The Scottish Conservatives have put out a properly disgraceful press release today:
No they wouldn’t. That’s a complete and utter lie.
Actually, now that we come to examine it in detail, this one’s quite special. We think EVERY single sentence in the official No campaign’s latest mailshot might be a lie.
Let’s step through it and see if they’ve really pulled off a hundred-percenter.
Britain and Scotland’s journalists have set a high bar for stupid today, but this might take the biscuit. Almost every half-cut hack and so-called expert who talks about the currency options open to Scotland casually mentions that Scotland “could join the Euro”. Whether such people are doing so through ignorance of the rules of the Eurozone or through malicious intent is for observers to decide, but either way, this particular piece of witless misinformation just will not go away.
So, let’s make it nice and easy for all the lazy people who can’t be bothered Googling “Eurozone Convergence Criteria”, shall we?
The Guardian, 27 January 2014:
“Yes Scotland sheds more senior staff as funding doubts reemerge.
The Herald, 26 January 2014:
Sounds like Yes Scotland is pretty strapped for cash, right?
The Guardian tonight reports, by way of covering Johann Lamont’s debacle at First Minister’s Questions today, an interesting snippet related to our post of earlier today:
Half a million? This weekend? Are we sure about that?
Yesterday’s Telegraph contained another example of something we’ve noticed becoming increasingly common in newspapers recently where Scottish independence is concerned – the incredible vanishing story. Check out these first two paragraphs from a piece about investment in the oil industry:
Just hold on a second, there, tiger. In the first sentence we’re apparently talking quite explicitly about something that IS ALREADY happening, but by the second sentence it’s immediately been downgraded to a “risk” and a “fear” that it “will be” happening in the future. We’re used to drastic and frequent revisions of UK government forecasts, but they usually take more than a single breath to collapse.
We’re endlessly told that the oil business is “volatile”, but that’s ridiculous.
We’re not sure which of The Scotsman and Murdo Fraser of the Scottish Conservatives was most confused this morning. Reporting on the second half of its intriguing ICM poll (which put the gap between Yes and No votes as low as six points), the paper publishes some data about the attitude of Scots to the EU.
Excluding don’t knows, the results provide a clear 16-point margin for Scotland remaining in Europe, at 58% to 42%. (The raw numbers put it only slightly lower, at 46 to 33.) But for some odd reason the newspaper chooses to reveal this vote of confidence under the bafflingly negative headline “A third of Scots would back exit from EU”, without even an “only” in there to reflect the implication of the stats.
Weirder still is Murdo Fraser’s reaction, though.
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?
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.
Here’s Labour MSP Kezia Dugdale today:
Except that’s not quite EVERYTHING we need to know, is it, Kezia?
Gah. Why is it that any time we’re ever vaguely nice about the Daily Record in public, they immediately pull an idiotic stunt like this and make us look like chumps?
Watch and marvel, readers, as a headline disintegrates in front of your very eyes.
It’s always a concerning state of affairs for any society when newspaper journalists appear less well-informed and less capable of intelligent analysis than their readers.
So we felt a letter published in today’s Herald deserved a wider audience.
Wings Over Scotland is a (mainly) Scottish political media digest and monitor, which also offers its own commentary. (More)
Wings Over Scotland
