Scotsman deploys threat multiplier
As a newspaper, The Scotsman is under absolutely no obligation to report the news impartially (a fact frequently misunderstood by a great many people). But it's becoming less and less subtle in its distortions of the truth the further we get into the SNP majority administration. One of its big politics stories today is a case in point. As a reader of Wings over Scotland you are by definition a normal, well-adjusted person, so how would you interpret the following headline?
Since John Swinney is an MSP with a remit which covers only the devolved Scottish Government, naturally you'd assume he was demanding this £20bn for Scotland, right? Particularly as the story opens with this sentence:
"Finance secretary John Swinney has demanded billions of pounds from the UK government for major building projects in Scotland"
Even for the most ardent nationalist it sounds an outrageous demand, even in less austere times than these. £20bn is around two-thirds of the Scottish Government's entire annual block grant, and would pay for every conceivable major infrastructure project in Scotland – finishing the Edinburgh trams and the Edinburgh and Glasgow airport rail links, dualling the entire A9, building the new Forth road crossing, completing the Borders railway, implementing the Beauly-Denny power line and opening the carbon-capture plant at Longannet – with a good £10bn still left over.
But with readers duly inflamed, the next paragraph quietly reveals the truth. Swinney wants the Chancellor to spend £20bn on capital investment projects in the whole of the UK, with just a tenth of that money coming to Scotland. He's asking for £2bn, not £20bn, and – we find out another nine paragraphs later – that £2bn would be spread over three years, amounting to a somewhat more modest £0.67bn a year for Scotland, set against the UK government's total annual Scottish spending of £53bn.
The arguments for extra capital investment to drive growth, create employment in the construction sector and avoid a double-dip recession are economically sound, but that's another debate entirely. The Finance Secretary has in fact asked for approximately one-thirtieth of what the Scotsman's highly-misleading headline implies. It's hard to see that misrepresentation as an accidental one.
You aren't quite right or only partially right about The Scotsman's responsibilities. They do have a responsibility to report the news truthfully and not to misrepresent it. They regularly break this remit.
That does not mean that they have to be unbiased as an organisation and all newspapers have an admitted and advertised bias. They support a certain political opinion and are expected to do so editorially.
That does not make it acceptable to mis-report and distort news stories in an attempt to support that bias.
I guess they'd say they were covered by the fact that all the info IS in the story, and the headline isn't strictly technically untruthful. Distortion and misrepresentation are just other words for spin, unfortunately, and we live in a world where about 80% of politics is spin.