Well, this is odd. An alert reader has sent us the response they just received from the BBC to a question about our recent banning from YouTube, and it’s curious.
“No discretion”, eh? That’s not what they said last week.
The data in this Scottish Government reply to an alert reader this week pretty much speaks for itself, so we’re not going to add too much to it.
The number of FOI requests submitted to the Scottish Government by the BBC in the past three years (112) is more than 25% higher than the total number submitted in the previous seven years (89).
The number submitted by Labour in 2017 was more than TEN TIMES as many as it submitted in 2008, and twice as many as any other year.
The number submitted by the Tories in 2017 was a third more than the total number submitted in the previous NINE years (92). They’ve also exceeded that total in the first seven months of this year alone.
And as the highlighted passage notes, the true numbers are considerably higher.
It really takes some going to stand out for especially terrible journalism in the Scottish press this week, given the vast acres of page-space that are still being devoted to truly abysmal, and borderline legally-actionable, barrel-scraping articles about the recent allegations made against Alex Salmond. So hats off to perhaps the only man who could possibly have achieved it.
Ladies and gentlemen, who else but David Leask?
Let’s see just who we meet, shall we?
The Scottish media has really had to scrape the barrel to give a negative spin to some NHS stats today. The Herald, Daily Mail, Daily Record and Scotsman all feature a story concerning an increase in ambulance waiting times, noting that the number of callouts taking more than ten minutes has doubled in four years.
What they’re a lot more reluctant to reveal is that the reason for that is a deliberate policy change which has meant ambulances have been saving more people’s lives.
Scotland’s newspapers are just one gigantic filthy avalanche of stinking, poisonous sewage today. They’re a disgrace to both journalism and humanity, and if we started listing the reasons why we wouldn’t be finished until sometime on Tuesday.
(Although some of it’s leaked out onto Twitter already.)
So instead, we’re going to do something we haven’t done before and probably never will again: we’re going to link you – unironically, unsarcastically and unarchived – to a post on the blog of the hyper-extremist SNP-hating BritNat fundamentalist zoombat “Effie Deans”, because astonishingly it occupies a moral plane infinitely far above any of the gutter-dredging, hate-crazed scum working in Scotland’s professional media.
That’s how far they’ve sunk. Effie Deans is looking down on them like an astronaut gazing from high orbit into the darkest depths of the Marianas Trench.
This is it here. And that’s all we have to say on the subject.
Earlier this evening the Herald’s poor demented David Leask made an extraordinary and completely untrue allegation:
We haven’t said a single word on the subject (we haven’t a clue if it’s true or not), so several people challenged Leask on the claim, and eventually got a response.
The recent former Daily Record editor and even more recent Yes convert Murray Foote caught a few people’s eyes on Twitter this morning with a rather audacious use of the phrase “decent Tories like Adam Tomkins”.
But it was a piece he wrote for The Times that we found harder to swallow.
We’ve got some spare time today, so let’s go through it all.
Anyone who’s ever written to the BBC, or who follows this site, will already know that the Corporation’s instinctive standard response to any request for information is “Get stuffed, pleb. Just because you pay for us doesn’t mean we’re answerable to you.”
But they do tend to show a little more respect if you used to be the First Minister.
Whenever Scottish Labour rouse themselve to try to rally their handful of remaining supporters by whipping up some fake moral outrage – on this occasion about the Scottish Government giving a grant to an arms manufacturer (helped as always by an obedient Scottish press, and on this occasion by a fairly extraordinary on-air meltdown from Good Morning Scotland interviewer Gillian Marles) – we tend to just sigh and set the stopwatch going to see how long it’ll take to backfire in a horribly messy explosion.
But this one was especially splattery.
Several right-wing media outlets, including the Scotsman, the Scottish Daily Mail and a far-right Unionist website called the Unity News Network have in recent days picked up on the findings of a newly-published study commissioned by the Scottish Government on young people’s attitudes towards immigration.
To give you a flavour of the Unity News Network, it was most recently seen making a Facebook post that captioned a fascinating colour video of London in 1924 with the words “Before Sadiq Khan, Before Terrorism, Before Acid Attacks, Before Moped Gangs, Before Mass Immigration…. Who wants Britain to go back to that time?”
(Some sample reader replies include: “How wonderful, we want our country back” and “It wasn’t the murder capital of the western world then I wonder why it changed was it a black cloud that descended on it?” For perspective on that claim, London recorded 80 murders in the first six months of 2018, compared to 141 in New York.)
And yet UNN still managed to put the least racist spin on the story.
One of the first posts we ever wrote on Wings Over Scotland, back in November 2011, recorded the fact that total daily sales of newspapers in Scotland had dipped below a million for the first time ever (to a total of 986,657).
The six-and-a-half years that have followed have been probably the most tumultuous in Scottish history – an independence referendum, a Brexit referendum and the death of Rangers, to name but three of the significant events that have taken place in just two-thirds of a single decade.
At the very least, then, you’d imagine that the period might have given the declining newspaper industry one last dead cat bounce.
The like-for-like sales total of the same newspapers today is 492,353.
Wings Over Scotland is a thing that exists.
