Wings Over Scotland

One of the problems for anyone highlighting media bias is the “invisible hypothetical”. Take, by way of example, this snapshot of today’s Scotsman website front page:

The headline on the first piece especially is an astonishing piece of work. Rather than report that Parliament had passed a motion criticising the UK government’s welfare reforms (something given extra poignancy by the article below it, and despite Labour voting with the Tories and Lib Dems against the motion), the paper mind-bogglingly manages to twist the story into an attack on the SNP for not explicitly providing an alternative plan – even though Holyrood has no powers over welfare.

We invite any Wings Over Scotland readers with an idle moment to ponder what the headline might have been had it been Labour attacking the SNP in similar circumstances. We’ll get you started – you’ll be wanting the word “ACCUSED”.

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Seems to have been a small typesetting error on this one.

We hadn’t previously bothered commenting on the Guardian cartoon by Steve Bell that had a lot of independence supporters hot under the collar this week. We’d assumed, as seemed the most likely explanation, that it had actually been a comment on what David Cameron was alleged to have mouthed to Angus Robertson at Prime Minister’s Questions, and that Cameron was therefore the main intended target.

We worried that the nationalists who beseiged the paper with angry comments were perhaps being a little oversensitive and looking for offence where none had been meant. Ironically, the cartoon happened only days after we’d highlighted our own habitual inability to understand what Bell’s cartoons were supposed to be about, and that comment turned out to be prophetic, because we had indeed called it wrong.

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The UK’s respect agenda, from last night’s Question Time on nuclear waste:

So, this was January:

Yeah, we’ll take that.

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In the light of the Electoral Commission setting higher limits for referendum campaign spending, Labour’s Richard Baker, Dr. Richard Simpson and Alistair Darling embark on an urgent fundraising drive outside The Rangers’ next away game in SFL 3.

(We might have gone with this, but it doesn’t seem to be possible to embed YouTube video at a specified starting point, at least in so far as we don’t know how to do it.)

Alex Salmond’s appearance on Scotland Tonight this week raised an issue we’ve been meaning to address for a while, so let’s do it now before we forget again.

Of the numerous polls of the last few months, the most encouraging for supporters of independence was the one conducted by Panelbase for the Sunday Times in late October. It showed a pretty tight race at 37% Yes to 45% No, but the most interesting aspect was how the numbers changed when voters were asked for their opinion in the hypothetical scenario that they expected the Conservatives be returned as either a majority or coalition government at the 2015 Westminster general election.

In that scenario, independence leapt ahead with a massive 10% swing, to lead by 52% to 40%. But much less reported by the media was another finding of the poll.

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1. Scottish Labour says universal free bus travel for pensioners is unaffordable.

2. Scottish Government manages to reduce the cost of universal free bus travel.

3. “CUTS TO CONCESSIONARY TRAVEL WILL HIT HARD-WORKING SCOTS”

4. Repeat ad nauseam, ad infinitum.

There’s very little room for ambiguity in the Electoral Commission’s request that both sides in the independence debate provide voters with information in advance of the referendum about the likely consequences of either a Yes or No vote. Here’s how the Scotsman reported their comments, for example:

“In a surprise recommendation reflecting widespread public confusion over the choices on offer, the commission said that the UK and Scottish government should try to ‘clarify’ the situation by seeking agreement on ‘how any competing claims made about independence during the campaigns would be resolved’.

The same clarity should be offered on events after a No vote, it said. It proposed that ‘both governments should agree a joint position, if possible, so that voters have access to agreed information about what would follow the referendum’.”

In the case of (what we’re finally now able to officially call) the No campaign, that only means – indeed, only can mean – one thing. After all, their platform is the status quo. In every immediate respect, the consequences of a No vote will be that nothing changes, so nothing needs explaining. There is but a single exception.

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This front page from the Sunday Herald is almost two years old, but seems apt today.

Your jaw just drops sometimes at the sheer cheek of it.

“I am pleased that this impartial body has […] rejected the nationalist attempts to silence their opponents by setting spending limits that would have given them an unfair advantage.” – No campaign leader Alistair Darling, in a post on the “Better Together” site today.

Remember: the “nationalists” wanted to let the No campaign spend £250,000 more than the Yes campaign –  a funny kind of “silencing” and a quite unusual definition of “advantage”, let alone “unfair”. Instead, the Electoral Commission has recommended that the Yes campaign be allowed to spend more than its opponents. We’re trying for all we’re worth to work out why Mr Darling considers that a victory.

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In a Twitter conversation yesterday, we suggested that a solution to the problem of biased reporting in the Scottish media might be to adopt a variant of the “Whizzer and Chips” approach. That is, you’d have two newspapers in one – one way round the news would be presented from a Unionist perspective (as it is now), but if you flipped the paper over and read it from the other end it’d have all the same stories, except covered by independence-friendly journalists.

It looks like the Guardian has tentatively taken the idea up already.