We thought we might leave this here so that Scottish journalists could print it out and stick it on their monitors as a memory aid. It’s something they keep unaccountably forgetting for some reason.
You never know, it might just cheer them up a bit.
So, this appeared in the Herald today:
And that’s a problem, because it’s a complete and utter lie.
As politics wakes up from the holidays, any readers still bothering to gaze at the pages of the Scottish media could be forgiven for a crushing sense of deja vu.
In more senses than one.
Order “Welcome To Cairnstoon”, Chris’ compilation of Wings cartoons and more, here.
Below is a very interesting 13-minute chat from this afternoon’s John Beattie Show on Radio Scotland, also featuring Stuart Cosgrove (presenter of the excellent footy prog Off The Ball) and Eamonn O’Neill, who we presume is this Eamonn O’Neill.
Naturally we like it because there’s mention of Wings, which – for just about the first time we can recall on broadcast media in our four-year life – isn’t about how vile and awful we are, but the whole thing is much more wide-ranging and well worth a listen.
(The line “The media the media doesn’t like to talk about” is Beattie’s, not ours.)
The Scottish Daily Mail, which alongside its Sunday sister paper is spending the festive period engaged in an “SNP BAD!” frenzy – attacking the party over everything from foxhunting to the brutal Stalinist suppression of free speech to using taxpayers’ money to send people Christmas cards – today runs the same story across a news page, a comment column and an editorial leader:
Let’s take a closer look.
The Christmas truce on social media ended unusually early this year as Magnus Gardham, the political editor of the Herald, filed a column which had all the hallmarks of a man who’d overdone the sprouts and redirected the usual outcome of such an error out of his mouth rather than the other end of his digestive tract.
Backed up with a series of borderline-trolling tweets from his Herald colleague David Leask (who ambitiously referred to Gardham as a “genius”), the piece triggered a mild stushie on Twitter which we fully expect to see written up in tomorrow’s papers as “VILE CYBERNATS IN ABUSE STORM”, because it’s Christmas and you’ve got to fill pages with something.
Scotland’s two best-selling newspapers on Christmas Eve and Boxing Day:
We suppose we should just be grateful that they don’t publish on the day itself. The “STARVING REFUGEE BABIES RAPED BY AIDS DOGS” story* they’d doubtless lead with might put people off their turkey.
This was a brief exchange between the Scotland correspondent of the Guardian and the Political Editor of the Daily Record on Twitter last night. (The hug referred to is the one between Nicola Sturgeon, Leanne Wood of Plaid Cymru and Natalie Bennett of the Greens at one of the leaders’ debates for the May general election.)
A little vision of the future, there.
An alert reader recently decided to get a bit meta and send an FOI request to the BBC about how many FOI requests it got, and how many it responded to with its standard get-out clause that basically amounts to “None of your business, get stuffed”.
This was the response. We’ve added the percentages in red.
You just pay for it, under penalty of law. It doesn’t answer to you.
Wings Over Scotland is a thing that exists.
