Even the alertest readers will probably already be confused by the baffling tale of Douglas and Jacqueline Wright, who sold their home to Edinburgh West MP Michelle Thomson. We certainly were last night, but on delving a little more into the media coverage of their story, things got a whole lot worse.
Older readers may remember an ITV show called The Krypton Factor, which had an “observation round” section in which contestants were shown a short video clip and then asked a series of questions about it.
Let’s play it now.
The newspaper is a fantastic concept. A cheap, accessible product, it’s a brilliant way of keeping yourself broadly abreast of current affairs. You turn a page and are presented with a diverse selection of interesting stories, often on subjects you’d never have thought to go and seek out in the self-refining echo chamber of the internet.
(Theoretically links on websites serve the same purpose, but dodging “sponsored” advertorial, gutter-level clickbait, pop-ups, autoplay video and pages that judder and leap around so much while loading all this rubbish that you’re about 50/50 to have an epileptic fit before you can read the story, has made clicking on one into a game of Russian Roulette fewer and fewer people are willing to take a chance on.)
This site has never believed that the ongoing steep decline in newspaper sales is a fundamental problem with the format. Rather, the truth is that people stop buying papers because they’re full of garbage.
Today the Scottish Sun is almost entirely devoted to things idiot celebrities have said to each other on Twitter (or stories about Rihanna’s earrings), while the Daily Record relegates the Lib Dem Trident fiasco to a couple of small side columns in order to splash a double-page “EXCLUSIVE!” spread with the shock revelation that the First Minister of Scotland has sent letters of congratulation to some successful Scots.
(A feature for which it bewilderingly felt the need to waste taxpayers’ money by sending Freedom of Information requests to the Scottish Government.)
The Scotsman goes big on famous people’s favourite churches (people have favourite churches?), and the Herald has a South African, of all people, complaining about Alex Salmond taking a stand against discrimination.
We might take the day off.
Wings Over Scotland is a (mainly) Scottish political media digest and monitor, which also offers its own commentary. (More)
Wings Over Scotland
