It’s a start, we suppose. But it doesn’t take long for the UK government’s latest independence “fact sheet” to start telling fibs again. It barely gets a quarter of the way through its very first sentence before dropping a big old porky on those assembled:
Much as we’d like to think otherwise, there’s no such thing as a “forever decision” in politics. Whether Scotland votes for or against independence, it could change in the future. The USSR fragmented, East and West Germany reunited (having been abruptly split up after the “Thousand Year Reich” only actually managed 12), and even our own lifetimes have seen countless realignments and redivisions of states across the world.
So what else in the paper is, to use the technical term, total cobblers?
Read the rest of this entry →
Tags: misinformation
Category
analysis, comment, scottish politics, uk politics
Veteran readers will be aware that there are basically two types of misinformation perpetrated by the Scottish media. The rarer type is the flat-out lie, where things that are simply demonstrably untrue are presented as facts – a common example being the regular assertion by journalists that all three Unionist parties are committed to giving Holyrood new additional powers after a No vote, which was neatly skewered by Andrew Nicoll in yesterday’s Sun (image link, no paywall).
The subtler variety is when newspapers and broadcasters report true information in a misleading way, sometimes so drastically that it comes out meaning the exact opposite of what it actually means. A story today is a case in point.
Read the rest of this entry →
Tags: misinformation
Category
analysis, media, scottish politics
Much gratitude tonight to alert reader “Albamac”, who’s not only compiled the whole of “The Claim Of Scotland” into a single very small (1MB), easy-download PDF file but has converted it in the process into one with cut-and-pasteable text for quotability. We’ve uploaded it to the Repository, and you can also download it from this direct link.
Big love once again too to Wilma Watts who made our serialisation possible in the first place, and to the sadly-deceased Herbert James Paton for writing a book that for the most part could have been released yesterday. We highly recommend it as a starting point for any undecideds you know who might not want to jump straight into the debate with something as openly partisan as this site. Having read it, we suspect they’ll be hungry for more truth, and then you can send them our way.
Tags: claimofscotland
Category
culture, history, scottish politics
The latest in the UK government’s “Scotland Analysis” series of independence briefing papers was released this week on the back of William Hague’s visit to Glasgow.
At 119 pages, the EU and International Issues paper is nobody’s idea of a slim pamphlet, but it’s remarkably light on meaty content.
Read the rest of this entry →
Tags: Andrew Leslie
Category
analysis, scottish politics, uk politics, world
Tags: qft
Category
uk politics
Welcome to another glorious new dawn in the Union.
Read the rest of this entry →
Tags: lizards
Category
comment, culture, disturbing, uk politics
#ukok #bettertogether
Category
uk politics
For those of you wanting to look at the report on broadcasting bias from the University of the West of Scotland, we’ve uploaded it to the Repository, and you can also grab it directly from this link. Thanks to the alert readers who sent it in.
Category
analysis, media, scottish politics
We doubt if anyone is going to faint with amazement from the discovery that an academic study has found TV news coverage of the independence debate was biased against the Yes side by a 3-2 margin between September 2012 and September 2013.
But what’s useful about the University of West of Scotland research is that it sets out the exact nature of the various types of biases, and gives a precise number for how many times each type occurred. This moves us on considerably, because complaints can no longer be dismissed as nothing more than (to misquote Derek Bateman) the paranoia of nationalists obsessing over how many times Jackie Bird raises her left eyebrow while reading from an autocue.
Read the rest of this entry →
Category
comment, media, scottish politics
We can’t be the only people, surely, to find the latest “Better Together” gambit one of their strangest yet. Never mind the made-up figures or the spurious assertions or their usual habit of having headline amounts which use cumulative sums over many years to make numbers sound bigger. Just look at the barely-concealed subtext here:
“Don’t leave the UK, or you’ll have to give your money to the English! Eurgh!”
Read the rest of this entry →
Category
analysis, comment, europe, scottish politics, uk politics
