BBC Northern Ireland website, 2 May 2014:
Lord Trimble on “Good Morning Scotland”, 3 May 2014 (31m 30s):
Whoops, eh? Oddly, while the original story is still on the BBC NI website, we can’t seem to find one reporting the correction anywhere, even though Lord Trimble spoke to GMS more than eight hours ago. We’re sure it’ll be along any minute now.
Because this is how a state broadcaster does balanced, impartial reporting.
Now some revision notes to help you.
Just magnificent work from the Daily Mail today.
Really only a couple of tiny quibbles.
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.
Can we please buy the Telegraph a new picture to depict “Scottish people”?
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.
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.
… they think you are.
(UK edition on the left, Scottish edition on the right.)
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.
“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.
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?
Matthew Norman in the Independent, 15 April 2014:
We could hardly have put it better. Long may it continue.
Wings Over Scotland is a thing that exists.
