Wings Over Scotland

The very strange man who is David Leask, chief reporter at the Herald, has been hard at work with a shovel ever since we ran a couple of stories on Monday.

Accusing this site of publishing “an implausible blog about our paper this week, based on some unchecked &, well, weird assumptions”, he curiously neglected to specify what those assumptions might have been, while embarking on a long, rambling and bewildering rant about what does and doesn’t constitute “fake news”.

Leask’s argument, at least in so far as we can make any sense of it at all, is that even deliberately and knowingly made-up lies printed in mainstream newspapers are not, and can never be, “fake news”.

That’s a term which he insists only applies to spoof sites pretending to be real news outlets, which we’d presume – although it’s by no means clear – means the likes of The Onion or the Daily Mash.

Which is an odd angle.

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December:

January:

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We thought it might be worth going through this in a bit more detail.

The phrase “out of control” is in quote marks in the Herald’s front-page headline, leading readers to believe someone has said it, but who? Let’s investigate.

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Call us cynical if you will, but we were very suspicious when we saw today’s Herald.

We were a little bit surprised that Oxfam would have commissioned a report into Scotland, so we thought we better check and see exactly what it said.

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Remarkably, the notoriously unreliable and yet somehow omnipresent Scottish political commentator and reality-disputer David “Davey” Torrance was still digging last night in the wake of this story from three days ago.

Never, eh? Let’s see if that’s true, shall we?

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Late last night in the House Of Commons saw one of the most significant votes in the history of UK constitutional politics. A group of Scottish Tory MPs voted to oppose an amendment which would have protected the central building block of Scottish (and Welsh) devolution – the principle that any powers not explicitly reserved are devolved – from the UK government’s attempted huge power grab under the cover of Brexit.

Those very same Scottish Tory MPs had previously pledged to stand up for Scotland’s interests regardless of loyalty to their party, and had repeatedly expressed their grave disappointment at the deeply unsatisfactory condition of the Withdrawal Bill.

Last night they could have fixed it by supporting the amendment (backed by every other Scottish MP right across party lines), which would have tipped the arithmetic and ensured its success. Instead they betrayed every voter in Scotland – including their own – by waving the bill through unamended and passing the buck to the unelected House Of Lords, which has no representatives from Scotland’s most popular party.

This morning, BBC Scotland led on the fact that it snowed a bit in Scotland in January.

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The past week saw the return to the public eye of the former Independent columnist Johann Hari, who vanished in disgrace a few years ago in a plagiarism scandal over claiming to have done things that he hadn’t.

It also saw the return of ubiquitous Scottish politics scribe David Torrance from a trip to San Francisco, the details of which he shared at stultifying length with the unfortunate readers of The Scottish Review.

Or at least, what he SAID were the details of where he SAID he’d been.

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We’ve commented quite a few times in recent months about the Scottish media’s habit of running statistical stories rendered meaningless by the absence of any context.

The reasons for this aren’t necessarily sinister – sometimes journalists are just lazy or the full stats are hard to establish because like-for-like figures aren’t published – but usually it’s just a way to get an SNP BAD story out of isolated numbers which, if the full picture was presented, would render that impossible.

The above story from STV News today contains no furious rentaquotes from Labour or the Tories (at least not yet), so we should place it in the former category. Nevertheless, we do feel it’s our duty in a general sense to provide readers with the information that the Scottish media can’t be bothered to, so let’s do that.

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Now remember, small oil-rich countries bordering the North Sea, there’s just no way you can thrive on your own.

After all, would this guy lie to you? He’s from the fair and unbiased media!

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The Scottish media has been operating at what former BBC journalist Paul Mason once called “full propaganda strength” for the last few weeks, trying to inflate some pretty standard seasonal fluctuations into a “WINTER NHS CRISIS”.

One of the more egregious examples came yesterday when the state broadcaster’s Scotland editor Sarah Smith announced to the nation that 100,000 patients had waited more than four hours at A&E departments last week – a pretty impressive feat since in reality only a quarter of that number actually visited A&Es in Scotland last week, and four-fifths of those were seen in under four hours.

The 100,000 figure in fact refers to an entire year, not a week. Depending on how you look at it, Smith misrepresented the reality by either 2,000% or 5,200%. Yet at the time of writing we’re not aware of the BBC having issued any correction or apology for this, well, let’s be generous and say “error”.

The stats record the time taken for patients presenting at A&E to be dealt with (that doesn’t just mean “seen”, but seen, assessed, and then either treated, admitted or sent home). For the whole of 2017 the figures for Scotland were:

Patients dealt with in four hours or less: 93.1%
In eight hours or less: 99.2%
In 12 hours or less: 99.9%

Which doesn’t sound like too much of a crisis.

Alert observers will of course be aware that this is all entry-level basic operating mode for the media. Even if they weren’t trying to whip up politically-motivated “SNP BAD” material – and most of them are – it’s a deep journalistic instinct to exaggerate and hyperbolise everything into the worst news possible in order to drive traffic and clicks.

But does it work?

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In some little-noticed news slipped out last Friday, it was revealed that Kezia Dugdale is to take up a position on the governing body of the Scottish Parliament.

Our favourite thing was her quote on the nomination:

“I’m very pleased to be Labour’s nominee for the SPCB. Having argued for gender balance, I’m glad that at least two of the five positions will now be held be women.”

…which suggested that she was unhappy exact gender balance hadn’t been achieved by placing two-and-a-half women on the board. (Unless she was getting at some sort of alternative solution, we suppose.)

But since the Herald raised the subject, it seemed a good time to take a look at voters’ opinions as to whether she might be a fit and proper person for such a role.

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