Wings Over Scotland

The “Calmangate” story just keeps getting stranger and stranger. A few hours after our piece earlier today noting that the Scotsman had overwritten their article alleging the comedian had suffered death threats and a “barrage of abuse” with a completely new one, a version of the original reappeared at its original address.

Its temporary absence was (ostensibly) explained by a post in the comments:

“Required for legal reasons”? Hmm, let’s see.

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We weren’t exactly shocked to see the Scotsman still trying to flog the “evil cybernats” routine this morning with another story about Susan Calman, with the paper seizing on some comments from Fiona Hyslop as their excuse to keep the issue alive.

Today’s article, though, is noticeably more restrained than yesterday’s. It’s liberally sprinkled with disclaimers and caveats noting that the threats and abuse had been alleged, rather than reporting them as empirical facts. It even notes that Ms Calman has declined to comment further on the supposed events, implying that there were questions to be answered.

Then we got to the comments, and things started to get a bit weird.

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Our mole at "Better Together" HQ leaks another upcoming poster.

Great work, Anas "Agent X"!

Wait, what now? From BBC News:

Several weeks on, we still await answers from the No camp to several serious questions about their biggest donor, Ian Taylor of Vitol. But the ongoing furore (we’re really not sure issuing the Herald with a legal threat worked out the way Mr Taylor hoped it would) over his £500,000 donation has kept attention away from the other substantial contributors to the “Better Together” campaign fund.

Aberdeen local paper the Evening Express has decided to put that right, though.

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Damn. That concerted Unionist smear campaign directed at us last month really hurt.

That’s 1,233,872 pageviews in April – almost quarter of a million up on the previous high, thanks to over 10,000 new first-time readers. We’ll try to struggle on.

We’ve spent a fair bit of time over the course of this website’s existence documenting the multi-media witch-hunts that invariably arise in the Scottish media whenever some obscure and/or anonymous independence supporter on the internet says something slightly intemperate (or even just expresses an unpopular opinion).

We especially enjoy contrasting it against the way that the elected, taxpayer-funded representatives of major political parties can get away unremarked with comparing the First Minister to dictators and genocidal mass murderers (of the sort “Better Together” donors like to give hundreds of thousands of pounds to).

The vast difference in the amount of media weight given to abusive behaviour from British nationalists and that from the independence side (the infamous “cybernats”) has long been a feature of Scottish political debate, but over the last 12 hours the phenomenon has seen an intriguing new twist.

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This is Labour leader Ed Miliband on Radio 4’s “World At One” yesterday:

(From 16m 12s on iPlayer.)

“I think people are asking this very very important question about the country, which is, y’know, are our problems so deep that NOBODY can actually make a difference to them? My emphatic answer is yes.”

Ours is too, though to a slightly different question.

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We had to be out most of yesterday, so we didn’t have time to cover a story which broke in the morning in several UK papers. 24 hours later, though, we can still find no mention of it in the Scottish media, which remains fully occupied in filling its pages with recycled wittering drivel about the pound.

This is a worrying state of affairs, because yesterday’s story is of direct concern to an awful lot more Scots than a hypothetical scaremongering fantasy about currency.

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Weirdly, the front-page lead story of today’s Herald newspaper is (at the time of writing) completely absent from the online edition. We did a little digging and found that it had been somehow fused into a piece about three women and a baby being involved in a car crash, with no text.

Hopefully the Herald will fix the glitch soon, but in the meantime we’ve managed to get a hold of this low-resolution but (just barely) legible image.

Click for the readable full-size version.

From this morning’s Scotsman:

That devious BASTARD.

Our survey of Scottish political website readership closed last night, and the results are in. And we must admit, we really didn’t see this one coming.

Remarkably, the winner of the poll – excellent news resource BBC Scotlandshire – was on 0 votes the day before voting closed, largely because we’d forgotten to include it. But to our surprise, in the small hours of the morning a whopping 1,011 votes arrived out of nowhere – or more specifically, according to our IP tracking, from a single building close to the Scottish Parliament in Holyrood.

When we checked, we found that it was the headquarters of a smaller and more amateurish news-reporting organisation, so we assume that lots of employees working the late shift had all decided to vote to express their admiration for a respected rival at once. (Curiously all from the same computer, and now we come to think about it, several hours after the poll had in fact closed.)

It’s quite the mystery.

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