The Scottish independence debate is characterised by so many gigantic lies from the No camp and the media (no pound, international outcast, bankrupt, cataclysm, etc etc) that there’s rarely time to pick up on all the small, casual, offhand ones that also litter the news-stands and the airwaves and poison any hope of intelligent discourse.

So let’s make an effort with one, just by way of example.
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Tags: flat-out liesheadline ferret
Category
analysis, media, scottish politics
Can we please buy the Telegraph a new picture to depict “Scottish people”?
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Category
media, pictures, scottish politics
Alert readers will be familiar with a phenomenon we often like to highlight in these pages – that of the dramatic newspaper headline which rapidly turns into something completely different by the time you read the text of the story.

There’s an especially fine example in today’s Telegraph.
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Tags: headline ferretproject fear
Category
comment, media, scottish politics
We don’t exactly have high expectations when it comes to the Daily Mail.

But a piece in today’s edition is despicable even for them.
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Tags: smears
Category
comment, media, scottish politics, scum
… they think you are.

(UK edition on the left, Scottish edition on the right.)
Tags: hypocrisy
Category
comment, media, scottish politics
The Scottish media displays such a remarkable uniformity of thought when it comes to the independence debate that you’d think it’d be the easiest thing in the world for them to at least all get their story straight when they launch a smear campaign against a prominent Yes figure.

That, however, would presuppose that they weren’t also incompetent.
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Tags: smears
Category
comment, media, scottish politics
“Sod it”, we thought, “let’s compile a list after all“.

Clearly we’re not impartial judges of how the No campaign is being conducted. To assess its performance with any degree of fairness, we must instead take the widest possible sample of opinion from those on its own side. Here goes, then.
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Tags: the positive case for the union
Category
comment, media, reference, scottish politics
We’ve just been watching the latest of the BBC’s big independence referendum debates, and we’d like the hour of our life we wasted back, please.

It wasn’t as though it was the worst we’ve seen by a long chalk. It was, if nothing else, relatively even-tempered, helped by some firm moderation by James Cook. Lesley Riddoch was as reliable, sensible and on top of the facts as she always is (although even we’re starting to get fed up of hearing her go on about Norway all the time). And while Brian Wilson is a dishonest and bilious wee nyaff, he does have the one huge saving grace that he isn’t Anas Sarwar.
But tell us this, readers – what was the point of it all?
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Tags: debates
Category
comment, media, scottish politics
Readers who may have been alarmed that the Scotsman hadn’t run any Michael Kelly columns for a while can breathe a sigh of relief this morning, as the role of “clueless idiot blithely spouting inflammatory and wrong-headed drivel about sectarianism and independence” is clearly in safe hands.

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Category
comment, disturbing, idiots, media, scottish politics
We didn’t do a stats post at the start of April (still just under 4m pageviews a month, if you’re curious) but when someone tweeted these figures this morning we thought they were worth a wee toot, because they’re more than just nice news for us.

They’re from the independent web-traffic analysis site Alexa.com, and they detail the relative rankings for the seven biggest dedicated Scottish politics sites on the web.
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Category
comment, media, navel-gazing, scottish politics, stats
With the Scottish Parliament on a two-week break, it appears to have fallen to the Telegraph to take on the role of Johann Lamont this Thursday.
Scottish Labour’s regional manager has recently been under the curious impression that the most pressing issue on the minds of the people of Scotland is the fine detail of the First Minister’s hotel bill during a trip to America to promote the Ryder Cup in 2012, and the Telegraph seems equally obsessed.

But that dramatic splash isn’t quite what it seems.
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Tags: misinformationsmears
Category
analysis, media, scottish politics