Wings Over Scotland

Please give as generously as you can, readers. It’ll really upset the Daily Record.

Click the image to go to the 2015 Wings fundraiser site.

Can you find the Daily Record’s prominent Smith Commission correction on the front page of its website today, readers? Take your time – it’s on there, we promise you.

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Sometimes a picture can say a lot more than a thousand words. Below, to the left of the vertical red line on our graphic, you can see the prominence that the Daily Record gave to their lies about “The Vow” and the Smith Commission report, which were found to be false by the Independent Press Standards Organisation.

On the right of the line, at the same scale, is the prominence they gave to the truth.

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Well, now, there’s a thing.

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The comical furore about The Nurse Who Definitely Isn’t An Actress shows no signs of making sense any time soon.

24 hours and several demented pages of hysterical tabloid shrieking later, we’re still not sure whether a No activist and Labour supporter from Clackmannanshire is called Suzanne Duncan (as “Better Together” called her until at least June last year) or “Suzanne Hunter” (as the Daily Record calls her), though a bit of Facebook detective work suggests the latter.

We do at least seem to have cleared up her employment history, as the Daily Record has now very quietly and subtly changed its article of last night, which claimed she’d worked for eight years at a hospital that’s only been open for five.

But a whole bundle of other questions remain unanswered.

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You can never accuse the Scottish media of being knowingly underhysterical.

Tonight the Daily Record snuck out its semi-apology for telling the Scottish people the biggest lie we’ve seen on the front page of a newspaper since its parent the Mirror published fake pictures of soldiers urinating on Iraqi prisoners.

You can tell they’re not awfully pleased we forced them to make that “correction” by reporting the lie to the Independent Press Standards Organisation, because they even reference it in the editorial above.

Speaking of which – well, heck, where do we even start?

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The last few days have not been proud ones for the Scottish media. Following the Daily Record’s humiliation at the hands of the independent press standards body over the Smith Commission, we don’t see this letter from the chair of the Scottish Prison Officers Association in today’s Scotsman (and the article in question doesn’t appear to have been corrected), so it looks like we’re going to have to print it here.

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Alert readers should by now have spotted our story about the findings of the Independent Press Standards Organisation with regard to the Daily Record’s “The Vow Delivered” front page from last November. The paper was found by IPSO to have been guilty of “significantly misrepresent[ing] the fiscal consequences of the Smith Commission’s recommendations”, and ordered to publish a correction.

IPSO also noted in its judgement that the Record had amended the online version of the article accordingly. But that’s only partly true.

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The Independent Press Standards Organisation has delivered its verdict on the Daily Record’s coverage of the Smith Commission recommendations on 27 November 2014, after we lodged a complaint with the watchdog body.

We attach its findings below. (Emphases ours.)

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One of the main strengths of the No campaign in the independence referendum was that it had an efficient production line for “truthiness”. Best known as a concept from the US satirical TV show The Colbert Report, the term means things that SOUND as if they’re true, and which people will therefore be inclined to believe, even though they fall apart under any factual scrutiny.

One good example is shown above. The facts on the graphic are individually true, and convey – without ever actually saying so explicitly – the message that Scotland is subsidised by the UK to the tune of £7.6bn a year.

But that message, despite being implied through exclusively true facts, ISN’T true, because the extra “spending” on Scotland is actually borrowing, which Scotland has to pay back. The real truth is that the figures on the left are accurate, and that Scotland heavily subsidises the rest of the UK.

But to walk someone through even the basic explanation of that is quite complicated and involved, whereas the original message is punchy and SOUNDS true. The simpler something is the more people want to believe it, so the implicit lie on the graphic is difficult to dislodge from their minds once it’s in there.

(It works especially well if the media is overwhelmingly on the side of those creating the misleading impression, because they can count on the fact that the mainstream press won’t run any analysis pointing out the flaws in the argument, and the only people who’ll ever encounter the explanation are those who actively seek it out.)

Truthiness, then, is a very powerful tool.

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One of the compensations of living in England (from the perspective of editing a website about Scottish politics) is that you get a much clearer picture of how English people – who make up 85% of the UK electorate, and as such in practice determine who the government is – see the country’s political leaders.

For those of you who don’t, here’s Charlie Brooker – a man who’s no fan of the Tories by any stretch of the imagination – casting a weary and exasperated eye over Ed “these strikes are wrong” Miliband on last night’s Weekly Wipe.

In our experience it’s a pretty accurate snapshot of how the hapless Labour leader is regarded by most left-leaning people down on this side of the border. You’ll need to have seen the rest of the episode to get the “Schofield!” joke.

The abusive Facebook comments recently directed at Labour MP Margaret Curran and highlighted in a piece on the STV website today make us sigh. Not only are they horrible but they’re counter-productive, in every sense of the term – they’re not going to change Curran’s mind about anything by yelling at her, and they feed a narrative about “vile cybernats” that the media is all too eager to gleefully perpetuate.

So let’s make something clear from the off: shut up, idiots. You’re not helping.

But then let’s tell the rest of the story.

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