With this year’s GERS figures imminent, there are two stories about North Sea oil in today’s papers which are markedly different in both tone and honesty.
This, for example, is the front page of the Sunday Herald:
It’s basically a reprise of a Wings story from almost a year ago, noting that despite producing broadly similar amounts of oil to Scotland from the North Sea, Norway has generated tens of billions in pounds in government revenue from it – even during the price slump of recent years – while Scotland has actually LOST money.
The Sunday Times, though, has a rather different take.
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Tags: misinformation
Category
analysis, media, scottish politics
Number of references to “UK”, “Britain” or “British” in this story about salmon: 17
Number of references to “Scotland” or “Scottish”: 1 (in a quote)
Percentage of “UK” salmon industry that’s actually in Scotland: 96.3%
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scottish politics, stats, uk politics
To be honest with you, readers, we’re still trying to make some sort of sense of the whole “vote Scottish Labour to get independence” thing. Because try as we might we can’t think of a single way in which having a Scottish Labour MP is better than having an SNP one in terms of either independence OR socialism.
And it doesn’t take a lot of effort to see why.
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analysis, scottish politics, uk politics
The mainstream media is now, by our count, up to at least 13 sizeable articles on the Great Yes-Movement Schism Of 2017 – a minor online spat between a tiny handful of people who’ve never liked each other and most of whom the general public has never heard of – and shows no signs of tiring of gleefully revelling in the subject.
There’s nothing particularly surprising or even diabolical about that. As any reality-TV show viewer will tell you, viewers absolutely love to watch people fighting, and doubly so if it’s the summer silly season and there’s no real news. Most of the stories have attracted large responses and therefore lots of juicy and profitable clicks for tired hacks who long ago stopped having anything of any interest to say but still have to honk out 1000 words a week in order to get paid.
But the more sinister aspect of them is the way they’ve been weaponised to (further) demonise and silence the Yes movement. If someone attacks other Yes figures with a provocative, offensive and dishonest piece, the extra bonus for the media is that any legitimately angry response to it can be used as yet more proof of The Vileness Of The Cybernats: “Look! They even turn on their own if they dare disagree!”
For the Unionist press, that’s a win-win every way up, and there are some on the Yes side who seem only too willing to co-operate with the narrative.
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Tags: phantoms
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analysis, comment, media, scottish politics
A reader sent us an interesting snippet of information today.
That seemed a startling fact, so we looked into it. And it’s true.
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analysis, comment, scottish politics, stats, uk politics
The Scottish media this week has started to rather resemble Argentina under General Galtieri’s military junta – everywhere you look are the ghosts of the disappeared.
We’ve already documented at length the sudden non-existence of the Herald’s madly inaccurate front-page lead story from Monday (along with the corresponding piece in the Evening Times). And today two more things joined the missing list.
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Tags: flat-out lies, misinformation
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comment, debunks, media, scottish politics
Here’s Daniel Sanderson in the Times in January this year, complaining that too few university students come from poor backgrounds and therefore the SNP are bad:
So he’d be chuffed if that situation improved, right?
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comment, media, scottish politics
In case you don’t know, Alan Roden is the former Scottish Daily Mail politics editor who’s now Scottish Labour’s director of communications. We haven’t edited this pic in any way, those genuinely are two consecutive tweets he posted yesterday.
So this is almost too beautiful.
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debunks, media, scottish politics
Earlier today we reported on the mysterious failure of the Herald to notice that its front page lead story about supposedly poor ScotRail punctuality figures made a number of serious errors with regard to the facts, most notably confusing the excellent figures for last month with a 12-month rolling average which was significantly worse.
But as we read the rest of the papers, we noticed the oddest thing.
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Tags: misinformation
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analysis, debunks, idiots, media, scottish politics
This is the front-page lead on today’s Herald.
Let’s fact-check that, shall we?
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Tags: misinformation
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analysis, debunks, media, scottish politics
