Most of the papers today are full of stories screaming hysterically about a (real, but somewhat exaggerated) decline in Scottish educational standards. But if the contents of those papers are anything to go by, Scotland’s schools have been disgorging idiots into the general population for a lot longer than the last 10 years.
This one definitely looks dodgy.
We, um… we don’t think they DID show that, Kez.
So the French presidential election result is in. And we’re getting early reactions:
Well, those are a bit weird, aren’t they?
It’s come to a pretty pass indeed when the Telegraph is the bastion of truth.
Because if you listened to the Unionist opposition and media today, you’d come away with a very different impression of what’s just happened.
Scottish schoolchildren start their exams today. We wish them good luck, because if any of them have taken their lead in language skills from the nation’s media they’re going to be in a lot of trouble.
For 10% of extra course credit, let’s find out why.
We’ve never tried to put a precise breakdown on how much of the falsehood pumped out daily by the Scottish political media is due to deliberately misleading spin and how much of it is simply due to journalists who are really, really terrible at their jobs.
But there’s plenty of both in today’s Times.
Most of the Scottish media today reports the latest Lord Ashcroft poll, which found Nicola Sturgeon to be by a distance the most popular political leader in Scotland.
“Scots feel quite positive about Sturgeon”, said the Daily Record, while the Scotsman headline was “Poll shows Scots approve of Sturgeon’s performance” and the Herald went with “Poll reveals strong support for Sturgeon”.
All three opened with almost identical paragraphs observing that the First Minister was the only UK politician to record a net positive approval rating in Scotland, putting her a thumping 32 points ahead of her nearest domestic rival.
The Scottish Daily Mail, though, had a slightly different take.
Unionists were barely able to hide their excitement last month at the thought of some dead pensioners. This was former Labour MSP Dr Richard Simpson, for example:
(Simpson later went on to embellish the claim by saying that it had in fact reversed.)
The story was serious enough to be the Sunday Times Scotland front page lead.
On today’s Good Morning Scotland, a Tory MSP (in this case seven-time voter reject Murdo Fraser) was allowed to repeatedly get away unchallenged – for about the 100th time on broadcast media in recent days – with telling the flat-out lie that opinion polls show a clear and large majority in opposition to the Scottish Government’s position and proposed timing on a second independence referendum.
We’ve endlessly shown these claims to be absolutely and categorically false, yet for some reason that we’re unable to explain, no interviewer has ever stopped Fraser, or Adam Tomkins, or Ruth Davidson, or Jackson Carlaw, and pointed that fact out.
Today, a tiny bar buried on a left-hand page in the Herald delivers yet more proof of public support for the Scottish Government’s stance.
It deserves rather more prominence, and while we’re about it we figured we might as well collect some of the evidence together.
Scotland is plagued by a Parliament of morons. The vast majority of opposition MSPs are people who were directly and personally rejected by the voters – usually with good reason – but who were parachuted into lucrative jobs anyway by their parties.
And yesterday, as Theresa May formally began the process that will tear Scotland out of the EU without its permission, those opposition MSPs queued up to demonstrate their pettiness, ignorance and stupidity.
Alert readers will of course be aware that one of this site’s most frequently-recurring themes is “phantom news”, whereby events or unpleasant opinions that newspapers or broadcasters really want to have happened are conveniently brought to life, either by some random nobody on the internet, or an unnamed “source” or “insider”.
(Or in a real emergency, simply asserted with no evidence at all.)
So when Nicola Sturgeon did something today that nearly everyone in the Northern Hemisphere knew she was going to do sometime soon, but wasn’t expecting just yet, there wasn’t time to prepare actual real people with the required quotes.
In the modern media world, though, that isn’t a problem.
Wings Over Scotland is a (mainly) Scottish political media digest and monitor, which also offers its own commentary. (More)
