Those of you who read our post of earlier today probably didn’t feel there was anything ambiguous going on in it. When Ruth Davidson intervened in an election debate to protest that the chair, the BBC’s Louise White, was being unfair to Nicola Sturgeon, it was pretty obvious who she meant, and White’s response removed any doubt.
Which makes this eye-witness account of the event, spotted by an alert reader this afternoon, odd in several ways.
Let’s count them up.
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comment, media, scottish politics
We were rather gobsmacked, readers, when we tuned into this morning’s BBC Radio Scotland phone-in at 9am. Ostensibly discussing the promotion of “Rangers” to the Premiership, presenter Louise White adopted the most astonishingly, openly partisan and aggressive approach we’ve ever heard from a host on the state broadcaster (which is no small feat), on the subject of whether the club was a new one or not.
Callers were harangued, interrupted and hustled on for daring to suggest the truth. It was a jaw-dropping display of disregard for not only impartiality but basic journalistic regard for the plain, uncontestable facts of the matter.
But don’t panic, football-haters. This post is about something else.
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audio, media, scottish politics
Goes to the BBC, for this cracker on Friday.
That is some arch satire right there, Auntie. Well done.
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comment, media, scottish politics
When we ran this story on Monday, some of the press got rather upset with us. Even though we’d linked to the full data tables published on the ComRes site, Scottish Daily Mail political editor Alan Roden, for example, huffily tweeted a link to a cropped table suggesting that the real sample size was higher.
And as it turned out, it was.
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Tags: misinformation
Category
analysis, media, scottish politics, stats
From the STV debate, an alert reader spots the picture that sums up Scottish Labour.
Category
comment, media, scottish politics
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.
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Tags: arithmetic failflat-out liesmisinformation
Category
comment, debunks, media, missing context, scottish politics
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.
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comment, idiots, media, scottish politics
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.
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comment, media, scottish politics
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?
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analysis, comment, media, scottish politics
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.
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Tags: arithmetic failflat-out liesmisinformation
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analysis, comment, debunks, idiots, media, scottish politics, stats, wtf
This headline appears in The Times today:
It’s an absolute lie. But that’s not the interesting thing.
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Tags: flat-out liesheadline ferretmisinformation
Category
debunks, media, scottish politics, wtf
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.
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investigation, media, scottish politics
