Wings Over Scotland

STV News gets the new year off to a cheery start today:

The headline, as alert readers will be accustomed to by now, is a flat-out lie. As far as the article reveals – and there’s nothing on the company’s website offering any more detail, nor in the longer quotes we found elsewhere – chartered accountants French Duncan LLP have in fact made no predictions whatsoever as to the number of Scottish insolvencies in 2019, merely recorded the number that took place in 2018.

STV’s claim that the 2018 figure of 12,000 “could be even higher by the end of 2019” appears, then, to have been entirely invented. But the depressing tone – which the Daily Express turns into a full-blown crisis, roping in Murdo Fraser for some SNP BAD rentaguff along the way – is even more inexplicable than simple fabrication.

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There’s a digital edition of the Times out today, but the normal Scotland section doesn’t make the cut. (There’s normally an Ireland section too – although it doesn’t get billed on the Contents list – which is also missing today, and there’s never a Wales section for some reason.)

Maybe if we all keep really quiet they’ll completely forget we’re here and not Brexit us either. Have a good one, readers.

We can think of no better illustrative metaphor for the brain-withering idiot festival that was 2018 than page 16 of today’s Sunday Mail, which in the space of a single inch of newsprint predicts both SNP gains at any new general election, and then SNP losses to the exact same Labour and Tory parties that the editorial on the left excoriates as incompetent, “deluded” and “moribund”.

We wish we could rationally hope 2019 will be any better.

It’s fair to say, readers, that Wings Over Scotland is somewhat cynical about the UK and Scottish media. It’s pretty much our thing. Very little about it behaving maliciously, untruthfully or incompetently genuinely shocks us. But today is one of those rare days.

Votes of no confidence in a UK government are even more uncommon. The last one was almost 40 years ago. They’re extremely dramatic and newsworthy events. So it’s a little odd that one has been called this afternoon and the British state broadcaster has absolutely nothing to say about it, even on its politics website.

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We’re on about Day 79 of NoScottishPoliticsNewsGate (today’s big “EXCLUSIVE!” in the Herald is something we told you about last Friday, and was also an “exclusive” in yesterday’s Scottish Sun), so we found ourselves getting diverted by something else in the papers this morning.

The Scottish Daily Mail had a piece on the cost of train journeys from Scotland, and living in Bath you don’t need to tell us how scandalously expensive British railways are compared to almost any other country in the Northern Hemisphere.

But the Mail is the Mail, and it couldn’t help distorting even an open-goal of a story like that until it had almost no relation to reality. And it’s a very useful illustration, should anybody need yet another one, of how this country’s newspapers vastly mislead their readers without actually technically lying.

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The front page lead of today’s Scottish Daily Mail:

As alert readers of this site will know, the Mail has a particular fondness for presenting statistics bereft of any context so that people have no idea how big or small they really are. So is 1,600 passengers a week receiving compensation for delays a lot or a little? Let’s find out.

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From today’s Daily Mail:

The headline is, of course, a lie.

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This is the editorial in today’s Scottish edition of The Times:

It seems to be an increasingly popular viewpoint in the country’s media.

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Ever aware of its need to deliver informed enlightenment to the populace, the state broadcaster has recently put up a “BBC Brexit Jargon Buster” page on its website. We’re not sure it was meant to be quite this candid.

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There was a certain uncomfortable 2018 inevitability this morning over the fact that where people were offended, arrests would follow.

And the burning of a cardboard model of the Grenfell Tower last night was certainly right up near the top in the pantheon of cretinously offensive things. Many victims of the appalling tragedy, which killed 72 people and injured many more, still haven’t been properly rehomed almost a year and a half later.

But if it’s a CRIME, we have some questions.

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We’ve been through all the papers and there’s still absolutely no Scottish politics news, so we’re going to take a moment out for one of our brief but always-popular tangential forays into the world of football. All the usual disclaimers apply.

Because the parlous state of current Scottish journalism can’t just be observed on the politics pages, with all their partisan spin, quarter-truths and hackery. Sometimes you get a better idea of it by stepping back and looking at the broader picture, and rarely is that picture more clear than when it’s a picture of “Rangers”.

The Daily Record devoted only a tiny corner of its back page on Thursday to the club’s latest financial reports, and the bulk of the text was devoted to Dave King enthusing about what great news it all was.

Pretty much every other piece of coverage to be found in the Scottish press was the same, shrugging the figures off as of no notable significance and all someone else’s fault anyway (in this case former manager Pedro Caixinha, even though one must suppose he didn’t spend any more money than the board told him he could), and we waited in vain for any in-depth analysis in the Sundays.

And we couldn’t help thinking we’d been here before.

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Alert readers may have noticed that for a non-holiday period, Scottish politics is a deathly quiet place at the moment. Papers are struggling to find anything to write about at all, and were beside themselves with joy this week when presented with the chance to fabricate a ridiculous “anti-Semitism” story about an obscure blogger criticising a trade union and fill several pages with hysterical fauxtrage over it.

The sheer dearth of anything happening whatsoever is typified by the Scottish Daily Mail’s front-page splash this morning.

It sounds dramatic – a potentially catastrophic en-masse exodus of Scotland’s doctors would certainly be a crisis. But anyone reading beyond the lurid headline will swiftly discover a rather less doom-laden reality.

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