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The grave of journalism 74

Posted on August 21, 2012 by

We were frankly staggered today to see that the Herald is still determined to flog the dead and rotting horse that is the Martin Sime “scandal”. It had seemed that the paper had slunk away with its “exclusive” between its legs after the widespread contempt generated by the first story, but incredibly it seems doggedly insistent on destroying the remaining shreds of its journalistic integrity by digging the hole even deeper.

The original piece was written by the Herald’s new political editor Magnus Gardham, until recently a faithful servant of the staunchly Unionist and staunchly Labour-supporting Daily Record. Entitled “Salmond in secret push to obtain a devo max option”, the story didn’t present a scrap of evidence of Salmond doing anything, secretly or otherwise. In fact, it was fabricated almost entirely from empirical lies, from the headline down. Let’s take a look at some of them.

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Obsession, by Severin Carrell 74

Posted on April 26, 2012 by

There is, as we’ve previously noted, very little actual news to be found in the Alex Salmond/Rupert Murdoch story that’s got the Scottish media on a full-scale SHOCK HORROR! war footing this week. These are the only actual facts in the furore:

1. Murdoch’s papers, having (in Murdoch’s words) “declared war” on Labour, switched their backing to the parties most likely to defeat them north and south of the border in the general elections of 2010 and 2011. Both parties concerned, the SNP and the Conservatives, duly won their respective elections.

2. The Scottish Government decided to back News International’s bid for control of BSkyB, on the grounds that the company was a major employer in Scotland and that such a move may well bring a significant number of jobs to Scotland. It signalled its willingness to express this support to the UK Government, though having no leverage or influence over the matter. In the event, the support was never expressed, as the UK Government decided to clear the bid anyway.

3. James Murdoch, Rupert Murdoch and Alex Salmond all unequivocally and categorically deny that any connection between the two matters was ever raised or discussed by either of the parties involved, and nobody has produced or even suggested the existence of any evidence contradicting these denials.

And that’s it. The Scottish Government took a position entirely within its normal and proper powers with regard to a business matter, and News International’s publications exercised their free democratic right to endorse whichever political party they chose to, just as they’d done within the space of the previous three years for both the Conservatives and Labour. It’s not exactly “hold the front page” stuff.

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This isn’t a rhetorical question 42

Posted on April 25, 2012 by

We had a successful but very late night at poker last night, so we've only been up for a couple of hours as we write this. But we've been watching BBC News for that entire time, almost all of which they've spent talking about the Leveson Inquiry, and so far they haven't felt that the allegations concerning Alex Salmond (about which the Scottish press and Holyrood opposition is in such a shrieking frenzy) were worthy of so much as a single mention. To be honest, we think that's as telling an analysis of the story's merits as anything anyone could write. (Though this is also a good stab.)

Similarly, we look forward to seeing whether the opposition parties are so suicidally stupid and lacking in self-awareness as to attack Salmond over the issue at First Minister's Questions tomorrow, given that they're all absolutely dripping with gooey, sticky, foul-smelling brown effluent when it comes to their own relations with Murdoch. But nevertheless, something's been nagging at us for a little while, and perhaps some of our rapidly-growing band of readers might be able to help provide an answer:

What IS it that's so uniquely evil about Rupert Murdoch anyway?

Wings Over Scotland isn't yet a billionaire multi-media mogul, but if we were we can offer you a solemn and unequivocal promise: we would use our power to try to influence political events in favour of our own agenda, all day and every day. Apart from making money, that's the ONLY reason anyone EVER gets involved in the media. We hope we're not giving away a massive secret or anything there.

This blog exists at the opposite end of the political spectrum to Rupert Murdoch on just about any issue you care to name. We despise almost every ideology he holds dear. But we acknowledge his right in a free democracy to put forward his views and use any legal means he can to further them.

Phone-hacking, of course, is not legal. But it's beyond any rational doubt that just about every major media organisation in the land is knee-deep in the swamp when it comes to phone-hacking, so there's nothing uniquely evil about Murdoch among media proprietors in that regard. The same goes for publishing oceans of largely made-up prurient/muck-raking drivel about celebrities and their sex lives/cellulite, which is in fact the main engine of 90% of news-stand journalism nowadays.

So why is it worse for Murdoch to back political parties than when the Guardian or the Mail or the Mirror Group does it? Why is it somehow inherently wrong and scandalous and dirty for, say, the Scottish Sun to back the SNP, but okay for the Daily Record to back Labour, the Guardian to support the Lib Dems, the Telegraph to advocate the Tories and the Mail to come out for the French National Front?

