Wings Over Scotland

One of the scary things about the decline in print newspaper sales is the mutability of online media. If you rely on digital versions of news stories for reference, it’s impossible to be sure that the paper you buy will be the paper you own tomorrow.

The most spectacularly ironic demonstration of the principle was when Amazon deleted copies of “1984” – a book whose central character spends his life doctoring and falsifying old newspapers for propaganda reasons – from customers’ Kindles without their knowledge a few years ago, showing that even content stored on your own device rather than on a publisher’s website wasn’t totally safe, and could be fiddled with or even taken away entirely, silently, from thousands of miles away.

But nowadays you can read three radically different versions of a story on a newspaper in a single day, all from clicking the same external link, with the whole process conducted in full public view, and almost nobody bats an eyelid.

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Ooh, we haven’t had one of these for a while. Browsing the newspapers on our iPad this morning before getting up, we noticed an interesting headline in the Scotsman.

Intrigued, we clicked on it to see if it was a standard-issue scare story in the paper’s “Scottish independence” section, and were pleasantly surprised to note that it wasn’t. In fact, the warned-of tax rises or cuts in services were those which would follow a No vote in the referendum, as they’re those planned by UK Chancellor George Osborne.

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One of the benefits, if that’s the right word, of the Daily Record’s shambolic new iPad app is that the 30-day trial period means we got to see a print copy of the Sunday Mail today for the first time in years. It was largely like a parochial edition of Heat magazine (“FAT LASS DATES THIN BLOKE” got a spread), but buried 40-odd pages in was a “special report” that doesn’t seem to have made it onto the paper’s website.

The Mail accompanies the report with an editorial entitled “We must not abandon our Geordie pals”, which is very carefully worded in order to give the impression that a Yes vote would be to do just that, without actually saying so. But the actual content of the report is curiously at odds with the headlines.

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It’s been an interesting week for the Scottish media. First the Sun’s website vanished behind the clouds of a paywall, and today the Daily Record unveiled a new version of its tablet app which no longer gives readers the weekday paper for free.

(Both papers, naturally, presented these new restrictions as enhancements.)

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Some of the more cynical independence supporters among our readership may today be asking themselves “What is it that Labour are trying to bury today with all this ludicrously farcical ‘Labour For Independence’ business?” 

Allow us to suggest a few possibilities.

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Labour voters are going to be key in deciding the outcome of the independence referendum. Even if everyone who voted SNP, Green or SSP in the last Holyrood election voted Yes in 2014, it wouldn’t be quite enough to secure a 50%+1 result.

But with polls consistently showing 15-20% of Labour voters are already in favour of independence, and also that a huge majority are dissatisfied with the status quo, it can be no surprise that the Unionist parties and media are extremely nervous of any growth in the Labour Yes faction.

But while nerves are one thing, blind panic is another.

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The internet’s been enjoying itself since last night knocking up satirical versions of The Sun’s wraparound cover today. For no immediately apparent reason (except perhaps that it’s a slow time for news) the paper has suddenly decided to give a “State Of The Union”-type address explicitly setting out its beliefs on a variety of subjects.

We thought that it might pass a few idle moments to compare the UK and Scottish editions, and see how closely those beliefs matched up on either side of the border.

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We linked you yesterday to a quite startling display of cognitive dissonance, as a dedicated Labour activist struggled to reconcile his party’s position on Trident with his own belief in disarmament, reaching some quite extraordinary contortions of logic in an attempt to convince himself that staying in the Union represented the best way of ridding the United Kingdom of weapons which are enthusiastically supported by every major UK political party and the Lib Dems.

But it’s not just mad bloggers who are frantically trying to whip up a sandstorm of spin to obscure Labour’s final abject surrender to the nuclear weapons lobby.

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We’re going to pop out for a quick bit of sun before it gets completely insanely hot. While we’re gone enjoy this, in which a hapless Labour stooge pens a quick diatribe of cut-and-pasted “Better Together” drivel for what he almost certainly expected to be a sympathetic audience on the anti-independence “progressive” site Left Foot Forward, and promptly gets the most comprehensive and one-sided shoeing from commenters we’ve seen in quite some time. We can only assume “Newsbot9” is on holiday.

(PS The CTU is one of many unions serving members in both the UK and Ireland.)

Credit where it’s due to the Scotsman today, which has been impeccably even-handed in its coverage of the furore around the issue of men-only membership at the Muirfield golf club, current host to the sport’s flagship event, the Open.

Here’s this morning’s edition discussing Alex Salmond’s stance, for example:

“The way he has performed this summer, I can’t be the only person relieved that Alex Salmond has decided against going to the Open at Muirfield.

Or is his bungled boycott of arguably the most treasured sporting event in Scotland’s calendar actually his clumsiest attempt yet to muscle his way into the spotlight?”

And showing scrupulous fairness, they’ve also reported on David Cameron’s view.

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Today the Scottish Sun is almost entirely devoted to things idiot celebrities have said to each other on Twitter (or stories about Rihanna’s earrings), while the Daily Record relegates the Lib Dem Trident fiasco to a couple of small side columns in order to splash a double-page “EXCLUSIVE!” spread with the shock revelation that the First Minister of Scotland has sent letters of congratulation to some successful Scots.

(A feature for which it bewilderingly felt the need to waste taxpayers’ money by sending Freedom of Information requests to the Scottish Government.)

The Scotsman goes big on famous people’s favourite churches (people have favourite churches?), and the Herald has a South African, of all people, complaining about Alex Salmond taking a stand against discrimination.

We might take the day off.