Wings Over Scotland

The passage below comes from the lead story in the Scotsman’s politics section today. We’ve highlighted a few of the more interesting bullet points.

“An independent Scotland will have to impose strict limits on spending and agree borrowing curbs with the rest of the UK to avoid the wrath of the financial markets, advisers to the Scottish Government have said. The advice also states that austerity will continue to bite “irrespective” of whether the country votes Yes or No next year.

However, the Fiscal Commission, set up by the SNP government last year to study the economics of independence, said the restrictions would be outweighed by the “flexibility” of independence, which would allow Scottish ministers to pick a way through the financial crisis facing western countries.

The 221-page document, commissioned by the Scottish Government, recommended that an independent Scotland should keep the pound and the Bank of England, and sign a pact with the UK on financial stability. Such policies would provide a mix of “autonomy, cohesion and continuity”, chairman Crawford Beveridge said yesterday. The pro-independence former Scottish Enterprise chief insisted: “Scotland has the clear potential to be a successful independent nation.”“

So here’s the quiz: guess which one formed the headline.

As a new week of Newsnight Scotland looms, this should work most days.

Recently we’ve mentioned a concept we called the “invisible hypothetical”. It refers to a form of media bias characterised by omission, and which is therefore hard to prove. This morning’s edition of the Scotsman carries a conveniently striking example.

Taken solely on its own merits, the article below the headline is impossible to fault. It notes the figure claimed today by the UK Government for the number of treaties an independent Scotland would be required to (at least theoretically) renegotiate, and even refers – obliquely and neutrally – to the previously-cited figure of 14,000.

In that oblique neutrality, of course, lies the rub.

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Whoah! We were starting to think SoS had lost its touch. But neigh chance.

Astonishingly, this really is the mane article on the paper’s front page today. Some hack must have noticed there were no “SNP accused” stories in this week’s edition and made something up on the hoof, in an attempt to give those beastly Nats a shoeing and stirrup a shocking tail out of nothing. What a load of old pony.

It’d give anyone who believes in a balanced Scottish media a really long face.

What IS going on at the Herald? Yesterday we highlighted a bizarre article which flatly contradicted its own headline, then agreed with it, then contradicted it again. And today another piece by the same author appears to do much the same thing.

At least the headline is a bit more circumspect this time: “Uncertainty claims over EU situation”. But the opening paragraph blares a dramatic statement which doesn’t appear to be supported anywhere in the story.

“The Scottish Government has indicated for the first time that Scotland would not automatically be able to negotiate EU membership from within the organisation if Scots vote Yes in next year’s referendum.”

…is the bold-fonted proclamation from the paper’s Political Editor. But if you read the text which follows it, you’ll struggle to locate anyone indicating any such thing.

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This splendid BBC news piece from 1975 about the Glasgow Underground appears to have been shot in some sort of awful, nightmarish post-apocalyptic wasteland. Or, put another way, a large and once-prosperous city run by Scottish Labour for 50 years.

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We checked with a few people on this one to make sure it wasn’t just us. Today’s Herald carries a story – by Magnus Gardham, no less – that on first glance sounds like good news for supporters of independence. But on closer inspection, it’s an incoherent jumble of word-noise that contradicts itself almost every paragraph. We honestly don’t have a clue what they’re up to over there.

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We’re not going to link to the Brian Wilson article which the Guardian unaccountably lowered itself to publishing yesterday. It’s embarrassing to see a still-widely-respected newspaper debasing its pages with the sort of swivel-eyed ranting you’d normally expect from a drunk shouting at a skip at 7am, which we can only assume the paper paid money for after LabourHame rejected it as being just too bitter and deranged.

One ugly little piece of innuendo is worth picking up on, though. With what’s the closest thing to subtlety in the piece, Wilson grudgingly concedes the SNP’s mandate to hold an independence referendum:

“The difference is that Scotland now has to answer a question which only a minority want to ask: ‘Should Scotland become an independent country?’ This is because, two years ago, 21% of Scots voted nationalist in the Holyrood elections, giving them an overall majority.”

Even in that tiny snippet there are several nasty little lies (nobody voted “nationalist”, for example – they voted for the SNP, which stands for Scottish National Party rather than Nationalist, and many did so despite opposing independence, just as tens of thousands of “nationalists” voted for other parties). But we’ll focus on the “21%” thing.

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One of the main reasons we started Wings Over Scotland 15 months ago was a recurring frustration at the Scottish media’s constant failure to represent our views. Time after time we’d sit watching the TV with our blood pressure rising, shouting “Why aren’t you asking this CLEARLY lying idiot the staggeringly bloody obvious question that anyone with a IQ higher than a badger’s bawbag would be asking?” at the screen until the neighbours started banging on the wall again.

We’ve come a long way in 15 months, and we can at least now draw a sizeable audience’s attention to such unasked questions. But the phenomenon hasn’t lessened any, and last night’s Newsnight Scotland provided a textbook example.

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This came out quite a few days ago, but didn’t get the attention it merited. Once again, we invite readers to ponder the “invisible hypothetical” of whether the Scottish media would have shown such complete disinterest in a piece of investigative journalism which revealed an elected representative of the SNP and some of its prominent activists discussing their own party’s complete uselessness.

We do accept that Scottish Labour being in shambolic disarray isn’t exactly hold-the-front-page stuff, and is in fact somewhere on a par with “Rain forecast for Hebrides” or “Scottish rugby team beaten at Twickenham”. But clearly the bar for headline stories is rather lower than it used to be, so you’d think it’d at least get a passing mention.

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One of the problems for anyone highlighting media bias is the “invisible hypothetical”. Take, by way of example, this snapshot of today’s Scotsman website front page:

The headline on the first piece especially is an astonishing piece of work. Rather than report that Parliament had passed a motion criticising the UK government’s welfare reforms (something given extra poignancy by the article below it, and despite Labour voting with the Tories and Lib Dems against the motion), the paper mind-bogglingly manages to twist the story into an attack on the SNP for not explicitly providing an alternative plan – even though Holyrood has no powers over welfare.

We invite any Wings Over Scotland readers with an idle moment to ponder what the headline might have been had it been Labour attacking the SNP in similar circumstances. We’ll get you started – you’ll be wanting the word “ACCUSED”.

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