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Data without information 193

Posted on January 07, 2017 by

This week a Scottish journalist told us ruefully that over the festive holidays, all parties send the newspapers “Christmas boxes” comprising a load of ready-made and pre-chewed garbage stories, each embargoed to specific days, for them to run in the news desert between Boxing Day and January 3rd with no further effort required.

(This year’s crop had been particularly dismal, our source revealed.)

emptybox

It seems, though, that the media plans to continue the practice all year.

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Category analysis, history, missing context, scottish politics

The opposite of information 133

Posted on March 10, 2016 by

Good luck with this one, folks:

guardiandeficit

All clear now?

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Category comment, media, scottish politics

The Pish Gallop 133

Posted on December 15, 2015 by

We’ve spoken a number of times before on this site about the “gish gallop” or “swarm of wasps” debating technique, in which a person attempts to bury their opponent under such an overwhelming tsunami of false, misleading or nonsensical claims in a short space of time that they can’t possibly debunk it all.

The Urban Dictionary gives an example of the form:

gishgallop

Faced with such a rushing torrent of drivel, it’s almost impossible for an opponent to know where to start in order to begin to even scratch the surface (if you can scratch a torrent). And that brings us directly to Severin Carrell’s article in today’s Guardian.

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Category analysis, comment, debunks, media, scottish politics

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