Wings Over Scotland

For the sake of our blood pressure we don’t normally tune in to Radio Scotland’s weekday phone-in show, but as Lallands Peat Worrier was on it today we stayed with it for a few minutes, and found ourselves getting increasingly annoyed as presenter Kaye Adams asked caller after caller if they thought Barack Obama’s comments on independence yesterday (in so far as he actually made any) had been “off the cuff”.

We knew they hadn’t been, so we rang up just to keep the record straight.

We wanted to have Obama’s awkward, halting delivery on file anyway, so this’ll do.

There’s a considerable amount of uncertainty currently flying around on the internet with regards to Alistair Darling’s comments in an interview with the New Statesman which was published on the magazine’s website yesterday.

There seems to be no dispute that the “Better Together” leader compared Alex Salmond to dead North Korean dictator Kim Jong-Il, adding his name to the illustrious pantheon of assorted Unionist politicians and journalists who’ve likened Scotland’s democratically-elected First Minister to a series of genocidal murderers.

There is, however, something of a grey area around whether Mr Darling also accused the entire SNP of promoting “blood-and-soil nationalism” – an extremely offensive term normally used in reference to Nazi Germany, where it translated as “Blut und Boden”.

Well, let us clear that up for you. Yes, he did.

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Just for laughs, we thought we’d have a look on the BBC website this morning for some intelligent, detailed analysis of yesterday’s devolution proposals from the Conservatives. Yeah, we know. We must still be a bit drunk from last night.

Not only is there not a single mention of the Strathclyde Commission report in the headlines (which do find room to report the line-up of a book festival in Nairn coincidentally featuring a number of BBC presenters, and the hot news that Roy Keane will NOT be the next manager of Celtic, although neither he nor Celtic had ever said he would), but on digging down into the dedicated referendum section we found something more disturbing.

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This morning’s papers are already full of reports about the contents of the Strathclyde Commission report, the Conservative counterpart to Labour’s shambolic “Devo Nano” proposals. Embarrassingly for Johann Lamont, it looks as though the Tories are going to “outbid” Labour, the self-proclaimed “party of devolution”, with what are superficially greater powers for the Scottish Parliament on taxation.

And like much of the media’s coverage of the entire independence debate, the reporting to date is an insult to the intelligence of the people of Scotland.

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We’ve been toasting in the sun with the Wings Emergency Kitten most of today, readers, celebrating the fact that Wings Over Scotland now has more unique readers per month than the sales of any Scottish newspaper.

(As of May we’re reaching 253,000 people monthly, whereas the best-selling paper, the Scottish Sun, shifts 248,000 copies. It is, of course, a ridiculously unfair comparison for all sorts of reasons, but it’s still nice as a purely symbolic milestone.)

Even so, when an alert reader sent us a picture of today’s Scottish Sunday Express we wondered if we might have baked our brains a bit too much, because it carried a feature about something that we didn’t remember doing at all.

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We spend a lot of time on this site pulling the Scottish media up on its many and abysmal failings, so it’s only fair that when it occasionally gets something (largely) right we should offer it a little bit of praise and recognition.

And for once we’re not even being sarcastic when we say that, so let’s have a round of only slightly muted applause for this week’s Scottish Sun.

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The week-long media frenzy that would have surrounded the Scottish Government releasing a key set of figures about independence, only to have them immediately and pointedly disowned by their cited sources as gross distortions misrepresenting the reality by a factor of 12, doesn’t bear thinking about.

(Remind yourself of the 10 desperate days they dragged out of some spectacularly innocuous comments about Vladimir Putin and multiply that by about a thousand.)

The one-sided national embarrassment that is the Scottish media, however, has done its level best to completely bury the wholly-justified anger of Professors Patrick Dunleavy of the LSE and Robert Young of Western Ontario University.

Neither of the country’s current-affairs TV shows gave the matter more than the most cursory passing mention, nor did most of its newspapers. You’ll search in vain for a story about it in the Guardian, and the Scotsman actually managed to hide its two paragraphs of coverage deep inside pieces attacking the SNP.

A promised interview with Professor Dunleavy on “Good Morning Scotland” never materialised, but the distinguished academic DID eventually surface on Wednesday’s edition of “Newsdrive”. If you click the image above you can listen to the seven-minute slot in its entirety, and wonder just how outrageously the defenders of the Union would have to act to make the front pages of a Scottish newspaper.

Here’s an important statistic: almost 40% of people who look at an online article don’t get beyond the headline and strapline. More and more readers fall away the further down the article you get – by the time you’re just a few hundred words in, you’ve probably lost roughly 70% of people who started reading.

So we’re going to try to keep this really short.

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It’s not often that you see the same story on the front page of the i and the Financial Times. It’s even rarer – in fact, perhaps unprecedented – if that story’s about Scotland, because the otherwise-admirable mini-tabloid is barely even aware that there’s a part of the UK north of Newcastle.

(Its parent paper, the Independent, is we think unique among national UK newspapers in not even having a Scotland section, let alone a Scottish edition.)

So when it happens, you know it must be a pretty darned significant story – one which the Scottish press will be all over like a swarm of wasps at a jam-factory picnic. Right?

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Yesterday the UK government put out what was even by its standards a ludicrously hyperbolic piece of scaremongering about the costs of independence, suggesting that to set up all the governmental bodies the new state would require might come with an eye-watering price tag of £2.7 billion.

Its citing of the London School of Economics made it particularly interesting to hear what Patrick Dunleavy of the LSE actually said about the figures.

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Alert followers of our Twitter feed will have learned over recent months that we have a seriously uncanny ability to influence the outcome of football matches. Need your side to grab a couple of quick goals? Just get us to tweet “Team X looks like they couldn’t score if they played till next Thursday” and get ready to watch the net bulge.

(One day we’ll reveal the size of the bribe we took from a shady consortium of wealthy Hamilton Accies fans during the SPFL playoff against Hibs on Sunday.)

And now it looks like that talent has extended itself to newspapers.

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While we admit that it probably doesn’t look like it (because we focus on the failures), this site’s default position with the media is to assume good faith. With the exception of newspapers that have explicitly declared themselves for the Union – the Daily Mail, Express etc – we strain every possible sinew to put errors down to incompetence, laziness or lack of investigative resources rather than malicious attempts to mislead.

We’ve even been known on quite a few occasions to publicly chide overly-paranoid Yes supporters on social media for seeing conspiracies everywhere.

But then sometimes we read things like today’s leader column in the Daily Record on the subject of immigration and we wonder whether they might be right after all.

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