Wings Over Scotland

Sometimes it’s hard not to salute the Scottish media’s sheer dogged, implacable commitment to misinformation, even in the face of seemingly-impossible odds.

Yesterday’s fiasco at First Minister’s Questions, where Johann Lamont dug herself a great big hole while trying to smear a successful Scottish businessman and imply corruption where none existed, was so farcically absurd and ham-fisted that the Scotsman had to bite its tongue and report it with the headline “Apology demanded over Lamont’s SNP land deal claim”.

Even Newsnight Scotland couldn’t brush it off, with hapless Labour MSP James Kelly wheeled on as the sacrificial bam sent to bluster his way through some rather timid questioning from Gordon Brewer. But no such trifling concepts as basic journalistic integrity or competence were going to trouble Magnus Gardham at the Herald.

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You know how it is when you’re writing a satirical newspaper website like The Onion or The Daily Mash. There’s a very fine line to walk such that a joke article is ridiculous enough to be funny, yet still just plausible enough to fool the unwary into believing it’s a real story, and it takes real skill to get it right.

So we wish the best of luck to promising new outfit “The Express”, who’ve perhaps just overcooked it a bit with this effort, but definitely show some potential.

Wait, what?

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The papers, as you’d expect, take some differing views today of John Swinney’s draft Scottish Government budget, delivered in the Holyrood chamber yesterday. But two articles in particular caught our eye.

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As you can perhaps tell, we’re starting to run out of post titles referencing “1984” and the Ingsoc habit of rewriting newspaper versions of history to pretend that certain things which happened didn’t happen, and vice versa. Here’s today’s case in point:

Wait a minute – “shifts to”? Are we sure about that?

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Sometimes even a site like this, dedicated to spending a large percentage of its time exposing the barely-concealed bias of the Scottish press, is almost lost for words.

We’ll see if we can dredge up a few for the latest plume of billowing black smoke and flame to spurt out during the death-dive of the Scotsman, though.

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Shall we keep track of some of the falsehoods printed by the Scottish and UK media today with regard to the Lord Ashcroft polling, and see which ones ever get corrected?

It seems like that’s the sort of thing we usually do, so we probably should.

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It’s not even a fortnight since we started to document the increasing levels of bullying, intimidation and dirty tricks employed by the No campaign against the far more numerous grassroots activists of Yes Scotland. We must admit, we weren’t expecting it to descend to outright physical violence quite this soon.

The picture above is taken from a story in yesterday’s Edinburgh Evening News. It shows an 80-year-old man, James McMillan (no relation to the differently-spelled composer James MacMillan CBE, who recently referred to pro-independence artists’ group National Collective as “Mussolini’s cheerleaders”), who was hospitalised with a broken wrist and other injuries after being attacked in the street by a woman outraged by his Yes placard.

It was only a matter of time.

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The results of some of the questions in this week’s Panelbase independence poll are so striking we just couldn’t help ourselves. Let’s have a quick delve.

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Every single line a classic.

Sometimes there isn’t much happening in the world of politics, but it’d be a bit of a stretch to describe this week as one of those times. So we’re not sure in what context this article on the BBC website today counts as “news”.

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Curiously, the only place in the media we’ve been able to find even slightly detailed coverage of Gordon Brown’s speech on independence to a group of Labour MPs, MSPs and party apparatchiks in Govan this week was in Newsnet Scotland.

The press, which gave extensive coverage to the former Prime Minister’s last intervention in the debate, has barely mentioned the latest one, made again in the name of the figleaf “United With Labour” brand created to convince the party’s more gullible grassroots supporters that it’s not walking hand-in-hand with the Tories.

That may, of course, be because the media, while more or less obliged to cover UWL’s launch, is generally rather uncomfortable about it and doesn’t want to shine too much light on the group. But it may also be because Brown’s speech was such arrant, obvious nonsense that even Scotsman readers would be insulted by it.

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And just to finish off our in-depth study into respective coverage of the recent YouGov and Panelbase polls in the Scottish media, here’s the Scottish Daily Express.

Reporting of the YouGov poll (giving the No camp a 30% lead) is at the top, and the Express’ coverage of the Panelbase poll (putting Yes narrowly in front) is below.

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