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Bad wolf baying 268

Posted on December 26, 2015 by

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.

gardhambad

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.

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Category comment, media, scottish politics

Tidings of comfort and joy 98

Posted on December 26, 2015 by

Scotland’s two best-selling newspapers on Christmas Eve and Boxing Day:

tidings

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.

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Category comment, media

To the bitter end 309

Posted on December 23, 2015 by

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.)

brooksclegg

A little vision of the future, there.

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Category comment, media, scottish politics

Transparency and accountability 412

Posted on December 18, 2015 by

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.

bbcfois

You just pay for it, under penalty of law. It doesn’t answer to you.

Category investigation, media

The Pish Gallop 133

Posted on December 15, 2015 by

We’ve spoken a number of times before on this site about the “gish gallop” or “swarm of wasps” debating technique, in which a person attempts to bury their opponent under such an overwhelming tsunami of false, misleading or nonsensical claims in a short space of time that they can’t possibly debunk it all.

The Urban Dictionary gives an example of the form:

gishgallop

Faced with such a rushing torrent of drivel, it’s almost impossible for an opponent to know where to start in order to begin to even scratch the surface (if you can scratch a torrent). And that brings us directly to Severin Carrell’s article in today’s Guardian.

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Tags:
Category analysis, comment, debunks, media, scottish politics

Another Amazing Collapsing Story 87

Posted on December 15, 2015 by

So this sounds pretty bad, right?

bilston

We imagine chaos and mayhem reigned on the streets.

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Category comment, media, scottish politics

The Forth Road Bridge FAQ 268

Posted on December 14, 2015 by

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.

frb

Here’s what we’ve got so far.

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Tags:
Category analysis, debunks, history, investigation, media, scottish politics

Lie by lie 195

Posted on December 13, 2015 by

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.

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Category analysis, debunks, media, scottish politics

The trick is to keep reading 74

Posted on December 13, 2015 by

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.

scomailfrb

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.

Tags:
Category comment, media, scottish politics

You can do it when you try 20

Posted on December 10, 2015 by

Evidently the Daily Record actually IS capable of fixing dodgy stories:

recordcarmichaelv

We wonder why they still haven’t done it here.

Tags:
Category comment, media, scottish politics

The Scottish Media Dictionary 88

Posted on December 07, 2015 by

It’s probably time we had a series of these. So here’s #1.

boswell

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”.)

Tags:
Category comment, media, scottish politics

An absence of clarity 307

Posted on December 04, 2015 by

On Wednesday the Daily Record ran this story:

mcgarrysyria

It didn’t have to wait long for the “questions” to be answered.

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Category media, scottish politics

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