas Alexander interviewed on Sunday Politics Scotland today, and heard an answer so bizarre and so spectacularly, flagrantly unrelated to the question he was asked that we briefly thought there might have been a slow-acting hallucinogenic in the cinnamon-and-vanilla cider we were drinking last night, we figured we better get it down in print so we could study it properly and check our sanity.
(Click the image to watch and listen for yourselves.) See what you think.
Wings Over Scotland is a thing that exists.
