So here’s a headline from the (Dundee) Evening Telegraph.
You know how we’re always pointing out how newspapers love to lie to readers without actually saying things that are untrue? Let’s have a quick case study.
An alert reader conveniently located in the Aberdeen area pointed us to an “SNP BAD” story in the ever-willing Press & Journal today.
And it raised an awful lot of questions the P&J didn’t seem to want to ask.
From today’s Scottish Daily Mail:
The slightly-less-well-known definition of “force” that means “a minority government persuading three out of four opposition parties to agree with it and democratically vote a measure through”, there.
If you’re a person (unemployed or working) subsisting via state welfare in the UK, there can be no more genuinely, blood-runs-cold, terrifying phrase in the English language than a Tory saying they’ve come up with “fresh thinking” on poverty and benefits.
Because – and if you’re only going to trust us on one thing in your life, trust us on this – it never, ever means your life’s about to get better.
Last week, just a day after we highlighted the disastrous sales collapse of the Daily Record during almost certainly the most tumultuous and eventful seven-year period in Scotland’s peacetime history, the paper’s editor-in-chief Murray Foote apparently took the Scottish newspaper industry by surprise by suddenly resigning his position.
(We’re sure, incidentally, this is entirely unconnected with the recent advertising of some senior media vacancies in Scottish Labour.)
Rival hacks dutifully issued a series of glowing tweets about what a smashing guy Foote was and how much he’d improved the paper during his 27-year tenure there in various positions, most recently editor-in-chief, group editor and deputy editor.
So even though Foote accused this site of “debasing public life” with “sewage politics, conspiracy theories, hatred and paranoia” when we forced his paper to reluctantly and belatedly correct a massive front-page lie, we thought we’d join in the salutes.
We’ve had extremely poor internet at Wings HQ since Thursday of last week, which our telecoms company is trying to get to the bottom of. (We’re typing this on an iPhone via very flaky 4G.)
We’ll be back with you ASAP. In the meantime, we’re being baffled by this assertion from the Financial Times that’s been doing the social-media rounds again recently.
Um, that isn’t “difficult” at all. That’s what maritime borders are for. That’s why the UK took the precaution of stealing (or reclaiming, depending on where you’re looking at it from) thousands of square miles of Scottish waters in 1999.
But other than any possible attempts to renegotiate that boundary, there’s nothing to debate. One side of the line is ours. The other side is yours. The end. We’re not at all sure why the FT would ever try to pretend otherwise.
Alert readers may recall as far back as November, when we ran an article on a bizarre Scottish Daily Mail hatchet job which claimed that “the SNP has squandered £2bn” in its ten years in office, but only actually listed around £800m in supposed waste.
The independent press regulator IPSO is still in a great big sulking strop with us for reasons we can’t remember, so rejects any complaints that come directly from Wings, but the good thing about having a 300,000-strong army of readers is that some kind soul will usually take on the task for us.
And this one turned out to be fascinating.
Alert readers may recall some articles last August in which we highlighted the total pig’s breakfast Scotland’s media had made of reporting ScotRail punctuality figures, centred around mistaking the “on time” figures (trains arriving within 59 seconds of their scheduled time, ie at the advertised minute) for the “PPM” figures (trains arriving within five minutes) which are the basis of official punctuality targets.
Several newspapers, including the Herald, Courier, Daily Record and Daily Mail, had to publish corrections after our articles, so we can be pretty sure they won’t have made that mistake again with the latest stats.
Can’t we?
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.
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.
Wings Over Scotland is a thing that exists.
