Wings Over Scotland

We reported last night on the mealy-mouthed semi-correction the Daily Telegraph has finally been forced to grudgingly publish with regards to its incompetent and inaccurate creation of the “Memogate” scandal. The paper – we’re loath to prefix it with the word “news” – has now suffered the full weight, such as it is, of the press regulator IPSO, and will not have to answer any further for its actions.

And that just leaves us with the source.

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At 10 o’clock on a Sunday night, three months after publishing the original falsehood, the Daily Telegraph has finally quietly pushed out the sort-of admission that it told a lie before the general election about the First Minister of Scotland, Nicola Sturgeon, wanting David Cameron to remain as UK Prime Minister – a claim intended to damage her party politically in the aforementioned election.

The toothless press watchdog IPSO has allowed the Telegraph to merely publish its adjudication by way of correction. No apology is offered to the First Minister, and the Telegraph can’t quite bring itself to concede that its facts were wrong, even though they’ve now been denied by every single party to the incident – Ms Sturgeon, the French ambassador, the French Consul-General and the former Secretary of State for Scotland who leaked a memo about their meeting to the press, Alistair Carmichael.

(More on him in a few hours, incidentally.)

Such, we must apparently accept, is justice for the British media.

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We’re not due a traffic post this month, so we’ll just leave this here.

(From a new Panelbase poll. More findings coming soon.)

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We’ll never tire of documenting the Daily Record’s increasingly panicked attempts to get David Cameron to enact the Record’s dodgy promise of last September and save it from having to answer for the pup it sold Scotland.

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The Daily Record has a major editorial in today’s edition bleating piteously about the way David Mundell and the Conservative government have – to everyone’s complete and utter astonishment, except not so much – ignored the wishes of almost all the MPs elected by the Scottish people just two months ago and blocked every single amendment to the Scotland Bill.

The picture above, by alert reader Neil Hepburn, seems to sum the situation up.

Two nights of political debate on the BBC:

Six unionists, two nationalists. What’s that all about, then?

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In today’s Scotsman, Peter Jones makes the case for why an independent Scotland would have been plunged into the same crisis currently affecting Greece (and making the case along the way for why George Osborne’s austerity is inevitable and we should just shut up and accept it).

He insists strenuously throughout the article that he’s doing no such thing and is simply highlighting the flaws in the idea of a currency union between Scotland and the rUK, but to anybody who actually reads the article, it’s patently obvious that that’s exactly what he’s doing.

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Here’s the Times (Scotland edition) last Wednesday:

A lot has happened since then, of course.

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STV’s notorious quisling correspondent Stephen “Stevo” Daisley has an interesting piece today about the latest manufactured “cybernat” shock-horror outrage being punted by the Daily Mail (although curiously, the major “CYBERNAT WEB OF HATE!” exposé they promised readers would be published on Thursday is yet to materialise).

Daisley’s column makes some valid points about how the SNP could distance itself from the most extremist elements of its online support, but with one important flaw – it overlooks a crucial factor driving internet rage, and as a result its recommendations would only actually make the situation worse.

But fear not, gentle and sensitive reader. Conveniently, there’s an easy solution.

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On Wednesday we highlighted a curious outbreak of mass hysteria in the Scottish press, when a whole clutch of its newspapers suddenly and inexplicably jumped on a six-month-old story that had been comprehensively debunked at the time and hadn’t become any more true.

The story was swiftly proven to be complete rubbish all over again, and some of the papers printed grudging and much less prominent pieces admitting it was nonsense (all gallantly blaming their source, some Buckingham Palace flunky gone rogue, rather than their own failure to check the facts).

And then things got weird.

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We’ve noted on more than one occasion that the spectacular SNP surge since the referendum appears to have completely unhinged much of the Scottish and UK press. Having pumped out a vast avalanche of hysterical coverage which utterly failed to stop the Scottish electorate returning 56 SNPs out of 59, the papers have responded to the rebuff by simply turning the volume up.

But even by those standards, today has been special.

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