The Scottish media this week has started to rather resemble Argentina under General Galtieri’s military junta – everywhere you look are the ghosts of the disappeared.
Earlier today we reported on the mysterious failure of the Herald to notice that its front page lead story about supposedly poor ScotRail punctuality figures made a number of serious errors with regard to the facts, most notably confusing the excellent figures for last month with a 12-month rolling average which was significantly worse.
But as we read the rest of the papers, we noticed the oddest thing.
Today’s edition of The Times contains a textbook example of a phenomenon that we highlight regularly: how newspapers gradually unpick their own dishonest headlines to grudgingly admit a truth which is often the polar opposite of the initial claim.
The BBC’s Reporting Scotland is, in our view, directly responsible for at least 80% of Yes supporters’ belief that the UK’s state broadcaster is biased against independence. Almost all of the worst examples of unbalanced or downright dishonest coverage over the last five years come from the flagship teatime bulletin.
Today’s Daily Record covers the story we mentioned yesterday about a report from a Scottish Labour campaign group making the pretty factually-uncontestable point that the branch office’s dismal strategy in last month’s election held the UK party back.
Broadly speaking, the psychological phenomenon known as the Pollyanna Principle is a tendency to neurotically see the most positive possible view of a situation. It’s not generally widely found in newspapers – for whom bad news as a rule sells much better than good news – but for some reason the Scottish press makes a uniform exception when it comes to military shipbuilding.
This, for example, is today’s Herald:
Now, in itself that headline is – unusually – true, so far as it goes. But it only takes until the first sentence of the article text before things start to fall apart.
Hanzala Malik has been a Glasgow Labour politician for 22 years without anyone noticing. His Wikipedia entry sums up his contribution to Scottish politics over that time in a single 25-word sentence amounting to “served on some committees”.
But he got noticed yesterday.
Because so committed was Malik to the core ideological principle of Scottish Labour – namely that absolutely everything bad that happens anywhere is the SNP’s fault – that he somewhat overstretched himself and blamed them for the closure of six Jobcentres in Glasgow, despite the startlingly obvious facts that responsibility for the decision lies solely with the UK government and the closures have been opposed consistently by every SNP MP in the city, two things Malik can’t possibly have not known.
After an outcry on social media when an alert Wings reader spotted the falsehood, Malik quietly amended the Facebook post twice, first from an attack on “the SNP” to the rather ambiguous “Government” and then finally to the accurate “UK government”. But “SNP BAD” will always be Labour’s instinctive default reaction.
We’re always loath to criticise political journalists for feeble stories published during the summer season, when parliaments are in recess and there’s nothing much happening to fill space with. But the Sunday Post has started pretty early this year.
Let’s see if we can put a number on the degree of “dilution” here, shall we?
The Labour Party’s current state of euphoric hubris about losing another election is at least partly explicable. Jeremy Corbyn increased his party’s 2015 vote in England and Wales by a thumping 40%, took the highest vote share of any Labour leader since 2001 (beating Tony Blair’s 2005 victory by five points), the highest actual vote since Blair’s 1997 landslide, and deprived the Tories of their overall majority.
Those achievements are tempered by the fact that while Corbyn vastly overperformed expectations and certainly gave Theresa May a bloody nose (and might well end up depriving her of the Prime Ministership once her party gets a challenger together), the morning-after reality is that Tory rule has been extended to at least 2022 – by which time Corbyn will be 73 – with the nasty hangover of the empowerment of the DUP.
(With both Labour and Corbyn personally now leading in the polls it’s pretty much impossible to see the Tories losing a vote of confidence which would trigger another exemption to the Fixed-Term Parliaments Act. Any new election would very likely lead not only to a Labour government but to a Jeremy Corbyn Labour government, a prospect to chill even the most rebellious Tory into meek and sober compliance.)
But it would be churlish to dispute that Corbyn has put Labour in its best position for nearly 20 years. The same is emphatically NOT true of Scottish Labour, which hasn’t stopped the Scottish media from desperately trying to pretend otherwise.
She’d insisted explicitly several times that a Jeremy Corbyn administration WOULD block a new indyref, even after being shown a video clip of Corbyn from earlier in the day saying he wouldn’t, and she repeatedly urged readers not to listen to the party’s leader and to instead go and look at the Labour manifesto.
