The right thing to do 118
Posted on
March 22, 2018 by
Rev. Stuart Campbell
The asymmetric war 614
Posted on
March 20, 2018 by
Rev. Stuart Campbell
We’re at the halfway point of our 2018 fundraiser, and the all-sources total so far is a thumpingly impressive £103,266 in just two weeks. But while that’s a tremendous sum, it’s sobering too.
Firstly because with an average monthly readership of nearly 304,000 people it comes to an average contribution of slightly under 30p per reader. As with most crowdfunded ventures, fewer than 1% of the site’s users have actually backed it financially so far.
And secondly because for perspective, the average Scottish adult – independence supporters included – sends the BBC about £72 a year. (£323m from 4.5m adults.)
While obviously a minority of folk do boycott the licence fee, that still means that the average Wings reader gives the BBC 240 times as much money every year as they give Wings to fight it.
And as well as its own output, which is hugely financially incentivised in favour of the Union, the BBC is now using your money to directly fund Scottish newspapers hostile to independence by paying them to hire more reporters.
(It’ll then also massively amplify those hostile voices by featuring them on multiple daily “papers review” shows from which online media with readerships many times bigger are arbitrarily excluded, enabling the anti-independence outlets to dictate the political news agenda every day without having to sell a single copy.)
So, y’know, it’s a tough job.
Plenty more fish in the sea 308
Posted on
March 19, 2018 by
Rev. Stuart Campbell
We’ve been scouring our picture archives all afternoon for something more surprising than the fact that the UK government has screwed over the Scottish fishing industry again after it voted Brexit and Tory in 2016 and 2017, and we found this one.
See also: literally anything else that has ever happened on Earth.
The greasy poll 357
Posted on
March 15, 2018 by
Rev. Stuart Campbell
A new Scottish Labour propaganda website called The Red Robin attracted some attention at the weekend by claiming that new polling had shown Labour closing the Westminster voting gap on the SNP to just 4 points.
To try to lend some credibility to this rather dubious assertion – the SNP’s average lead is currently around 15 points – it pointed out that the polling company’s owner was the Vice-Chair of the British Polling Council.
Readers would quite reasonably infer from that that Moonlight Research was a BPC member, and BPC rules state that if figures from a poll enter the public domain, the full data tables concerning those figures have to be released within 48 hours so that people can scrutinise them and ensure that the methodology (sample size, weighting, question wording etc) is fully up to scratch and above board.
So since the blog post is now five days old, we dropped Moonlight a line asking if we could see them, and quickly got an interesting reply.
The same as it ever was 44
Posted on
March 15, 2018 by
Rev. Stuart Campbell
Particularly alert readers may have experienced a pang of deja vu at yesterday’s story highlighting media misrepresentation of polling figures.
We can’t imagine why.
The star prize 77
Posted on
March 14, 2018 by
The History Twins
Spinning down 177
Posted on
March 14, 2018 by
Rev. Stuart Campbell
So here’s a headline from the (Dundee) Evening Telegraph.
You know how we’re always pointing out how newspapers love to lie to readers without actually saying things that are untrue? Let’s have a quick case study.
A historic breakthrough 579
Posted on
March 12, 2018 by
Rev. Stuart Campbell
We could all do with some cheering up at the moment, so it’s with great pleasure that we can announce fantastic news for Scotland – the ancient plague of sectarianism has finally been defeated once and for all!
At least, we assume it MUST have been, because this week the Scottish Parliament is set to give its final assent – thanks to Labour, the Tories, the Liberal Democrats and the all-important Scottish Greens – to abolishing the Offensive Behaviour (Football) Act, against the wishes of the overwhelming majority of the Scottish population.
And as we can plainly observe from events yesterday, they would only be doing that if sectarianism was no longer a problem and it was safe to send out an encouraging message to the bigots that their worldview is now acceptable in Scotland again.
The Cupid Stunt 412
Posted on
March 08, 2018 by
Rev. Stuart Campbell
An alert reader conveniently located in the Aberdeen area pointed us to an “SNP BAD” story in the ever-willing Press & Journal today.
And it raised an awful lot of questions the P&J didn’t seem to want to ask.
Using the Force 58
Posted on
March 08, 2018 by
Rev. Stuart Campbell
From today’s Scottish Daily Mail:
The slightly-less-well-known definition of “force” that means “a minority government persuading three out of four opposition parties to agree with it and democratically vote a measure through”, there.
