Readers will doubtless be startled to hear that today’s Scottish newspapers have taken a somewhat misleading approach to the facts on one of the day’s big stories.
Several of them report the findings of a commission looking into the idea of a Citizen’s (or Universal) Basic Income, a scheme which pays every adult in the country a fixed sum every year regardless of their own income, almost completely replacing the current benefits system.
The idea is that as well as reducing poverty, the administrative costs of social security are massively reduced, as is the problem of vulnerable people not taking up benefits because of the stigma often attached to them by the press.
The downside is that it’s generally more expensive. But have the Scottish press accurately reported the scale of that cost, or have they massively exaggerated it for shock value and to serve a right-wing agenda? Read on for a surprise!
The first version is entirely accurate. Readers can decide for themselves why someone at the BBC felt it needed to be changed from neutral terms to pejorative ones.
The above story is feeble enough as it stands, even allowing for it being a desperately slow news week for Scottish politics. Maureen Watt is 66 years old and has asthma, and making a pensioner with breathing difficulties sprint a mile to get to a speech on time probably isn’t the most cost-effective way for the Parliament to save four and a half quid, once you’ve factored in the cost of the ambulance and everything.
We referenced this a few days ago because we definitely remembered it happening, but we’d been unable to actually locate the evidence, and at Wings Over Scotland that sort of thing bothers us. After a very considerable amount of effort we’ve now tracked it down, so we’re bunging it up here to preserve it for the record.
(At that point host Frank Skinner gave up and moved on.)
It’s from one month after the indyref, and the interesting thing is that Robinson is twice given the opportunity to respond to Skinner’s question about whether he thought that the pro-Yes supporters had any sort of fair point about his alleged bias, and both times – rather than, say, just dismissing it with a quick “Of course not” – he ducks it.
Readers can, as always, make their own judgements.
As readers who were once children will probably recall, papier-mache is a substance in which incredibly flimsy material – such as tissue paper or newspaper – is turned into something rather more hard and durable by dint of combining multiple layers of it with a simple flour-and-water solution.
What’s less well-known is that the process also happens IN newspapers.
For a case study, let’s look at this article in today’s Times.
The Scottish Daily Mail almost explodes with fury over new crime statistics today:
Which is weird. Because there’s less crime in Scotland than there’s ever been at any time in modern history. How do we know that? Because the Mail tells us so.
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