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Wings Over Scotland



Fury Of The Phantoms 349

Posted on March 13, 2017 by

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.

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A trivial omission 265

Posted on February 27, 2017 by

Our attention was drawn today to hardcore shrieky Loyalist nutter collective Scotland In Union releasing “new research” on an independent Scotland’s finances, which in fact came out last year but which for unknown reasons they’re touting again now.

standardindy

Commissioned by the loongroup from a London-based thinktank that we’d never heard of by the name of “Europe Economics”, it predictably produces a doom-and-gloom conclusion that independence would have cost over £10bn in the first year.

There are so many gaping chasms in the logic we could hardly stop laughing for long enough to type, but one in particular was worth wiping the tears from our eyes for.

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More questions than answers 130

Posted on February 24, 2017 by

We were very pleased to hear Gary Robertson challenge Kezia Dugdale on the curious matter of Scottish Labour’s membership and income figures on today’s Good Morning Scotland. Dugdale flapped and dodged and waffled for as long as she could before diverting the topic onto federalism, and eventually managed to wriggle away from the subject without any sort of proper answer (through no fault of Robertson’s).

(Good Morning Scotland, BBC Radio Scotland, 24 February 2017)
.

But what she said just made the situation MORE confusing, not less.

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News values depreciate further 133

Posted on February 23, 2017 by

Almost a year ago we ran a short piece mocking a Scotsman headline which claimed that “THOUSANDS” of people had signed a Tory anti-referendum petition, when the actual number was a strictly-accurate-but-pathetic TWO thousand.

We didn’t think that could ever be beaten for technically-true hyperbolic exaggeration, but we’d reckoned without the bold boundary-pushing ingenuity of the Daily Express.

exp1000s

Hundreds of thousands? How many hundreds, exactly?

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The centrifuge 487

Posted on February 10, 2017 by

Sometimes the word “spin” just isn’t enough to get the reality across.

Ladies and gentlemen, we give you: the Scottish media.

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A matter of disclosure 372

Posted on February 08, 2017 by

There’s a truly abominable piece of hatemongering in today’s Times. A grotesequely dishonest Nat-bashing smear job based on stupendously misrepresented fragments of quotes, it’s penned by Patrick Harkness, someone who the paper identifies as “a past co-chairman of the RSE [Royal Society of Edinburgh] Young Academy of Scotland”.

harkness

For some reason it’s chosen to leave a few lines off his CV.

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Truth With Ruth 415

Posted on February 05, 2017 by

Scottish Conservative leader Ruth Davidson a couple of hours ago:

truthless

Just a few teeny tiny issues with that one.

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What fake news looks like 332

Posted on February 03, 2017 by

The most overused political insult du jour is for people to accuse each other of dealing in “fake news” and “alternative facts”. Normally, of course, they’re referring to dodgy memes on social media or the latest mad yelping from Donald Trump or his minions.

But in Scotland, our fake news is in the real newspapers.

highesttax

Pretty much every day of every week of every year.

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While the truth gets its boots on 367

Posted on January 25, 2017 by

Here’s Alex Salmond on last night’s Newsnight:

Let’s just quickly fact-check that claim.

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The flexibility of figures 573

Posted on January 15, 2017 by

It’s a well-known fact, of course, that 87% of all statistics are made up. But as this site regularly observes, if you’re the Scottish opposition and media there’s no need to invent fake ones when you can twist the real ones to present an image completely at odds with the reality.

The Sunday Times today has some fine examples of the craft of massaging figures for the purposes of deception. It carries two separate scare stories on the NHS, both of them using figures which aren’t based on any sort of news, but on opposition spin on existing stats. One comes from the Tories, under a dramatic headline:

privatenhs

The banner is pulling a classic trick – the £685m figure is actually the total sum spent in a decade, not the single year that most people would assume (since there’s no good reason to measure spending in decades, so headlines usually don’t do it). But remarkably it’s just about the most honest thing in the paper’s health coverage today.

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All news is bad news 339

Posted on December 14, 2016 by

Figures released yesterday indicated that the number of full-time teachers employed in Scotland had risen by 253 over the past year, despite budget cuts imposed by the UK government’s austerity programme. This obviously presented the Scottish media with a dilemma: how could such statistics be presented as an “SNP BAD” story?

Luckily, we’re dealing with experienced professionals here.

teachernumbers

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The missing numbers round 261

Posted on December 13, 2016 by

We often say here on Wings that our job is to teach people to instantly recognise the sneaky tricks used by the media to try to create false impressions without saying things that are technically untrue. (Because despite the tiny size they’re allowed to print corrections at, they’re still rather embarrassing.)

A key technique is to look at a headline or story and immediately ask what you’re NOT being told. So here’s an easy example from today’s Scottish Daily Mail.

65trains

What’s been left out there, readers?

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    • Young Lochinvar on According As We Need Them: “Unfortunately yes. Add in the DEI obsessed LibDems onto the list though, the shark lurking under the waves on this…Jul 13, 23:00
    • GM on According As We Need Them: “Very true. Nothing for it but to keep the faith and take the genuine option when it is on offer…Jul 13, 22:58
    • Captain Caveman on According As We Need Them: “@Lorn Excellent post, in my humble opinion. How did we get here?Jul 13, 22:39
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    • sarah on According As We Need Them: “@ Lorn at 6.34: “who are these paragons?”. I think Dan may be referring to the Independents for Independence who…Jul 13, 19:21
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