Wings Over Scotland

Nobody could ever accuse the Scottish press of underpromoting its grievances – alert readers will still recall, for example, the long procession of articles with near-identical content in the Daily Mail last year about SNP MPs and their “second jobs”. For 2016, though, the media’s obsessive repeating of the exact same story every few weeks has manifested itself over Nat members’ expenses.

So let’s take a quick look.

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Can be half-full or half-empty. Neither of the stories below is untrue.

Readers can make their own judgements on the Scottish Daily Mail’s agenda.

Even seasoned and cynical observers of the Scottish opposition and press such as ourselves, readers, have been rubbing our eyes in startled disbelief this week at the spectacular about-face performed by the aforementioned parties with regard to the Scottish Government’s £10bn Chinese investment “deal” that was never an actual deal, and which may or may not have collapsed.

But today’s Times just about boggled our minds completely.

Well, who could disagree with that? Who would suggest otherwise?

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There are three separate articles in today’s Sunday Times on the same subject, all containing the same information, of which the below is the most concise.

So let’s recap the events, shall we?

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Yesterday we drew attention to a disgracefully untrue claim made by the leader of the Ruth Davidson No Surrender To A Second Referendum Party at the day’s FMQs.

Davidson had attempted to pass off the personal views of just THREE members of the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors as representing the official position of the august and 125,000-strong body. It’s the sort of bare-faced lie we’re sadly accustomed to hearing from opposition leaders in the chamber, but it was also an illustration of a much wider and depressingly-growing phenomenon.

Let’s learn about it together.

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We were hugely excited earlier on today to receive news of a long-hoped-for team-up between two of our very favourite people on the internet: catastrophically thick Daily Express hack Siobhan McFadyen and popular lawsuit enthusiast JK Rowling.

What we hadn’t expected was a starring role.

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Many readers spotted a particularly repellent article in the Daily Express this week, penned by its clueless and poisonous hack Siobhan McFadyen.

McFadyen, who rather uncharacteristically failed to insert any violent language into a headline about the First Minister, instead leapt eagerly onto an artificial furore around the actions of Gregg Brain, the Australian father battling his family’s deportation from the Highlands by the Home Office, at last week’s SNP conference.

(Their case is so outrageous that even the Daily Mail and David Coburn have joined the fight to have the family be allowed to stay.)

We got an email from Gregg Brain about how the story had come into being, and (with his permission) we thought you might like to see the exchange which took place between him and Siobhan McFadyen, with the purposes of illustrating how the press distorts, perverts and selectively omits quotes in order to mislead.

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An article by Nick Cohen in the Spectator last night fairly had social media ablaze with a heady brew of anger and mockery.

It’s the most extraordinary outpouring of deranged, spittle-flecked arsewash we’ve seen outside of a Daily Express comment thread in a very considerable time, and it merits attention solely because we think it might have broken a world record for the number of empirical falsehoods contained in an article in a respectable media outlet.

Get your clickers out, readers. You’re going to need a fast trigger finger.

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We had a bit of a debate at the weekend with ITV’s generally pretty decent Scotland correspondent Peter Smith, after he tweeted this:

It wasn’t the curious choice of picture we objected to, nor the fact that the £14.8bn figure is a notional sum which is totally meaningless in the context of an independent Scotland (because it represents a vague estimate of the disaggregated finances of a Scotland that’s inside the UK and subject to UK government policy choices).

Nor was it even the implication that a £14.8bn “black hole” was an inherent permanent feature of the Scottish economy rather than an unusually bad year.

What chafed with us was the idea that it was somehow Nicola Sturgeon’s fault.

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Here’s David Mundell on Sunday Politics earlier today:

It’s a pretty uncomfortable time. But it could have been a lot worse.

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There was a rather comforting predictability about the headlines the Scottish media greeted the first day of the SNP conference in Glasgow with.

Unsurprisingly, the Express’ lead story was a piece of fabricated drivel based on alleged quotes from an unnamed source claiming that the Scottish Government would resign in order to force an election and win a mandate that it already has.

(The SNP’s manifesto this May, on which it won a third landslide election victory in a row, clearly reserved the right to call a second referendum should there be a serious material change in circumstances, explicitly citing the Brexit scenario as an example.)

The Daily Mail, meanwhile, puffed up a load of entirely fact-free press-release foaming from some Tory list MSP nobody’s ever heard of into “news”, in the process somehow managing to twist the economic consequences of the Brexit vote caused by his own party into a bewilderingly illogical attack on Scottish independence.

Both articles are essentially the sort of comedy pastiches of terrible journalism one might create as a cautionary example in a media studies degree course, so we’ll waste no more of your time on them. The Herald’s piece, though, is at least marginally more interesting.

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