It’s always a concerning state of affairs for any society when newspaper journalists appear less well-informed and less capable of intelligent analysis than their readers.
So we felt a letter published in today’s Herald deserved a wider audience.
A must-view for those of you who missed last night’s Scotland Tonight. Watch and marvel (mainly from 2m 28s) as a man falls apart in front of your eyes, reduced to a babbling, incoherent shambles by a calm, eloquent gent in a sharp tweed suit.
Our favourite bit is the desperate, plaintive “Just ask Alistair Darling!” at the end.
Just a quick one, folks. Here’s a story we touched on earlier today, that appeared in today’s Scotsman and Daily Record. (It even briefly showed up in the Herald, but was deleted faster than we could save it.) At first glance it appears to be identical in both papers, but it isn’t. In fact there’s a rather substantial difference. Can you spot it?
Yesterday saw one of the odder incidents to date in the Scottish media’s coverage of the independence debate. Both the Herald and Scotsman ran almost word-for-word-identical articles reporting the findings of a Glasgow University study into the nature of the debate on Twitter, which concluded (in line with previous research) that Yes campaigners were far more active on the social network than No ones, and that the Yes campaign was far more grassroots than its “top-down” opponent.
We were pleased to get a namecheck in both pieces, but the curious aspect was the length that the articles went to in order to provide a couple of examples of “unofficial” No advocates. It’s now over a year since we first observed the death of Unionist blogging, so it’s understandable that the study had trouble digging anything up, but the representatives they settled on boggled quite a few minds.
We were a little bemused to read in today’s Herald (and also to hear on “Good Morning Scotland”) of the appointment of Professor Jim Gallagher as an official adviser to “Better Together”. Not because we’d been in any doubt about the academic’s views on independence, but because the Herald had already identified Prof. Gallagher as the No campaign’s “Director of Research” in a referendum supplement back in December.
Indeed, the Herald article goes on to note that “Mr Gallagher has been working behind the scenes for Better Together for several months”. So today seems a pertinent moment to revisit a letter we sent after reading the supplement to Ian Stewart, the editor of The Scotsman, and to which we’re still awaiting a response.
This wasn’t online when we wrote this morning’s piece, but it is now:
These are organisations Labour should surely be on the right side of.”
(“Record View”, the Daily Record, 8 Jan 2014.)
Yesterday the Labour Party’s representatives in the Scottish Parliament voted against a motion to provide free school meals to all Scottish children in Primary 1 to Primary 3, and to increase childcare funding for two-year-olds. They did so barely 48 hours after angrily demanding that the Scottish Government provide better childcare – an issue which Labour had explicitly tied into the independence debate by using an opinion poll commissioned by the “Better Together” campaign.
Fortunately for Scots, Labour is a totally impotent force in the Scottish Parliament, and its opinions and actions there ultimately count for nothing. Thanks to the SNP’s majority, the motion passed and hungry children living in poverty will get at least one hot, nutritious meal a day, without the stigma of being marked out as poor.
But after the blanket media coverage of Labour’s calls over child welfare, you’d expect that the arithmetic of the vote would merit at least a passing mention when Scotland’s press reported the story. Wouldn’t you?
What a week it’s been for respect. Here’s today’s Telegraph:
Maybe when you’re on holiday it doesn’t count or something.
Looks like the dastardly SNP have succeeded in digging that giant trench from the Solway to the Tweed and sailing Scotland off towards its Nordic neighbours. Poor England, according to tomorrow’s Mail, is now an island.
We have a feeling, readers, that the Scottish edition won’t be carrying that headline.
Since we’re talking about The Independent today, we thought those of you who don’t follow us on Twitter or Facebook might like to see their latest editorial cartoon.
No, we’re not making that up.
The Independent is the most English newspaper in Britain. Alone among the nationals, it has neither a Scottish edition nor even a Scottish news section. And for the vast majority of the time, it acts as though Scotland simply doesn’t exist at all. (Or, perhaps, as if Scotland was already independent and therefore none of its business.)
So it’s perhaps not altogether surprising that on the rare occasions it dares venture north of Luton, it invariably makes a gigantic ham-fisted hash of it.
Wings Over Scotland is a thing that exists.
