Over the last few days, as most of Scotland’s media has focused on hysterical smear stories and outright lies, we’ve been digging around trying to uncover the truth about events around and leading to the closure of the Forth Road Bridge.
Here’s what we’ve got so far.
The Scottish Mail on Sunday’s shock-horror Forth Road Bridge story today is also accompanied by an editorial leader. And if the main article was a piece of bare-faced deception, it’s got nothing on the opinion piece.
We’ve lost count of how many times we’ve drawn people’s attention to the necessity of sticking with newspaper articles right to the end if you don’t want to be horribly misled by eye-catching headlines. But it never hurts to have another example.
If you only read the start of today’s Scottish Mail On Sunday “bombshell” on the Forth Road Bridge (the left side of the picture above), you might come to a very alarming conclusion. But if you get all the way through it, to the paragraphs we’ve highlighted in red and enlarged on the right-hand side of the image, you’ll discover the truth.
It’s probably time we had a series of these. So here’s #1.
scandal (noun) – a situation where no known crime has been committed and nobody has been interviewed by the police, yet which apparently contrasts in some way with other situations about which the exact same applies.
(Can often by identified by presence of Scottish Labour MPs/MSPs describing claims of entirely legal activity as “very serious allegations”.)
On Wednesday the Daily Record ran this story:
It didn’t have to wait long for the “questions” to be answered.
The meme of the week among the Unionist media and politicians is once again that the SNP is a sinister Borg-like organisation where independent thought is outlawed.
Bewilderingly, this evening Labour MSP Neil Findlay bitterly tweeted a complaint that all of the SNP’s elected members apparently agreed with his own position on bombing Syria, the vile swine that they are. (Presumably he’d prefer if some of them voted with the Tories just for the sake of it.) But he’s not alone.
This is the lead Politics story in morning’s Herald:
And, y’know, we’re fairly confident that’s true.
Chris Deerin in this morning’s Daily Mail:
That’s okay, Chris. We’re embarrassed that you’re Scottish too.
We were considering having a day off today, readers. There’s absolutely nothing of any note happening in Scottish politics, and the papers have been reduced to scraping up all manner of barely-reheated leftover dregs to fill their pages.
But then someone drew our attention to something in Scotland On Sunday about the ongoing Women For Independence fiasco, and we were too annoyed to let it lie.
For reasons which defy all known science, John McTernan remains the first number on the BBC’s speed-dial list when they need a commentator to represent Labour views. It’s a remarkable editorial decision, given that McTernan despises the party’s current leadership almost beyond words, and it doesn’t seem too fond of him either.
But on today’s Good Morning Scotland, McTernan really kicked it up a notch.
We tweeted this yesterday:
Increasingly, the line between satire of the Scottish media and reality is non-existent.
Wings Over Scotland is a thing that exists.