We're serious. It's been axiomatic folk-wisdom in this country for years – since long before the phone-hacking scandal – that Rupert Murdoch is the devil, and merely being associated with his name makes you instantly guilty of some sort of a priori crime. We're not fans, but can anyone tell us what it is he's actually done that makes him measurably worse than anyone else in his line of business in this country? Is it just that he's better and more successful at it? We'd honestly like to know.

Double takes and double standards 1

Posted on April 17, 2012 by

As we browsed the papers this morning, naturally our attention was captured by the implausible-sounding headline "Rennie Hails Breakthrough At Launch Of Poll Campaign". Coming the day after a YouGov poll suggested the Liberal Democrats had suffered the indignity of falling behind UKIP in nationwide voting intentions, we were intrigued at the notion of a positive turnaround in their fortunes.

The story wasn't quite as exciting as it sounded, referring as it did to a local-council by-election in Inverness that the Lib Dems had captured from Labour in November 2011 (quite why the Herald feels it to suddenly be front-page news in April 2012 we're not sure), beating the SNP by seven votes. But as we casually skimmed the piece we were startled into alertness by the revelation that the election had been brought about by the conviction of the previous Labour councillor for benefit fraud.

Attentive readers can't have failed to notice that the Unionist parties and media have been on something of a witch-hunt against the SNP recently, particularly the party's councillors and prospective councillors as – quite coincidentally, we're sure – crucial local-government elections loom.

The best-known example is of course that of MSP Bill Walker, which we've documented at some length before, and who has been the recipient of far more media and political opprobrium for violent crimes he's alleged to have committed 20 years ago as a private individual (but strenuously denies and has not been charged with, let alone found guilty) than Scottish Labour MP Eric Joyce, who pleaded guilty to a number of violent drunken assaults committed while a serving MP (indeed, committed in the House Of Commons) yet remains the elected representative of the people of Falkirk.

But we've also had the bizarre case of Lyall Duff, a man hounded out of the party under concerted and suspiciously-timed media pressure – most notably from the Telegraph, the Scotsman and the Herald – for some frank but fairly innocuous comments made weeks ago on a private Facebook page which appears to have been hacked in order to view them, leading to the curious situation where none of the newspapers involved have actually printed any images of Duff's alleged comments, citing possible legal issues.

(It's curious because if the information was obtained lawfully, there can be no possible grounds to fear publishing it. If Mr Duff expressed his views in public, they're fair game to reproduce. If he didn't, the newspapers concerned are guilty of intercepting someone's private communications, which is a criminal offence.)

Yesterday the Scotsman whipped up another smear about an SNP councillor, this time a non-story about a non-existent conflict of interest with a company in administration, and today the lead story – that's the lead story – in its Politics section is an absurd and hysterical piece based around an article openly written by an SNP MSP in a newsletter and illustrated with a picture of her, but which (in addition to spelling her name wrongly) attributes her academic history to the wrong university. This error leads the Scotsman to bewilderingly describe the entire newsletter as a "fake leaflet".

Earlier this month the same paper prominently reported some rather feeble allegations of "ballot-rigging" by SNP members (in an internal candidate-selection process), and also ran with a story of another SNP councillor who'd apologised for making a tasteless joke. Attentive readers will note that the media rarely fails to include the word "SNP" in the headlines of articles like the ones we've listed in this piece.

But oddly, even though it only happened a few months ago, we couldn't remember reading of any Labour councillor being convicted of benefit fraud, which seemed strange as you'd imagine it was a bigger story than a badly-subbed newsletter or some sour grapes from an unselected council candidate. So we got our Googling hats on.

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Labour’s attack boomerang 27

Posted on April 09, 2012 by

Last week saw another deployment of Labour's secret weapon in the fight against the SNP and their dastardly independence plans. The device is a WMD (Weapon of MisDirection) which the party has unleashed several times. But the weapon has a persistent teething problem – it has a tendency to come straight back and hit the user in the rear when they least expect it, while rarely managing even a glancing blow off the intended target. (Which in this case is of course the SNP.)

We've seen the patented Attack Boomerang in action on many occasions (the most recent being the bizarrely ill-judged attack on the SNP's referendum consultation which rebounded particularly badly on the party's "deputy" Scottish leader Anas Sarwar, and forced even the BBC to reluctantly acknowledge Labour's embarrassment), but one of the strangest was Labour's bitter criticism of the SNP over the fact that it had persuaded Amazon, the internet retailing giant, to recently open a large centre in the Dunfermline area and provide thousands of new jobs.