sam on Yelling at the tide: “Linguistic professors, McLeod and Jones of Edinburgh University chart the decline of the use of Gaelic language. “In the mid…” Jan 23, 17:32
Northcode on Yelling at the tide: ““Gaelic is exponentially closer than Inglis is to (what is known of) the language of the Picts.” I think you’re…” Jan 23, 17:28
TURABDIN on Yelling at the tide: “A cosmopolitan «littérateur» ancestor of mine wrote in Ottoman Turkish. He disliked Syriac, and had reservations about Arabic considering the…” Jan 23, 17:09
Northcode on Yelling at the tide: “All I know, Sam, is that when my folk arrived here there was naebody else tae be seen… and it…” Jan 23, 17:04
Fearghas MacFhionnlaigh on Yelling at the tide: “Gaelic is exponentially closer than Inglis is to (what is known of) the language of the Picts.” Jan 23, 16:58
Northcode on Yelling at the tide: ““Seriously, tak yer Gaelic and yer Inglis and get yersel’s tae…” Obviously I wasn’t being serious with my last comment.…” Jan 23, 16:52
sam on Yelling at the tide: “@ Northcode “As far as I’m concerned Gaelic is the weird language of the first invader, English that of the…” Jan 23, 16:47
Hatey McHateface on Yelling at the tide: “Shirley-Anne Somerville has sent a baby box to New York mayor Mamdani. To show him how it works, and to…” Jan 23, 16:46
Alf Baird on Yelling at the tide: ““claim we were all colonised near a century afore 1707” As noted above, Linguistic Imperialism (e.g. language deprivation and cultural…” Jan 23, 16:42
Hatey McHateface on Yelling at the tide: “Ah, c’moan noo, Northy. Just the other day you were self-identifying as shit. Shit should be in seventh heaven in…” Jan 23, 16:20
Northcode on Yelling at the tide: ““Can we please therefore jettison the exclusivist “mither tongue” myth… No! As far as I’m concerned Gaelic is the weird…” Jan 23, 15:56
sam on Yelling at the tide: “@ “It was a choice made and maintained by Scots.” Hardly. Historian, Iain MacKinnon. “And in 1608 there was a…” Jan 23, 15:53
TURABDIN on Yelling at the tide: “When i was a kid my parents visited some relatives and other exiles in California, we have relatives near &…” Jan 23, 15:33
Hatey McHateface on Yelling at the tide: “See fit ye’ve done noo, Fearghas? Ye’ve empowered the Baird/Northy axis tae claim we were all colonised near a century…” Jan 23, 15:15
Northcode on Yelling at the tide: ““He also claimed “It was the English who commanded that Scots schoolchildren be viciously belted with a leather strap…” No……” Jan 23, 15:08
Fearghas MacFhionnlaigh on Yelling at the tide: “We observe that the following was written almost exactly a century BEFORE the Act of Union. We note that the…” Jan 23, 15:03
100%Yes on Yelling at the tide: “Is she really worth fighting for “Information commissioner sues SNP Government over ‘failure to publish Sturgeon files’. I wouldn’t give…” Jan 23, 14:51
willie on Yelling at the tide: “If I may, can I turn attention to the Bonnie Banks of Loch Lomond and the recent announcement that Lomond…” Jan 23, 14:41
factchecker on Yelling at the tide: “Thank you Cynicus for some factual input. The professor writes “Ignorant rubbish” indeed. He claims “In seeking to justify only…” Jan 23, 14:29
Hatey McHateface on Yelling at the tide: “Aye, TURABDIN, there’s been notable failures. There’s been notable successes, too. Japan, the former West Germany before they were sunk…” Jan 23, 14:26
Hatey McHateface on Yelling at the tide: ““As we know, Linguistic Imperialism (e.g. language deprivation and cultural assimilation) are well established colonial procedures intended to make ‘a…” Jan 23, 14:10
Hatey McHateface on Yelling at the tide: “Dinna be sae harsh, Cynicus. It’s Baltic oot there. Northy needs his pants aflame tae keep warm and he’s discovered…” Jan 23, 13:52
Alf Baird on Yelling at the tide: ““Ignorant Rubbish” ? In seeking to justify only the English language being taught to Scots bairns in school, British educationalists…” Jan 23, 13:50
Hatey McHateface on Yelling at the tide: “My, Alf, but like your sidekick Northy, you’re a tonic sometimes. Why don’t you call for what Mummy et al…” Jan 23, 13:49
Alf Baird on Yelling at the tide: ““The American psyche’s great flaw is that .. like a prepubescent child uncertain of its identity” This is a general…” Jan 23, 13:34
Cynicus on Yelling at the tide: “Northcode, 23 January, 2026 at 10:56 am “It was the English who forced their own language on the Scots. “…” Jan 23, 12:55
TURABDIN on Yelling at the tide: “@Hatey McHateface to this reader your argumentation can turn towards the confusing, however, I do share your perspective regarding the…” Jan 23, 12:49
Alf Baird on Yelling at the tide: “Aye Willie, and here we are reminded that “whenever colonialism is imperiled, the colonizer reveals his fangs” (Fanon). So why…” Jan 23, 12:26
Hatey McHateface on Yelling at the tide: “You remind me of the people who claim to believe that the killing of one woman as she interferes with…” Jan 23, 11:07
Northcode on Yelling at the tide: ““… speaking, reading and writing only in Scots…” Who do those folk who believe an independent Scotland would insist that…” Jan 23, 10:56
