Actual Scottish politics news continues to be thinner on the ground than the crowds at a Donald Trump inauguration, so we sympathise once more with the gentle souls of the Scottish press as they endeavour to fill empty pages without doing anything more journalistically strenuous than slightly rewording a Labour or Tory press release.
Fortunately for us, of course, we’ve always got their dismal efforts to talk about.
Alert readers may recall as far back as July of last year, when we highlighted an odd thing that Scottish Labour branch manager Kezia Dugdale had started saying.
Regardless of the fact that it was total hooey, Dugdale repeated it every chance she got, and the inevitable Scottish-media consequences have duly followed.
You very rarely get useful stats about online newspaper readership, so we were quite intrigued by this snippet on tonight’s BBC2 Scotland documentary “Paper Thistle”, about the 200th anniversary of The Scotsman.
We don’t know what the numbers are or how brief the period was, but Wings’ average traffic is higher now than it was in 2014, while we suspect The Scotsman is moving in the opposite direction. For a single-issue website to be anywhere even in the same ballpark as a two-centuries-old broadsheet news brand with scores of full-time writers and production staff and a daily newsstand presence is a remarkable thing indeed.
We might start doing classifieds and sport just to see what happens.
It’s a well-known fact, of course, that 87% of all statistics are made up. But as this site regularly observes, if you’re the Scottish opposition and media there’s no need to invent fake ones when you can twist the real ones to present an image completely at odds with the reality.
The Sunday Times today has some fine examples of the craft of massaging figures for the purposes of deception. It carries two separate scare stories on the NHS, both of them using figures which aren’t based on any sort of news, but on opposition spin on existing stats. One comes from the Tories, under a dramatic headline:
The banner is pulling a classic trick – the £685m figure is actually the total sum spent in a decade, not the single year that most people would assume (since there’s no good reason to measure spending in decades, so headlines usually don’t do it). But remarkably it’s just about the most honest thing in the paper’s health coverage today.
While normally the Unionist media deploys the ever-reliable blunt sledgehammer in its tireless war against Scotland controlling its own affairs, it’s also occasionally capable of more subtlety, slipping in a sneaky stiletto of a lie in passing. Take this piece from today’s Mail On Sunday:
The thing is, that’s not how currency reserves work.
As we’ve always understood it, readers, the definition of “news” is supposed to be “a new thing which has happened that people didn’t previously know about”.
Evidently the rules have changed since we were young cub reporters.
We weren’t going to dignify the utterly absurd media stushie over a tweet by Glasgow MSP John Mason yesterday with any coverage because it was too cretinous to even bear thinking about, but this from today’s Daily Record was just too good.
It might only be the 2nd of January, but it’s already pretty clear what we should expect from Scottish politics and the Scottish media in 2017.
Yesterday saw an absurdly petty response from Scottish Labour to the SNP’s “baby box” initiative, sourly carping at a dirt-cheap measure with a proven record of reducing infant mortality and providing vital help to the poor.
Today’s Herald, meanwhile, leads on a meaningless story about people being opposed to having a second independence referendum in 2017 – something nobody has proposed and which has no prospect of happening barring wildly unforseeable events.
The National has an interesting-sounding front page lead story today.
Donalda MacKinnon’s immediate predecessor Ken McQuarrie has been a hostile and toxic presence at the top of BBC Scotland for many years now, so we were naturally intrigued to hear if a change of heart at the Corporation was on the horizon.
While its pages are mostly filled with toadying drivel about the Royal Family, today’s Scottish Daily Mail does manage to squeeze in a bit of supposed politics news.
We say “supposed” because as alert readers may have already suspected, the story quickly disintegrates under inspection. The figure of 3000 police officers leaving the force since it became Police Scotland (buffed up with a hysterical editorial on page 14 talking about the “truly alarming scale of the mass exodus”) is presented without any context as to whether this is a higher number than one would normally expect.
And sure enough, a few paragraphs in we find out that the vast majority have quit after 20 to 30 years of service, which is entirely normal – the article notes that “most officers retire in their late forties or early fifties”.
The line that caught our eye, though, was this:
“Last night, Scottish Conservative leader Ruth Davidson said: ‘Officers seem to be leaving Police Scotland in their droves.'”
Last night? You mean on Christmas Day Ruth Davidson had nothing better to do with her life than offer vacuous quotes to justify meaningless non-stories in the Daily Mail? For the love of God, someone get the poor woman a Netflix subscription.
This is a lie. There are in fact no “tax hikes” in the budget at all. The threshold for the higher rate of tax is increasing with inflation, ie in real terms it’s staying the same as it is now. Councils are being ALLOWED to raise Council Tax but not FORCED to.
But the Mail lying is a reflex action. What about the rest?
