We tweeted this yesterday:
Increasingly, the line between satire of the Scottish media and reality is non-existent.
The Daily Record has this on its front page today.
And that’s fine. The tale of a five-figure sum of money which might (or might not) have gone missing from the accounts of Women For Independence, who’ve promptly called the police to investigate an apparent discrepancy between their donated income and their expenditure, is entirely legitimate news.
But we couldn’t help wondering something.
This is John Humphreys on the Today programme on Radio 4 earlier this week:
And there’s only one small thing wrong with that.
Of course, that particular problem is easily solved. All the SNP needs to do is decide NOT to offer an alternative, at which point one will magically be created out of thin air.
A few weeks ago, we were told by a source that BBC Scotland’s flagship weeknight current-affairs show Scotland 2015 was recording some truly shocking viewing figures, in the region of 5,000 people a night. When we sent the BBC an FOI request for the stats, it was rejected, like almost all FOIs to the Corporation are.
We also looked into trying to get the data from BARB, but they weren’t very helpful either. So the only option we had left to get any sort of idea at all was to ask in our latest Panelbase poll.
When the results came in, we understood why the BBC wanted it kept quiet.
Below is an article taken from the UK media today about the Scotland Bill.
Give it a read through, and pay attention. There’ll be a very short quiz at the end.
We saw this tweet from Scottish Conservative leader Ruth Davidson yesterday:
And we were quite confused.
We noticed this on Twitter earlier this evening:
And we thought, “Well, that sounds bad”.
Alert readers will probably already be familiar with the philosophical proposition of Schrödinger’s cat. (The less alert can click the link for a short and easy primer.) The hypothetical experiment posited by 20th-century Austrian physicist Erwin Schrödinger has entered into popular culture. But increasingly and disturbingly, it’s also becoming the guiding principle of mainstream media journalism.
Certain viewers should steel themselves at this point, because we’re about to briefly talk about football before moving on to other things later in the article. You can consider that your trigger warning. We’ll let you know when it’s over.
The lines above were issued to the press yesterday by The Rangers International Football Club plc, a football club (the clue’s in the name) formed in 2012, yet which lays claim to the history and achievements of a previous club of a similar name which was liquidated for bankruptcy the same year, having been formed in 1872.
And eagle-eyed logic fans may have spotted something of a contradiction.
Some of you may not have seen this from last night, and it needs to be seen.
Wings Over Scotland is a thing that exists.
