And twirling, always twirling 277
Posted on
September 07, 2016 by
Rev. Stuart Campbell
Archive for the ‘media’
The head start 401
Posted on
August 30, 2016 by
Rev. Stuart Campbell
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.
A lack of selfie-awareness 310
Posted on
August 28, 2016 by
Rev. Stuart Campbell
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.
Lying right to your face 106
Posted on
August 28, 2016 by
Rev. Stuart Campbell
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.
Living in a world of quicksand 181
Posted on
August 26, 2016 by
Rev. Stuart Campbell
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.
At home with the Kardashians 209
Posted on
August 25, 2016 by
Rev. Stuart Campbell
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.
The kingdom of wishful thinking 233
Posted on
August 24, 2016 by
Rev. Stuart Campbell
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.
And so it begins 88
Posted on
August 24, 2016 by
Rev. Stuart Campbell
“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.
Feeling yourself disintegrate 201
Posted on
August 23, 2016 by
Rev. Stuart Campbell
“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.)
So let’s see what this worrying-sounding story actually DOES reveal.
Impartial Journalism For Dummies 205
Posted on
August 22, 2016 by
Rev. Stuart Campbell
The BBC’s most prominent politics presenter Andrew Neil, today:
There is, as there is so often, just one small problem.
Here come the drums 265
Posted on
August 21, 2016 by
Rev. Stuart Campbell
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:
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.
More phantom news 451
Posted on
August 19, 2016 by
Rev. Stuart Campbell
For several years now this site has been drawing attention to the weird phenomenon of phantom news – stories presented by the media without even a shred of supporting evidence yet treated as unquestionable empirical fact. And recently there have been more phantoms around the Scottish press than an episode of Scooby Doo.
The thing Alan Roden – who prefers intimidating ordinary members of the public by doorstepping them and vilifying them in his paper – links to in that tweet is an article on the Herald website last night. And it’s a weird article, because it’s an extensive, quote-laden story about something that doesn’t appear to have happened at all.