Hatey McHateface on The End Of Law: “Wally Walrus wakes? Nah. Another 5 letter word preserving the alliteration.” Jun 21, 18:37
Ex President Xiden on The End Of Law: “Exactly, HR departments are used to socially engineer our thinking. Nobody complains as they fear for their jobs.” Jun 21, 18:31
Aidan on The End Of Law: “Don’t believe the lying rape victims, says Sam.” Jun 21, 18:30
gm on The End Of Law: “The working cops did their jobs properly. I don’t know where the order to keep the operation secret came from.…” Jun 21, 18:27
gm on The End Of Law: “https://www.scotland.police.uk/access-to-information/freedom-of-information/disclosure-log/disclosure-log-2024/march/24-0363-operation-cerrar-child-exploitation-glasgow-2020/ It happened in Glasgow. Operation Cerrar. You can search it. Deeply worrying. What was worse was the response of…” Jun 21, 18:19
Captain Caveman on The End Of Law: ““Do you people own anything?” #spoiler alert Nope. “IT WUZ THE TORRREEES” etc. Hatey has hit the bullseye here.” Jun 21, 18:07
Red on The End Of Law: “There’s a special place in Hell for Rape Gang deniers, sam. Have you no shame?” Jun 21, 17:59
sam on The End Of Law: “Unsubstantiated garbage” Jun 21, 17:32
James on The End Of Law: “Excellent idea, Onlooker; let’s get on with it! Sadly there are bad actors from another country, and their compromised stooges…” Jun 21, 17:08
Hatey McHateface on The End Of Law: “House! I just needed green cheese to complete four corners.” Jun 21, 17:05
James on The End Of Law: “Can you read? Even one eyed?” Jun 21, 17:02
James on The End Of Law: “Unionist Prick.” Jun 21, 16:59
Hatey McHateface on The End Of Law: “Jay I do attach much weight to personal responsibility. Such as the responsibility of the SNP voters in Arbroath. They…” Jun 21, 16:57
Red on The End Of Law: “List of areas where Muslim Rape Gangs have been found operating in Scotland (so far): Aberdeen City Angus Argyll and…” Jun 21, 16:46
Hatey McHateface on The End Of Law: “Loving it, sam. We need to improve benefits and free health care so we can draw even more millions of…” Jun 21, 16:23
Hatey McHateface on The End Of Law: “You’re missing that a male minus dangly bits isn’t a female. Quite a big miss. Maybe excuse yourself from framing…” Jun 21, 16:18
Nemisis Benn on The End Of Law: “Am I missing something? The blurb from Pollock doesn’t quite say that certain criminals are serving their sentences in establishments…” Jun 21, 15:20
Saffron Robe on The End Of Law: “The admissions practice has been deemed unlawful and yet it remains in place. The irony is, of course, that if…” Jun 21, 14:41
Alf Baird on The End Of Law: ““Wasn’t it psychology” Indeed so, for colonization ‘is based on psychology’ (Cesaire). Of course, colonization itself leads to many other…” Jun 21, 14:39
Jay on The End Of Law: “McHateful, interesting to read your riposte to my comment (11:37, 20th June). Your reply comes close to making me think…” Jun 21, 14:36
sam on The End Of Law: “Social Murder? Austerity and Life Expectancy in the UK Get access Arrow David Walsh, Gerry McCartney Published: 28 November 2024…” Jun 21, 14:32
sam on The End Of Law: “From “UK Poverty Guide 2026..”, Joseph Rowntree Foundation. “Every year, we see the same groups disproportionately trapped in poverty, with…” Jun 21, 14:23
Hatey McHateface on The End Of Law: “I’m almost certain that some of the “Scotland’s Mammie” Covid TV addresses were fronted by Murrell, not Sturgeon. Think about…” Jun 21, 13:56
Hatey McHateface on The End Of Law: “I haven’t read it. Don’t imagine I ever will. There’s some quite clever people plausibly arguing that AI is already…” Jun 21, 13:46
Hatey McHateface on The End Of Law: “Fuck Morocco an aw.” Jun 21, 13:36
Jay on The End Of Law: “Nicely made point,McHateful. On another topic, have you read ‘Rise and Kill First’ by Ronen Bergman? To avoid confusion, Ruth…” Jun 21, 13:08
Hatey McHateface on The End Of Law: “Not sure if I should level the “unclean” or the “fantasist” charge at you Tommo. Probably the latter, as it…” Jun 21, 13:03
Captain Caveman on The End Of Law: “Heh! Well, I guess I’ll just have to lick my wounds and enjoy the tennis here at Queens Club, [capital…” Jun 21, 13:00
Onlooker on The End Of Law: “I do wonder how many of the ‘people’ here are either bots or paid King’s shilling-graspers, I admit.” Jun 21, 12:57
Onlooker on The End Of Law: “I see. So anybody critical of English legal sovereignty on an ostensible Scottish independence site is in the SNP. The…” Jun 21, 12:54
