Wings Over Scotland

Newsnet Scotland this morning attacks some comments by BBC presenter James Naughtie in which he remarks disapprovingly on the aesthetic state of Princes Street in Edinburgh. To be honest, we’re with the Beeb’s man on this one – as documented by the splendid Facebook page Lost Edinburgh, the capital’s main thoroughfare is a living catalogue of grotesque crimes against architecture, and the additional havoc wreaked on it by years of needless tram works doesn’t need any detailing here.

The piece does reveal something much more interesting, though.

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We haven’t bothered covering the latest confected anti-independence scare from a clearly bored political media before now, because it’s such a weak effort that in the interests of at least a vague impression of balanced journalism they haven’t been able to avoid undermining it themselves, without needing our help.

But hey, there’s not much happening this afternoon.

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A particularly alert reader contacted us this morning with an observation so subtle it had totally escaped us, even though we’d seen both the things in question.

On last night’s BBC News at Six, the lead story – taking up over six minutes of the 30-minute show – was a steep 4.1% rise in English rail fares. The in-depth piece explicitly noted (at 5m 45s) that Scottish rail users would have a lower rise, saying “Passengers in Scotland will be better off, with season tickets capped at the rate of inflation” and also noting that no rises were planned in Northern Ireland and the decision in Wales was still to be made.

Reporting Scotland, immediately afterwards, took a different angle.

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In so far as there’s any actual reasoning or hard data supporting the Scotsman’s front-page lead story today at all, it’s when the American pundit Nate Silver claims that “Historically, in any Yes or No vote in a referendum, it’s actually the No side that tends to grow over time, people tend not to default to changing the status quo.”

Shall we just check whether that does indeed “tend” to be true, readers?

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We had a listen to Radio Scotland this morning again. We only caught the end of Good Morning Scotland, but we were still in time to catch them cramming in a piece on today’s comedy Scotsman headline about American psephologist Nate Silver and his vague, generalised comments about polling.

With an absolutely straight face (so far as you can tell on radio, anyway), the GMS presenter asked Silver for his view on “how well the media handles statistics”, while carefully steering the discussion in such a way that neither Silver nor fellow live guest Professor John Curtice had any opportunity to refer to the Panelbase poll commissioned by this site and published last week.

(We have no idea if either of them would have had any desire to, but the presenter’s questions carefully closed off any avenues which might have offered the chance.)

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(No, that’s not a reference to David McLetchie, who was by all accounts a very decent chap and a sad loss to the world of Scottish politics, whatever your persuasion.)

We’ve made a couple of slight changes to this front cover from tomorrow’s Scotsman. Amazingly, neither of them is the headline story. That one, hilariously, is all real.

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There’s one last bit of data from our poll that we haven’t revealed the results of yet. That’s because, unlike the rest of the survey, this one absolutely WAS a leading question. We asked it partly to satirise the ridiculously slanted nature of those used in some “Better Together” polls, such as this one, but also to make a more serious point.

If you’re looking forward to Wednesday’s game at Wembley, this one’s for you.

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The Scottish media has adopted a uniform silence over the results of last week’s Panelbase poll. We can simply accept that, or we can stand up and challenge it.

The BBC is funded by a compulsory tax, enforced by law. You pay for it to serve you. If you think it’s been abdicating its duty, why not ring BBC Radio Scotland’s phone-in show “Call Kaye” (presented by stand-in Louise Smith) this morning from 8.50am – lines actually open at 8am – and let them know how you feel about it?

By phone: 0500 92 95 00
By text: 80295
By email: callkaye@bbc.co.uk

Please be polite. If you call but don’t get on, or your text or email isn’t used, please tell us in the comments section below. (In the case of text or email, include a copy.)

The crowdfunded opinion poll this site commissioned from Panelbase last week was a wide-ranging one which covered numerous aspects of the independence debate in some depth. We had to break up our reporting into several pieces to keep it a manageable read. Here, however, is a quick summary of the top ten major findings.

The full data tables can be downloaded directly from Panelbase via this link.

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When we commissioned our poll, we were about 50/50 in terms of whether the mainstream media would cover it. When the results came in, we cautiously shifted to 60/40 in favour. No matter how piqued the press was about this site’s scrutiny of it for the last year and a half, we reasoned, these results were dynamite and surely couldn’t be ignored by any journalist with a shred of conscience or dignity.

Who would have thought that we, of all people, could be guilty of so over-estimating the integrity and professionalism of Scotland’s newspapers and broadcasters?

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A series of super-short snippets from our splendid survey.

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VOTERS WHO EXPRESS ANY OPINION ON MEDIA BIAS

Men: 60%
Women: 37%

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