Wings Over Scotland

…and you haven’t got time to think of a misleading headline or laboriously rewrite a “Better Together” press release into something that might just about pass for actual news reporting if viewed fleetingly in poor lighting conditions, you can do nearly as good a job of distorting the truth with just a quick C-switched-for-W keypress.

It’s a real Scottish-media time-saver!

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Ask anyone who knows about such things and they’ll tell you that not only is the headline the most important aspect of an article, but often it’s the only part of it that people read at all. It’s a fact worth bearing in mind when you scan the media coverage of the main Scottish politics story of today.

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Spain’s supposed threat to veto Scottish membership of the EU is like one of those serial killers on a student campus in a slash ‘n gore movie. No matter how many times the evil maniac is stabbed, hit over the head with bricks, shot 46 times through the lungs with a depleted-uranium blunderbuss, drowned in boiling acid or baked in a kiln with the pottery-class homework, he’s still stalking the heroine in the final scene.

Today the vampiric figure of a Spanish EU veto threat received yet another silver, garlic-coated stake through the heart. But we expect it to get up and walk again every other week until September 2014 regardless.

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Today’s special referendum supplement in the Herald gives another run-out to the well-worn “women don’t like Alex Salmond” line much beloved of the Scottish press. It’s rare indeed that a month goes by without some mention somewhere of the fairer sex’s supposed dislike for the First Minister’s occasionally somewhat gallus nature, and today’s example is very much of its type.

“Yes campaign struggling to attract women voters” runs Magnus Gardham’s headline, and curiously notes of the paper’s poll findings that “the Scottish Labour leader Johann Lamont emerges as a potential asset in appealing to women”.

Why “curiously”? Well, let’s actually have a closer look at those stats.

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Rhodri Morgan, Labour former First Minister of Wales, 12 December 2013:

“No reform to the Barnett Formula until after the Scottish referendum.”

Alistair Carmichael, Lib Dem Secretary of State for Portsmouth, 17 December 2013:

“This government is not going to touch the Barnett Formula.”

Our emphasis both times. It’s not too tricky to read between the lines, is it?

We bought the digital edition of the Herald today on the promise of a 20-page “Scotland Decides” pullout, and were most disgruntled to find out we’d been swindled – you get the Sport supplement with the electronic version of the paper, answering every question you could imagine about the Rangers AGM, but not the referendum one.

That meant all the content we’d paid good money for was locked behind the Herald’s online paywall, where it’s a complete chore to access from mobile devices like the iPad we’d downloaded the digital edition to, because evidently the paper holds its techno-customers in lower esteem than news-stand purchasers.

So to save anyone else the same irritation, we’ve dug out all the articles we can find from the pullout and archived them for easy access. We don’t like doing this sort of thing wholesale, but if you’re going to steal our cash on false pretences then sod you.

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Someone asked us yesterday for some facts and figures to help them with a debate, and it got us remembering one that we never see being brought up, perhaps because it’s buried in the archives of the Herald under Sport > SPL > Aberdeen (no, really).

It’s a piece that pre-dates the Scottish Parliament (and is written in a style that makes it seem older still), but it’s a complete mess of broken formatting, clearly the victim of numerous website redesigns, and painfully hard to read even when rescued from behind the paper’s paywall.

So we’re going to preserve it for posterity here in a cleaned-up, more user-friendly presentation, because it’s pretty much dynamite.

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We enjoyed this satirical piece on Buzzfeed today picturing how various world media outlets would handle the end of civilisation via a double meteor strike/zombie virus catastrophe. We’ve pinched some of their UK examples for illustrative purposes, and added a couple of our own at the end.

Have a go! It’s easy* and fun!

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There’s a rather strange article by Peter Kellner, CEO of polling company YouGov, in today’s Guardian. It makes a whole series of dubious claims, one of the most startling being the assertion that “Labour is the pro-welfare party-of-the-heart”, a view somewhat at odds with the party’s stated intent to be “tougher than the Tories on benefits”.

But perhaps most curious of all was the piece’s strapline.

Because the idea that Labour was winning any battle for the hearts and minds of the British public over public-sector cuts was quite dramatically contradicted the very same day by some data released by… YouGov.

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Because it’s aimed at you. (As judging by the increase in donor numbers set against the number of clickthroughs we registered from yesterday’s piece to the benighted Yes Scotland fundraising page, there’s no mistaking where the money came from.)

Bella and Newsnet both now over £10,000 too, even though it’s barely over a week until Christmas. Take a moment to give yourselves a wee pat on the back, readers.

We haven’t done a “We said, he said” argument transcript for months and months, because as a rule they’re of extremely limited interest to anyone outside the political nerdosphere who isn’t familiar with the people involved.

But you don’t need any background to follow this one. So buckle up and do your best to wade past the obvious personal antagonism, because you won’t get a better illustration of the tortured mental twisting and squirming of the No campaign this year.

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Here’s the Secretary Of State For Portsmouth, legendary bruiser Alistair “Crybaby” Carmichael, in this morning’s Herald on the subject of the dastardly SNP Scottish Government intimidating businesses out of speaking up for the Union:

“Asked if there was a fear factor, Mr Carmichael replied: ‘There is very much. This is what business people tell me; they are scared of the consequences for their business of getting on the wrong side of the Scottish Government.’

Without naming names, he noted: ‘I see it in the media sector. I have seen media outlets feel constrained in their coverage.'”

A random sample from the front page of our “PressReader” newspaper app, there, covering just a single month (March 2013). Heaven help us all if the media suddenly breaks free of these draconian constraints and tells us what it REALLY thinks.