Even by the low, low normal arithmetical standards of the Scottish media, yesterday’s Scottish Sunday Express humiliated itself with the most stupendously factually wrong articles we’ve seen in a newspaper for some time.
James Kelly on Scot Goes Pop! has already eviscerated its comically inept bumbling in detail, but we thought we’d just quickly give you a visual version.
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Tags: arithmetic failflat-out liesmisinformation
Category
analysis, comment, debunks, idiots, media, scottish politics, stats, wtf
Here’s a tweet from Fraser Nelson of the Spectator this morning:
Now, we already know that’s complete drivel for at least five reasons. But it’s not the maddest thing about the point Nelson’s trying to make.
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Category
comment, idiots, wtf
This headline appears in The Times today:
It’s an absolute lie. But that’s not the interesting thing.
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Tags: flat-out liesheadline ferretmisinformation
Category
debunks, media, scottish politics, wtf
(The GERS figures actually showed Scotland’s revenues in 2014/15 dropping by ONE PERCENT as a result of the oil price collapse. Non-oil revenues were UP by 3.2%.)
Category
comment, media, stats, wtf
Goodness gracious.
Tags: britnats
Category
culture, uk politics, wtf
Last night, MP Natalie McGarry made another heavily-qualified semi-apology to the popular abusive-tweeter enthusiast JK Rowling, because that’s how bullying works. (As far as we know McGarry has still refused Rowling’s demand that she make a sizeable donation to Rowling’s charity under threat of legal action.)
One of George Orwell’s most-quoted lines is “Journalism is printing what someone else does not want printed: everything else is public relations.”
We wonder who was trying to silence the torrent of drivel below, then.
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Category
culture, media, wtf
Without a doubt our new favourite Unionist website is this one:
And it’s not just for the snazzy badges.
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Tags: flat-out liesmisinformation
Category
comment, media, scottish politics, stats, wtf
There’s nothing unusual about reading something in the Scottish media that makes your eyes widen. But a piece we saw in the Courier earlier today stretched ours out to Clockwork Orange-like proportions.
Now that’s a pretty intriguing opening (as the bishop said to the actress). At first we took it to mean that an independent Scotland could effectively take over Britain’s EU membership in the event of a Leave vote, ending any debate about whether and when it would be admitted on its own.
But then the punchline arrived.
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analysis, comment, europe, scottish politics, uk politics, wtf
Something kept nagging at the back of our minds as we read today’s front-page lead story in Scotland On Sunday about a battle between finance secretary John Swinney and a number of Scottish councils.
And then we remembered what it was.
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Tags: hypocrisy
Category
analysis, scottish politics, wtf
Thanks to the Scottish Daily Mail, we’ve just spotted a piece by the Conservative MP Bernard Jenkin for City AM a few days ago. We had an inordinate amount of trouble getting the full article to display past the site’s incredibly over-zealous advert enforcer, so we’ve preserved it for posterity here.
There’s a gem in every paragraph. You’re going to like this one.
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comment, media, scottish politics, uk politics, wtf
This tweet mysteriously vanished from Blair McDougall’s Twitter timeline last night:
We’re not sure why, as we know that Scottish Labour love nothing more than to attack the Scottish Government (no matter how ham-fistedly) over education.
And we’re pretty sure it’s not because McDougall felt guilty about picking out only the negative aspects of what Scotland’s biggest teaching union called a “largely positive picture” of the state of Scottish education – and which the OECD itself said contained “much to be positive about” – because if there’s one thing we know for sure about Blair it’s that his conscience isn’t troubled by misleading people.
Our best guess was that even he was just too embarrassed at having made an attack line out of the fact that 20% of the country’s schools were “only” rated “satisfactory”, thereby implying that “satisfactory” status was actually in some way unsatisfactory.
In doing so, of course, he was echoing the words of his hapless leader Kezia Dugdale, who in September told the Holyrood chamber that “no parent wants a satisfactory education for their child”. Maybe McDougall just realised belatedly that he was reading from the wrong month’s script.
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comment, scottish politics, wtf
