The Big Split 472
Posted on
February 03, 2016 by
Rev. Stuart Campbell
From a Daily Record vox pop today on Scottish Labour’s tax plan.
Seems there are some things nearly everyone agrees on.
Archive for the ‘media’
Help, we need somebody 77
Posted on
February 02, 2016 by
Rev. Stuart Campbell
It’s been a fair few months since we last documented the Daily Record’s increasingly panicky attempts to save its own hide over its infamous eve-of-referendum “Vow”.
In its growing desperation, the paper bizarrely turns today to First Minister Nicola Sturgeon, demanding that SHE should be the one to fulfil a promise that the Record made specifically in order to thwart Sturgeon’s lifelong goal of independence.
A kind of goldrush 202
Posted on
February 01, 2016 by
Rev. Stuart Campbell
An alert reader directed us to an article on finance site Bloomberg today:
It’s interesting to see a business and bankers’ perspective on something that we’ve already pointed out a number of times on Wings, namely that the lower oil price has at least as many upsides as downsides.
A world full of philanthropists 364
Posted on
January 30, 2016 by
Rev. Stuart Campbell
To the astonishment of all, it turns out that JK Rowling isn’t going to sue anyone after all. Or, as the ever-reliable-and-accurate Scottish Daily Mail puts it:
(It seems needlessly churlish and picky to also point out that McGarry currently isn’t an “SNP MP”, so we won’t do that.)
Instead, the author, worth hundreds of millions of pounds, intends to try to pressure McGarry into making a donation to her childrens’ charity, Lumos, which we can only presume is happy to receive money generated by what some people might regard as intimidation bordering on blackmail.
So that’s all well and good. If you’re going to bully people, after all, it’s probably best if it’s at least for a worthy cause. Rowling was full of praise for abusive Tweeter “Brian Spanner” when he raised some money for the same charity last year by selling t-shirts mocking the loony “Scottish Resistance” campaign group.
But not all charitable donations attract such gratitude.
Hullo, hullo, we are the bully boys 212
Posted on
January 29, 2016 by
Rev. Stuart Campbell
On the rare occasions when this site discusses football, and in particular if we mention the three-year-old Championship club known as “Rangers”, we get complaints on two grounds: one, that football has nothing to do with politics, and two, that we risk alienating supporters of the club who also back independence, of which there are unquestionably a significant number.
The second complaint is one we’ve dealt with in detail here. But the first one is more important. Because whether you’re talking about the original club which died in 2012 and was put into liquidation or the new one currently challenging for promotion to the top division for the first time, “Rangers” is a totem of the Unionist establishment in Scotland, and the way it’s treated by the media tells us at least as much about that establishment and that media as any amount of political journalism.
The tweets you won’t read 361
Posted on
January 28, 2016 by
Rev. Stuart Campbell
Social media amused itself briefly tonight over a spat between former SNP MP (now independent) Natalie McGarry and children’s author and hedge enthusiast JK Rowling.
It started like this:
And then some stuff happened.
The bargain of evil 147
Posted on
January 28, 2016 by
Rev. Stuart Campbell
The Scottish Daily Mail’s front page lead today is so galactically despicable that it’s easy to overlook another story that it bundles in with the same “SNP BAD” attack.
While excoriating Dr Philippa Whitford for having the sheer shameless gall to help save women’s lives in her holidays, the alleged newspaper also devotes a page-high article to an attack on another Nat MP, George Kerevan, for employing his wife.
The headline, however, omits a rather key fact.
The scum at the bottom of the sewer 201
Posted on
January 28, 2016 by
Rev. Stuart Campbell
As it happens, one of the things that we’ve been occupying ourselves with during the current news drought is pulling together a post called “The SNPBAD Files”, collecting all the desperate smear and innuendo of the Unionist press as it systematically tries to discredit every one of the 56 SNP MPs elected last May.
Until last night we hadn’t been sure which had been the most pathetically dismal. Was it the MP who still did a few haircuts in his barber shop on Saturday afternoons? The one who bought a derelict London house many years before he was an MP, renovated it with his own hands and now sometimes stays there when working at Westminster, rather than charging expenses to the public for accommodation? Or perhaps the one who tweeted that he was opposed to the concept of monarchy, the foul monster?
Now, though, we have a clear winner.
The headline is always a lie 133
Posted on
January 27, 2016 by
Rev. Stuart Campbell
In a cunning meta-twist which simultaneously proves and disproves its own claim, the headline above is itself a lie. It’s of course not true that every single headline you read in a newspaper is absolutely false.
It is, however, a pretty good rule of thumb.
Slow news month 268
Posted on
January 26, 2016 by
Rev. Stuart Campbell
We’re not saying there isn’t a lot going on at the moment, but today’s Daily Record actually devotes a page to telling women when to change their pants.
Imagine our surprise 112
Posted on
January 25, 2016 by
Rev. Stuart Campbell
Referendum day, 18 September 2014:
Let’s hit the fast-forward button again.
Think of another number 167
Posted on
January 24, 2016 by
Rev. Stuart Campbell
Normally when the BBC’s Andrew Neil asks a politician to put a figure on one of their policy proposals the interviewee should be wary, because a trap is about to be sprung.
For some reason that didn’t happen today.
