The Scotsman goes big this morning on a story revealing that John Swinney has admitted accidentally misinterpreting a report from Lloyds Banking Group which said that the oil and gas industry would create 34,000 new jobs in the UK over the next two years. A Scottish Government paper in July originally said the jobs would all come to Scotland, but the error was corrected within three days.
While most papers give the issue a couple of short lines, the Scotsman runs the news twice, once in a substantial article of its own and also (for some reason we can’t quite fathom) as a sizeable addendum tacked onto its lead story about Henry McLeish criticising the relentless negativity of the No campaign.
The Scotsman is quite right to highlight this embarrassing clanger. After all, what sort of hapless bumbling idiot could have published something which misinterpreted the Lloyds report as referring to solely Scottish jobs?
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Tags: snp accused
Category
comment, media
We’ve been getting quite a lot of emails and other messages recently from people complaining about what they perceive to be heavily biased moderation of comments on the website of the Herald. We haven’t done anything about them because most of them lacked any supporting evidence, but today we decided to gather some.
And what we discovered was pretty disturbing.
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Category
comment, disturbing, media
While the Scottish print media continues to almost totally blank our Panelbase opinion poll, it’s nice to know that they’re nevertheless paying close attention to its findings.
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Category
comment, media, scottish politics
Below is the headline of a story from this morning’s Independent.
We’ve read the article in question several times now looking for the supposed “bad news” for the Scottish First Minister, and we’re having no luck at all. Perhaps you can help us out with it, readers.
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Tags: misinformation
Category
comment, media, scottish politics, uk politics
If you weren’t up at 8.45am or so (it’s the weekend), click the image below to hear the interview on Good Morning Scotland on the subject of our Panelbase opinion poll.
The poll was also discussed (again) by prominent psephologist Professor John Curtice, who made a few helpful comments by way of expert advice. We’re new to the polling game, so let’s quickly address them.
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Category
audio, comment, media, scottish politics
We’re using that phrase in the sense of “the end of the universe”, we should say.
We’ve done interviews for radio in the BBC’s tiny Bath studio before, but this is the first time we’ve had to let ourselves in and do the whole thing solo.
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Category
media
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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Category
comment, disturbing, media, scottish politics
…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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Tags: poll
Category
analysis, media, stats
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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Category
analysis, media, scottish politics, uk politics
A quick update on how mainstream media coverage of our poll is going.
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Tags: poll
Category
media
