Wings Over Scotland

The tone of coverage deployed by the Daily Express (Scottish and English editions alike) with regard to the First Minister of Scotland in recent weeks has been both bizarre and disturbing. Yesterday the paper ran this “story”:

It’s a load of gibberish, obviously. But if the FM was preparing herself for a punch-up, you could hardly blame her given what’s apparently been going on.

Read the rest of this entry →

In your media today:

Oh, right. One of THOSE days.

Read the rest of this entry →

Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz gave an interesting interview to Good Morning Scotland just after 8am today, in which he expressed a number of careful, measured and qualified views on a variety of subjects including currency.

But obviously Scottish people are much too stupid to understand stuff like that, so the BBC quickly dumbed it down for them.

The problem is that there’s a difference between simplifying and falsifying.

Read the rest of this entry →

The Scottish Mail On Sunday felt obliged this weekend to devote newsprint in what’s technically an actual newspaper to a piece of snark that might just be a new all-time low in the highly competitive barrel-scraping field of “SNP BAD”:

Half a page was given up to a bunch of sour complaints that the First Minister had built in FIVE MINUTES on her itinerary on a school visit (aimed at encouraging girls to take up traditionally male careers) for people to get selfies with her.

Stand by, folks. It actually gets worse.

Read the rest of this entry →

Dismayingly often, the thing that irritates us the most about the Unionist press lying to its readers isn’t the fact that they’re doing it, but the fact that they do it so insultingly badly. As an illustrative case in point, here’s the Sunday Times’ reliably dull-witted Scottish columnist Gillian Bowditch today:

Now, let’s be generous and ignore the honkingly stupid first paragraph, which paints a couple of exceptional bad years as a permanent status, and focus on the second one.

Read the rest of this entry →

Scottish Labour won a council by-election in Fife last night, held after the long-serving Communist Party/independent councillor Willie Clarke (who can be seen on the last page of our Charlie Hebdo feature here) stepped down due to ill health.

The successful candidate Mary Lockhart was understandably jubilant, but there were a couple of what seemed like pertinent facts missing from the local paper’s report.

Read the rest of this entry →

The new January-June 2016 sales figures for “regional” Scottish newspapers:

Aberdeen Evening Express: 27,441 copies per day (-11.3% vs Jan-Jun 2015)
Dundee Courier: 41,243 (-8.5%)
Dundee Evening Telegraph: 16,354 (-9.5%)
Edinburgh Evening News: 20,235 (-14.1%)
Glasgow Evening Times: 25,679 (-14.3%)
The Herald: 30,402 (-11.6%)
Paisley Daily Express: 4,986 (-7.4%)
The Press & Journal: 54,270 (-7.2%)
Scotland On Sunday: 19,059 (-21.1%)
The Scotsman: 20,304 (-14.6%)
Sunday Herald: 21,613 (-25.5%)

Posted without comment.

Read the rest of this entry →

One thing you can always guarantee on GERS Day is that the latest set of figures for Scotland’s devolved economy inside the UK will trigger another uncontrolled spurt of “SNP HONEYMOON OVER” articles from the nation’s dogged commentariat.

Today we’ve seen already examples (links below) from two ex-Scotsman editors, Iain Martin and Magnus Linklater, the latter popping up in the Times by way of a rather crass and unpleasant analogy involving Oswald Mosley and the Blackshirts.

And since we’d rather watch “Suicide Squad” again than spend any more time going over the arguments about GERS (and trust us, readers, we don’t say that lightly), we thought it’d be more fun if we finally got round to compiling a semi-definitive list of all the times the collective wisdom of Scotland’s media and opposition has confidently predicted the SNP’s imminent demise.

Read the rest of this entry →

“Black hole” grows by £2.4bn in the space of four minutes:

Hopefully we’ll soon have the sort of totally definitive clarity we got last time.

“CRISIS-HIT POLICE TO AXE 300 OFFICERS”, blares the front-page lead of today’s Scottish Daily Mail. (Along with some exciting Prince Harry not-news.)

“SECRET cuts to police numbers will see hundreds of officers axed as the single force faces a deepening cash crisis. The Mail can reveal controversial proposals to reduce frontline manpower – while violent and sex crimes are increasing”, it continues.

So let’s see what this worrying-sounding story actually DOES reveal.

Read the rest of this entry →

The BBC’s most prominent politics presenter Andrew Neil, today:

There is, as there is so often, just one small problem.

Read the rest of this entry →

Today’s Sunday Times didn’t bother with any subtlety in its signalling of how people should expect the Scottish media to handle next week’s GERS figures.

So we’ll just leave these here:

The limitations of GERS

The five key facts about GERS

The wishful believers

Gazing into the black hole

There’ll be nothing but repeats of all last year’s articles in the papers, so there doesn’t seem to be much point in re-writing all the rebuttals. We’d advise readers not to expect to hear any of the facts or arguments in any of the above articles aired on TV or radio discussions of the new figures either. For the sake of your blood pressure, it’s probably best to stick to old QI repeats on Dave for the next eight days.

Read the rest of this entry →