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The Big Lie and the many small lies 18

Posted on April 02, 2012 by

We’ve referenced “The Big Lie” before on Wings Over Scotland. As that link explains, it’s a propaganda technique invented by Adolf Hitler in order to convince people of particularly enormous untruths. It’s one often employed by the Unionist parties, especially Labour – to name but one example, their persistent labelling of the SNP as “Tartan Tories”, despite the independently-assessed facts that the SNP are considerably to the left of Labour on the political spectrum, and that on an equally impartial policy-convergence test it’s Labour who are by far the closest of all Scotland’s parties to the Conservatives in terms of ideology.

But while in the internet age the Big Lie is harder to get away with, recently Labour and its ever-compliant friends in the Scottish media have begun to utilise a subtle twist on the method – the Big Lie Made Up Of Many Small Lies. This new variant can be seen most clearly in this weekend’s co-ordinated, manufactured outbreak of outrage about the Scottish Government’s consultation on the independence referendum.

Scotland On Sunday went with the story first, in an embarrassingly transparent and incoherent piece from Tom Peterkin, and the Scotsman clearly thought the “scandal” good enough to also lead with it on today’s front page, under the gibberish headline “Nationalists anonymous spark new referendum dispute“.

(Is “Nationalists Anonymous” some sort of support group for Labour, Lib Dem and Tory members who back independence? If so, their name is a proper noun and really ought to have both of its words capitalised.)

The Herald also runs a front-page lead on the same topic, entitled “Salmond accused of rigging poll feedback“, and it was the main item on The Sunday Politics Scotland, with Scottish Labour’s de facto leader Anas Sarwar given lots of airtime to attack the SNP’s increasingly effective Stewart Hosie on the allegations (who comported himself extremely well, and is fast becoming one of the party’s most reliable assets).

But the reason the Big Lie Made Up Of Many Small Lies is an effective technique is that it makes it considerably harder for the victim of the lie(s) to refute it/them, simply because it’s hard to know where to start. To illustrate the point, let’s see if we can break down this particular Big Lie (“The SNP are rigging the consultation!”) into just some of its component parts.

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Scot The Difference 23

Posted on April 01, 2012 by

Can any alert readers pick out the interesting contradiction from this page in today’s Scotland On Sunday? (Specifically the absurd piece of drivel by Tom Peterkin the paper has chosen to manufacture some embarrassing fake outrage over.) If you don’t have the eyes of a hawk, click on the image to see it full size.

First to spot it wins dinner with Tom Harris. Losers get two dinners with Tom Harris.

A new low 1

Posted on April 01, 2012 by

Normally we enjoy a little chuckle at Kevin McKenna’s weekly column in the Guardian, as befits one of the stalwarts of our Zany Comedy Relief link section. On taking an early peek at this week’s effort, it looked to be one of those rare occasions when Kevin takes a break from slagging off the SNP and talks about something else, but instead we were horrified to witness one of the most despicable things we’ve seen in the mainstream “quality” press for quite some time.

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Salmond: the secret of his success 14

Posted on March 30, 2012 by

The Tories blow £110,000 on tea and biscuits in a single department in three months:


Meanwhile, in Edinburgh, Alex Salmond pays for two cups of tea and two Caramel Wafers out of his own pocket and makes £1m profit in a single afternoon:

Is it any wonder the canny Scottish people would rather have the clever First Minister running their country than the hapless Tories?

The fine art of smearing 10

Posted on March 28, 2012 by

As the fallout from Cruddasgate continues, it's instructive to watch the attempts of both the Unionist parties and the media to drag the SNP through the mud along with the Tories, Labour and the Lib Dems. The print and online media have both had a stab today, with the Telegraph running a lengthy piece about Alex Salmond inviting lottery winners Chris and Colin Weir for a cup of tea at Bute House before they made a £1m donation to the SNP, and the Caledonian Mercury picking up the same story as part of a Hamish Macdonell op-ed.

The latter is the more interesting, on account of a couple of somewhat contradictory paragraphs in it. About halfway down the column, Macdonell makes this assertion:

"The issue here is not the money or where it comes from. The issue here is the nature of what is being promised by the parties in return for these donations."

And it's a very fair point. Nobody sensible is objecting to people giving money to political parties in itself. Donations are absolutely vital to the continued functioning of our political system as it stands. There are (deeply unpopular) arguments to be made about changing that system to one of public funding, and there are arguments against having political parties (rather than individual members) at all, but neither scenario is currently the case, so parties need donations. Nothing wrong with that.

