(This article was originally intended to go up on Wednesday, but it was somewhat overtaken by events before it was finished.)
This week has seen another of those strange coincidences by which a whole slew of Unionist pundits all randomly decide to start talking about the same subject. On this occasion it was the rape clause, and why it proved the SNP are bad.
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Category
analysis, media, scottish politics
Most of the on-the-spot media reporting of the judgement in our court case against Kezia Dugdale on Wednesday was pretty fair and straightforward news coverage. The majority of pieces accurately and prominently mentioned the fact that the sheriff had found that I wasn’t a homophobe and that Dugdale’s article in the Daily Record which had claimed that I was WAS both untrue and defamatory.
(Some readers objected to headlines claiming that Dugdale had been “victorious”, but the strict legal fact is that she had.)
But it didn’t take long for the press to recover its composure and revert to type.

A comment piece in today’s Herald is probably the peak so far.
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Category
comment, media, navel-gazing
Just you wait and see.

Scottish political pundits: they’ve got all the pieces in their hands, but they still haven’t even worked out that it’s a jigsaw.
Category
comment, disturbing, idiots, media, scottish politics
We haven’t talked much on Wings about the court case currently in progress against former Scottish Labour branch manager Kezia Dugdale, for hopefully obvious reasons.

The case is currently “in avizandum” – legal jargon for “the sheriff is considering his decision” – and a result is hoped for around the end of this month, and while as far as we know there’s no actual rule against talking about it at this stage, if you’re one of the participants it’s probably not the greatest idea as a general principle.
But what CAN be discussed is a much wider issue which it touched on, as highlighted by Daily Record columnist Anna Burnside while talking about the case during last week’s BBC Radio Scotland media review on the John Beattie Show.
The debate had a fully balanced panel: Burnside, who thought I was an awful person, Stuart Cosgrove, who thought I was an awful person with a sometimes-good website, and Anne Marie Watson, who thought I was an awful person. But it was Burnside who really went in with the boot, as can be heard from 2m 27s on the clip below.
Let’s take a walk through that.
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Tags: soapbox
Category
comment, media, scottish politics
So there was a football match at the weekend.

At least three people were stabbed, one very seriously, in violent incidents the likes of which haven’t been seen around Scottish football for years.
But it was probably just a random, unforseeable one-off, right?
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Tags: toldyouso
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comment, culture, disturbing, idiots, media, scottish politics, scum
From today’s Telegraph:

But who’s this “we”, exactly?
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comment, europe, idiots, media, sport, uk politics
Wings Over Scotland isn’t the only website dedicated to scrutinising the truthfulness of things claimed by politicians and media pundits. There’s the widely-respected and diligent FullFact.org, there’s Scotland’s own The Ferret, and there’s the BBC’s Reality Check (which frequently takes the more unconventional approach of, er, not making a finding either way about what the reality of things is).
And then there’s Channel 4’s FactCheck, which we’re going to generously assume had a liquid lunch yesterday and was a little under the weather.

Because not only is the conclusion that it reached on the subject of an independent Scotland having to use the Euro utter nonsense that’s been debunked roughly 1000 times in the last six years, it doesn’t even agree with itself.
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Tags: flat-out liesmisinformation
Category
debunks, europe, idiots, media, scottish politics
The Scotsman is delighted to have some bad news to report:

So, the number of teachers is falling, right?
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Tags: misinformation
Category
analysis, debunks, media, scottish politics
Sundays have been the low point of Scottish political journalism for a while now. Traditionally a day when newspapers are heavy on comment and light on news (because politics tends to happen on weekdays), they unleash all the weary old dinosaurs who’ve been driving away readers for the last 30 years.
So you really have to stand out to be noticed for especially appalling hackery on a Sunday, which is probably why nobody from Scotland On Sunday wanted to have their name on this toe-curling piece of second-hand, lifted-from-another-paper garbage.

Professor Ronald MacDonald, you say? That name seems to ring a bell.
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comment, media, scottish politics
Michael Glackin of the Sunday Times is the only serious contender to the Scotsman’s demented Brian Wilson as the most poisonously, blindly instinctive hater of anything even passingly connected to the SNP or independence in the Scottish media. His weekly bilious rants in the paper make even Scottish Daily Express hacks wince and say “Blimey, that’s a bit strong”.

But even by those standards, this week’s column is quite something. So let’s take a little look at just how much of an idiot you can make of yourself if you never allow facts to get in the way of your rage.
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Tags: flat-out liesmisinformation
Category
debunks, idiots, media, scottish politics
What does two plus two make?



Let’s all do it together, shall we?
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Tags: and finallyarithmetic fail
Category
media, scottish politics