Wings Over Scotland

The Mail is incredibly still banging away at its “evil cybernats” campaign today – we make that 19 days now – with another front page lead (this time, impressively somehow managing to turn SNP MSP Joan McAlpine being the victim of acts of online sabotage into an attack on the SNP) and another “Cybernat Watch” article inside.

One passage in an editorial, however, caught our eye. (Our emphasis.)

“It is not acceptable to make personal threats and insults under the guise of exercising the right to speak openly. It is an inescapable fact that while there are trolls on both sides, the so-called cybernats are more numerous, more vocal, more vituperative and act in consort.”

An “inescapable fact”? The Mail seems to have unaccountably failed to identify its material source. Who measured these things?  Can we have a link to the study data? Is there an internationally-recognised scale of vituperativeness? Is there a shred of evidence to back up the assertion that these alleged abusers “act in consort”?

Because if the Daily Mail doesn’t come forward with the proof of these allegations, and instead just continues making insulting comments and doorstepping, frightening and vilifying innocent members of the public for posting perfectly legal comments on the internet under their own names, it’ll be hard for the people of Scotland to arrive at any other conclusion than that the paper’s reporters are a bunch of bare-faced liars as well as bullies trying to selectively intimidate and silence one side of the debate.

The Daily Record’s run a whole clutch of articles of a vaguely positive nature towards independence recently, which is nice. We assume Torcuil Crichton must be ill. But an editorial leader column today commenting on the Yes campaign’s encouraging poll figures and identifying the SNP’s social-justice policy programme as the reason had an intriguing line buried in the middle of it.

“Only Labour can win this battle for the UK and they have to run up a red flag for Scotland and sail under it. If that is a different banner from the rest of the UK, so be it.”

Hang on. What does that mean, exactly?

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Now it all makes sense.

But how will we get by without our best undercover agent? We’re in trouble now.

Well, jings, crivvens and help – so to speak – wur boabs. How did we all manage to miss this one in the Sunday Times last month? We assume it’s meant to be comic.

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We’re not sure which of The Scotsman and Murdo Fraser of the Scottish Conservatives was most confused this morning. Reporting on the second half of its intriguing ICM poll (which put the gap between Yes and No votes as low as six points), the paper publishes some data about the attitude of Scots to the EU.

Excluding don’t knows, the results provide a clear 16-point margin for Scotland remaining in Europe, at 58% to 42%. (The raw numbers put it only slightly lower, at 46 to 33.) But for some odd reason the newspaper chooses to reveal this vote of confidence under the bafflingly negative headline “A third of Scots would back exit from EU”, without even an “only” in there to reflect the implication of the stats.

Weirder still is Murdo Fraser’s reaction, though.

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…not to laugh. The Scottish Daily Mail, unperturbed by the waves of mockery, is still banging away furiously on the “cybernats!” drum today, with another front-page lead and another two-page spread inside.

The paper’s managed to rope gormless Labour MSP Kezia Dugdale into its one-sided witch-hunt, and she pens an article dramatically entitled “TWITTER AND A THREAT TO BAYONET ME” complaining of someone “recently” threatening her, although the offensive tweet in question turns out (not revealed in the piece) to be 15 months old.

The above picture is – really and truly – the story’s illustration.

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So the Daily Mail emailed us earlier in the week, all friendly-like. They wanted to chat on the phone about this whole frightful “cybernat” business or send a reporter and photographer round, but as our head doesn’t button up the back and we didn’t just sail up the Clyde on a digestive biscuit we indicated that we’d rather keep everything nice and on-the-record in case of any unfortunate accidental misquotings.

So instead, we had them send their questions in writing and we sent back some helpful replies, accompanied by a clause that we’ve found effective in dissuading newspaper hacks from using extracts out of context. Below is a list of the Mail’s questions and the answers we sent them. In bold we’ve highlighted the parts that were actually used in the article, purely for the interest of readers who might find themselves in similar situations in the future and would like to know how it works.

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It’s mainly hilarious, if we’re being honest. Today’s hysterical “unmasking” of “cybernats” (in fact a collection of perfectly normal and varied people, using the internet under their real names and mainly with photographs of themselves) by the Scottish Daily Mail as part of its ongoing “Cybernat Watch” smear campaign is like a one-stop beginner’s guide to the paper’s lurid sub-tabloid modus operandi.

But much as we chuckle, there are deeply sinister undercurrents to the article.

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Tell you what, readers – say what you like about the Daily Mail, but you certainly can’t accuse them of not really going for it once they get an idea into their heads.

These are all just from the last week or so, and there’s more to come. The paper has been going around doorstepping random pro-independence tweeters for what we presume is going to be quite a sizeable feature any day now (we declined their offer to send a hack and photographer round, but answered a few questions by email, as much for the sheer curiosity of seeing how they’d twist them as anything else).

And the “Cybernat Watch” column is now our favourite start to the day.

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The Daily Mail is proving an even more consistent source of comedy than usual of late, nowhere more so than its superb “Cybernat Watch” column (which we were delighted to find ourselves in this morning, on only its second day). Today the collection of partial, out-of-context quotes from random tweets was nestled into a bizarre piece about Labour’s shadow something, Jim Murphy.

As with most articles from the Mail’s Scottish edition it isn’t available online, but we’ve attached the text below so you can digest the full disturbing madness.

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The front page of this morning’s Telegraph.

We can’t decide which part we’re the most proud of.

Veteran readers will be aware that there are basically two types of misinformation perpetrated by the Scottish media. The rarer type is the flat-out lie, where things that are simply demonstrably untrue are presented as facts – a common example being the regular assertion by journalists that all three Unionist parties are committed to giving Holyrood new additional powers after a No vote, which was neatly skewered by Andrew Nicoll in yesterday’s Sun (image link, no paywall).

The subtler variety is when newspapers and broadcasters report true information in a misleading way, sometimes so drastically that it comes out meaning the exact opposite of what it actually means. A story today is a case in point.

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