Wings Over Scotland

One of the long-term goals of Wings Over Scotland is to put itself out of a job. By teaching people how to read newspapers in such a way as to understand what they’re NOT telling you, and to be wise to methods they use to create completely false ideas while not actually saying anything untrue, one day we’ll hopefully reach a situation where there’s no need for us to exist and we can go on holiday or something.

There’s a nicely subtle example of the craft of malicious spin in today’s Scottish Daily Mail, but it also sharply illustrates another toxic aspect of the media’s coverage of the independence debate – the rise of the phantom.

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Since we’re (reluctantly) talking about the odious and hateful side of the independence debate today, here’s crusading socialist MP and No campaigner George Galloway of the Respect party, retweeting a troll account depicting Chris and Colin Weir as a couple of fat pigs standing around in filth.

And on this occasion, the retweet IS an endorsement.

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It’s been another one of those weekends when the independence debate has taken a bit of a nasty turn. Whether it’s the Sunday Times stirring up Anglo-Scottish tensions (deliberately or otherwise), the Daily Mail running supposedly comic articles that are just an orgy of Scottish self-loathing, or Tory councillors making menacing-sounding threats against us personally, it’s been a grim 48 hours for fans of civilised discourse.

And we can’t in all conscience say that much of it looks like an accident.

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The tweet below was posted earlier this morning by Conservative councillor for East Renfrewshire Gordon McCaskill. We’ve asked him to clarify what it means, but at the time of writing no response has been forthcoming.

The comment was made in the context of the Sunday Herald reporting that Wings Over Scotland would be registering with the Electoral Commission as a “permitted participant” for the referendum campaign. Among other things, that will mean making our address public on the EC’s register and all campaign literature.

It’s somewhat disturbing that that fact has been the trigger for Cllr McCaskill issuing ominous-sounding warnings about being unable to “hide” from “sound and fury”.

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There doesn’t seem to have been a huge amount of coverage of Ed Miliband’s visit to Scotland today, presumably because there’s so little to report. The Labour leader came to Dundee and promised to commit to implementing the party’s feeble and essentially meaningless “Devo Nano” proposals – something that both he and Johann Lamont had already done in interviews at the time of the Scottish Labour conference in March – and also reiterated a few UK-wide policies.

So the BBC, perhaps aware of the low levels of newsworthiness in the visit and plainly keen to avoid having to report any more significant developments in the independence debate, decided to sex things up a bit for him.

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Yesterday the BBC finally changed the headline and body text of its story about Lord Trimble’s comments on the impact of a Yes vote on Northern Irish politics, three days after the original and two days after the peer himself told BBC Radio Scotland that it totally misrepresented his views.

Better late than never. But there’s still something not quite right in the image above, and you’ll have to be one of our extra-specially alert readers to spot it.

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We’ve quite frequently highlighted the ugly, irresponsible tone of the No campaign’s – and especially Labour’s – comments about “foreigners” in the independence debate. And the reason we do is because that sort of language feeds attitudes like these.

There is, sadly, more where that came from.

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Yesterday, we discovered a rather curious anti-independence “listicle” on the popular viral-meme website Buzzfeed. Entitled “Scotland. The UK. 10 Myths. 10 Facts.”, it describes itself as “myth busting” by an author identified only as “YouDecide2014”.

It was shared or retweeted by a variety of Conservative Party special advisers, the 10 Downing Street Facebook account, and even the UK Ministry of Defence.

The crude, extremely biased article gives no indication that it’s written by the UK government. The closest it comes to doing so is right at the end, where it says “Get the facts at www.gov.uk/scottishreferendum“. The Buzzfeed account page makes no reference to the UK government, and the layout makes the piece look like any normal article on the site, although in fact it’s posted on Buzzfeed Community, which is an area where users can post anything they want to without censorship.

We decided to find out more.

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I had no idea what to expect from the UKIP public meeting in Bath tonight. The city is genteel, wealthy and has been solidly Lib Dem for over 20 years. While there are of course some sketchier areas and it hasn’t been immune to the UK’s recent economic troubles, generally speaking it has little to complain about.

So when UKIP booked the 730 downstairs capacity of the Forum (a rather beautiful old Art Deco former cinema from the 1930s) for a public meeting, I hung onto the hope that there was at least a reasonable chance it’d be half-empty.

No luck there, then.

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Readers who may have been alarmed that the Scotsman hadn’t run any Michael Kelly columns for a while can breathe a sigh of relief this morning, as the role of “clueless idiot blithely spouting inflammatory and wrong-headed drivel about sectarianism and independence” is clearly in safe hands.

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One of the great things about this site’s sky-high viewing figures is that on the rare occasions when we might be, for example, out having a walk in the park to get over the crushing disappointment of somehow losing yet another Scottish Cup semi-final, our ever-vigilant readers will remain alert.

Otherwise, we might have missed this.

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The other (and more complete) view of this story from yesterday:

Remember, readers, when we were all over the papers as “creepy as f**k”, intimidatory “spies” for peacefully and non-confrontationally documenting alleged “Better Together” events with long-distance photos in which we carefully avoided publishing anything that could be used to identify any individuals?

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