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A sad, sad robot all alone 139

Posted on August 28, 2018 by

It really takes some going to stand out for especially terrible journalism in the Scottish press this week, given the vast acres of page-space that are still being devoted to truly abysmal, and borderline legally-actionable, barrel-scraping articles about the recent allegations made against Alex Salmond. So hats off to perhaps the only man who could possibly have achieved it.

Ladies and gentlemen, who else but David Leask?

Let’s see just who we meet, shall we?

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Filling in the gaps again 382

Posted on April 04, 2018 by

The Scottish Daily Mail’s never-ending quest to find the very bottom of the SNP BAD barrel reached a new record depth today, somehow managing to blame the Scottish Government for… whiplash injuries.

But as ever, it turned out the Mail’s story was missing some key data.

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Here isn’t the news 163

Posted on May 11, 2017 by

Something really quite strange happened yesterday. The Prime Minister of the United Kingdom was caught red-handed in the act of telling a bare-faced, unarguable lie in the middle of a general election campaign, and nobody cared.

Reacting to the Crown Prosecution Service decision not to prosecute dozens of Tory MPs who’d broken the law in getting elected in 2015, the PM offered up a quote, which was reported in most of the newspapers:

“If we look at the expenses issue, we have seen all the major parties, and the Scottish nationalists, being fined for mistakes having been made on national expenses. We’ve paid our fines, and I sincerely hope that the other parties are paying theirs.”

Nice wee bit of snark on “all the major parties, and the Scottish nationalists” there. But there’s a slight problem with the statement, which is that it’s an absolute lie.

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Incompetence and lies 263

Posted on April 26, 2017 by

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.

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The Great Urging 594

Posted on January 10, 2017 by

As we’ve always understood it, readers, the definition of “news” is supposed to be “a new thing which has happened that people didn’t previously know about”.

brokenrec

Evidently the rules have changed since we were young cub reporters.

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The angry saboteurs 281

Posted on November 06, 2016 by

There are three separate articles in today’s Sunday Times on the same subject, all containing the same information, of which the below is the most concise.

timeschina

So let’s recap the events, shall we?

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The Some Arsehole Doctrine 226

Posted on November 04, 2016 by

Yesterday we drew attention to a disgracefully untrue claim made by the leader of the Ruth Davidson No Surrender To A Second Referendum Party at the day’s FMQs.

Davidson had attempted to pass off the personal views of just THREE members of the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors as representing the official position of the august and 125,000-strong body. It’s the sort of bare-faced lie we’re sadly accustomed to hearing from opposition leaders in the chamber, but it was also an illustration of a much wider and depressingly-growing phenomenon.

arseholegulls

Let’s learn about it together.

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