Wings Over Scotland

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.

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The Scottish media has worked itself into an indignant froth over the last few days about the appearance of Sputnik News – an Edinburgh-based arm of a publicly-owned, state-run Russian news agency, fronted by (among others) former Dateline Scotland and NewsShaft stars Jack Foster and Carolyn Scott.

(Any resemblance to publicly-owned, state-run national news agencies of questionable impartiality in other countries is of course entirely coincidental and totally different.)

The Sunday Herald ran a bizarre smear piece yesterday on the pair’s past fundraising initiatives for their two previous projects (which were obviously completely unrelated to Sputnik), and today’s Times has an even weirder column by Melanie Reid in which Foster and Scott are directly and startlingly compared to the Cuban Missile Crisis:

We tried, for the purposes of satire, to think of another country that played host to nuclear missiles that were controversially imposed on it by an external government, but unfortunately we couldn’t come up with anything. Sorry about that.

No, we’re not referring to the Spectator’s awful reheated whine from super-Unionist composer Sir James Macmillan, Knight Commander Of The Most Excellent Order Of The British Empire, in which he takes the audacious step of accusing some OTHER artistes of cravenly kowtowing to the establishment.

(A complaint he’s been levelling for several years in any publication that’ll listen, and which today’s piece hasn’t bothered to update with any post-2014 examples.)

We’re actually talking about this:

Because this one’s even older.

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This morning’s SNP BAD piece in the Herald has undergone a slight change in tone since we wrote about it.

We’ll just assume that a small pang of conscience overcame someone.

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There’s a story in today’s Herald about yet another SNP disaster:

Backfires? What, the fares have gone UP?

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God knows, readers, there’s almost nothing we want to write about less than either David Torrance or the Scottish Six. Just to restate our own position for the record, we couldn’t care less either way about a dedicated teatime Scottish news programme on BBC Scotland – not because it’s a bad idea but because we have no confidence that in reality it’d end up any better than the embarrassment that is Reporting Scotland, far and away the regional station’s worst current-affairs broadcast.

(Certainly now that Scotland 2016’s had the chop.)

Nevertheless, the former’s article about the latter in today’s Herald is one of the most abysmally disingenuous and badly-argued things we’ve seen in the Scottish media for quite some time, and in the absence of any more diverting news in what now seems to have reasserted itself as the traditional summer slow season, we might as well take a methodical look at it.

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WARNING: this post isn’t about football, but it will refer to football for quite a while in order to illustrate its point. Get over it or go outside for some fresh air.

Today is the opening day of the SPFL Premiership season, and will see the top-flight debut of a four-year-old club which is legally entitled under company law to use the name and trademarks of a much older one which went into liquidation in 2012 owing creditors tens of millions of pounds.

The facts of that matter are beyond any empirical dispute, but human beings are adept at arguing things which are demonstrably not true and so the truth is hotly and furiously rejected by a substantial group of people, weirdly including the club itself (even as it insists that it can’t be held responsible for the old club’s debts because it’s not the same club).

We’re not going to attempt to settle that argument here, because (a) it’s already been settled, and (b) we have nothing new to say that would remotely convince the people who’ve already steadfastly refused to acknowledge any of the proven facts.

Instead, we’re going to talk – not for the first time, sadly – about why the “debate” around “Rangers” won’t die, and what it tells us about the Scottish media.

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Have you ever wondered how you try to poison and shut down a debate and a political environment that you fear you’ve found yourself on the losing side of, readers? Well, it’s funny you should ask, because as it happens we’ve got a visiting professor – an expert authority on the subject – with us today to give us a demonstration.

Make sure you’ve got your pens and notepads ready. He’s got a very busy schedule and we can’t afford to have him here for long.

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A parable of internet abuse. Acknowledgements to Alan Moore and Frankie Boyle.

Dedicated to David Torrance, Susan Calman, Johanna Baxter and Angela Eagle.

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There’s been a statistic released in Scotland, so obviously there’s a crisis.

Anarchy on the streets can only be moments away.

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The mad explosion of news that consumed most of July has largely abated. The Tories have a new leader, Labour are settling in for an insanely destructive and bitter two-month factional war in order to (almost certainly) re-elect the same one they only elected 10 months ago, and Brexit is on hold until next year.

So with a palpable sigh of relief, the Scottish political media has been able to get back to what it does best: juvenile silly-season drivel about nothing.

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