Live No Viewers 73
Posted on
March 29, 2016 by
Rev. Stuart Campbell
From the STV debate, an alert reader spots the picture that sums up Scottish Labour.
Archive for the ‘media’
The one hundred and ten 342
Posted on
March 28, 2016 by
Rev. Stuart Campbell
Alert readers will have noticed that the Conservatives and most of the right-wing press have recently embarked on a hyperbolic campaign against the Scottish Government’s “named person” child-protection legislation. The latest assault is in today’s Daily Mail:
The shriekingly furious lead article thunders in outrage that “nearly two thirds of Scots have condemned the SNP’s state guardian scheme as an ‘unacceptable intrusion’ into family life”, which sounds like a pretty damning verdict.
It’s not until you look a little deeper that it all falls to pieces.
The state we’re in 121
Posted on
March 25, 2016 by
Rev. Stuart Campbell
Here’s a column from Kenny Farquharson in today’s tablet edition of the Times, which hasn’t made it onto the website. We don’t know if it’s in the print version.
Let’s just linger over those words for a moment.
The £5bn miracle 138
Posted on
March 24, 2016 by
Rev. Stuart Campbell
Two front pages in the same newspaper, two weeks apart.
The top image is Scotland within the UK. The bottom one is an independent Scotland.
£5 billion better off with independence? We’d call that a no-brainer.
All bad things to everyone 86
Posted on
March 23, 2016 by
Rev. Stuart Campbell
We’re very confused today.
Okay, so that’s all straightforward enough. The SNP are bad because they’re going to hit “middle Scotland” with more tax. Bunch of dangerous tax-and-spend lefties. Right?
The other kind of soaring 167
Posted on
March 21, 2016 by
Rev. Stuart Campbell
Even by the low, low normal arithmetical standards of the Scottish media, yesterday’s Scottish Sunday Express humiliated itself with the most stupendously factually wrong articles we’ve seen in a newspaper for some time.
James Kelly on Scot Goes Pop! has already eviscerated its comically inept bumbling in detail, but we thought we’d just quickly give you a visual version.
The murder of words 140
Posted on
March 16, 2016 by
Rev. Stuart Campbell
This headline appears in The Times today:
It’s an absolute lie. But that’s not the interesting thing.
The technical plural 109
Posted on
March 14, 2016 by
Rev. Stuart Campbell
A significant groundswell of opinion, perhaps:
Oddly, the Scotsman’s report on the story contains not a single further piece of data about how numerous these opponents of a second referendum are.
Louder than lovebombs 171
Posted on
March 13, 2016 by
Rev. Stuart Campbell
From today’s Scottish Sunday Express:
“Please, Scotland, stay with us” seems a long time ago, doesn’t it?
The extraordinary untruth 237
Posted on
March 11, 2016 by
Rev. Stuart Campbell
We don’t normally ask you to watch videos as long as this, readers. (Although at 4m 22s it’s still not War And Peace.) As a rule the key part of any TV discussion can be boiled down to a few seconds, but this one needs to be taken in at a bit more length.
It happened on last night’s Question Time from Dundee, and was already 10 minutes into a discussion about whether there might be a second independence referendum and what might trigger it, in particular the prospect of Scotland voting to remain in the EU in June but the rest of the UK voting to leave, dragging Scotland out forcibly.
At that point, host David Dimbleby made an inexplicable intervention, abandoning his position as supposedly neutral moderator to pluck a “fact” out of thin air with which to attack the SNP’s John Swinney. Here’s what unfolded.
Wait, what?
What are the odds? 300
Posted on
March 11, 2016 by
Rev. Stuart Campbell
BBC1’s weekly Question Time political debate shows are heavily over-subscribed. Only a couple of hundred tickets are typically available for would-be members of the studio audience, and far more than that apply to attend, so your chances of getting through the initial vetting are fairly slim. You’re especially unlikely to be selected if you’re not from the city where the show is being held, for obvious reasons.
While the group of failed Scottish Labour parliamentary candidates is, let’s say, rather larger than it used to be, it’s still a pretty select club of a few dozen people.
And if you DO make it into the QT audience, the chances of you being picked out to speak are also rather poor – not more than 1 in 10 at best, probably nearer 1 in 20.
So what happened on tonight’s edition from Dundee was quite the long shot.
The opposite of information 133
Posted on
March 10, 2016 by
Rev. Stuart Campbell