As Macdonell correctly points out, the issue is whether those donations are being used to influence policy in favour of vested (usually commercial) interests. But if that's the case, what are the Weirs doing in the story? Macdonell's demand that:

"If the UK’s most successful lottery winners are invited in for tea with the first minister before offering the SNP a huge donation, that should be declared."

…makes no sense in the stated context of influence being the issue. There's no suggestion that the Weirs sought to influence any SNP policy. As former SNP activists it's probably fair to assume that they already support most of the party's aims, and it's hard to see what benefit they could possibly be seeking in return, being as they're already sitting on a bank account with 160 million quid in it.

We have no argument with the broad thrust of the CalMerc piece. We're all in favour of transparency when it comes to donations. But then, the SNP made no secret of the Weirs' donation – indeed, it'd be fair to say they shouted it from the rooftops. So whether the First Minister entertained them to a cuppa and a Caramel Wafer beforehand is neither here nor there. Actively soliciting contributions is not in itself the slightest bit underhand – every party does it openly every day.

The Weirs have no place in any story about dodgy donations. They are not a business, and are not seeking favours in return for their money. They are Scottish citizens and residents, not foreigners prohibited by law from giving money to politicial parties. And the First Minister, it seems, actively sought them out, rather than them paying for access to him in order to lobby the Scottish Government for their own ends.

But just as with the expenses scandal, the forces of Unionism will not be dissuaded by such trivialities as the relevant facts as they try to haul the SNP into the pit of sleaze alongside the London parties. As ever, we recommend reading the pro-Union press – if you must read it at all – through a very long lens.

The Scotsman: a user’s guide 9

Posted on February 03, 2012 by

The Scotsman is a big paper (in terms of content if not readership). Today’s issue is 104 pages long, a full five of which are devoted to its front-page lead story. But here at Wings Over Scotland we appreciate that you’re busy people and can’t always afford to devote hefty chunks of your day to reading everything in full, especially when there’s so much happening in the world of Scottish politics at the moment.

So to save you some time we’ve helpfully edited the article down, cutting it off at the point where you can safely stop reading without fear of missing anything. (It doesn’t just work today – any time you see these three words, you can confidently move on.)

“ONE of Scotland’s leading experts on public finance has cast doubt on the Scottish Government’s ability to produce fair and accurate economic reports, ahead of the debate on independence. Professor Arthur Midwinter -“

That’s a good 15 minutes of your life rescued there, in which you can get on and do something more productive and rewarding instead, such as seeing if you can make the sky turn purple just by thinking at it. No need to thank us, it’s all part of the service.

Back to business 0

Posted on December 01, 2011 by

Okay, so after yesterday's fit of grand polemic for St Andrew's Day we've got some normal news to catch up on again. We left off mentioning this before because the Newsnet Scotland server had a bizarre extended outage and because the feature itself is horribly written, but the statistical fact that the mainstream Scottish media is 11,319 times more likely to run a story based on the SNP being accused of some terrible wrong than they are to do the same thing to the Tories, and that "accused" stories directed against the SNP make up 88% of all such articles, is definitely worth examining if you haven't already.

Meanwhile, the BBC and Herald run a pair of bone-chilling pieces about the economic future of the UK (the latter one also echoed in the Scotsman). In the coming years before the independence referendum, it's increasingly clear that it's going to get harder and harder for the Unionist parties to credibly push the "stronger together, weaker apart" line, because it's hard to imagine how an independent Scotland bursting with natural resources could possibly be in a bigger mess than successive Labour and Tory governments have left Britain in, even if we elected The Krankies to run it for a laugh.

The Scotsman also runs with an interesting piece linking the gay marriage consultation with the independence referendum, highlighting comments by former SNP leader Gordon Wilson suggesting that the SNP can ill afford to alienate a single voter in the run-up to the vote with such controversial policies. It's a fair enough point, except that with Labour and the Lib Dems on the same side as the SNP on the issue, and the Tories actually led by a lesbian, we're not sure there's much scope there for the opposition to exploit it politically. (Curiously, while the Scotsman piece makes great play of Wilson's SNP connection, it neglects to mention anywhere that Bashir Maan, one of the other opponents of gay marriage extensively quoted in the piece along with Cardinal Keith O'Brien, is a prominent former Labour figure.)

And as with the sectarianism bill and minimum pricing, the SNP is wisely front-loading its more contentious policies into the first half of the Parliament – presumably counting on any furore having long died down by the time of the referendum, as armies of angry Old-Firm-supporting gay couples enraged by the price of booze for their weddings fail to materialise on the streets.

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