The small print
Two stories from opposite ends – or at least, what USED to be opposite ends – of the newspaper spectrum caught our eye this morning. On first glance they have nothing in common, but closer investigation shows that they’re in fact cut from the same cloth. And although one of them is a little more contemptible than the other (admittedly by a narrow margin), it isn’t the one you might think.
The front-page lead story in this morning’s Herald (accompanied by a truly remarkable piece of Photoshop hackery) is headlined “Revealed: Salmond’s forest wind farm plans”, and leads with the line “Large swathes of Scotland’s forests are being sold off on long-term leases to wind-farm developers”. At least, it does NOW. When we first looked at the page a couple of hours before writing his piece, the words “on long-term leases” were missing, misleading the paper’s readers with the suggestion that the nation’s wilderness was being flogged off altogether.
(You can just make it out on the Google page-cache screenshot above, and you can also still see the old version on countless news aggregator sites like Silobreaker.)
Nowhere near where we live sells the Herald so we can’t check, but we’d happily wager you a pound to a penny that the version in the print edition carries the original text (EDIT: now confirmed), even though the story itself reluctantly reveals – almost at the very end – the truth: that the Forestry Commission is leasing some land, not selling it, and that Scottish Government policy dictates that any tree-felling that results from the scheme will be balanced by compensatory planning elsewhere.
The other story is an equally-prominent front-page splash in the Scottish Sun. Under the title “We’re in the mummy”, it’s a story the right-wing tabloid press runs several times a year, with only the names and places changing. It’s the standard-issue “benefit scrounger” attack piece, whose hapless subject on this occasion is one Susan Greenfield, a mother of 12 from Wishaw.
The article is littered with some extremely unflattering pictures of Mrs Greenfield (who, to be scrupulously fair to the Sun’s photographer, does give off the uncanny impression that someone covered Rikki Fulton in glue and chased him through Matalan’s clearance aisle on a dusty day), along with some entirely irrelevant details about the numerous fathers of her children. Making Mrs Greenfield appear an unattractive sort of person – in the moral as well as physical senses – is a task akin to shooting fish in a barrel, but the Sun’s reporter lays it on thick.
As usual, the object is to maintain the public perception of all benefit claimants as despicable parasites by highlighting the vast sums of money the state allegedly bestows on such unlikeable individuals – or as the somewhat misleading secondary headline has it, “£30K handout for tot”. But as with the Herald windfarm story, the rather different reality is buried grudgingly in the details.
Unusually for the subject of such pieces, Mrs Greenfield does not appear to be part of a workless family. He partner, one William Findlay, is identified as a “warehouseman”, and the breakdown of the family’s benefit payments makes no mention of Job Seekers’ Allowance, Working Tax Credits or any sort of disability benefit being paid to him. The vast bulk of the £30,200 figure – £22,805 – is made up of Child Benefit and Child Tax Credits for the five of Mrs Greenfield’s children who are under 16.
(The rest comes from figures the Sun has assumed – but not apparently verified – for Income Support and housing benefits.)
Child Benefit and Child Tax Credits, of course, are both non-means-tested benefits payable to anyone with eligible children, regardless of income. A rational person motivated by something other than hatred of the working class might quite reasonably feel it was rather more of a scandal that the taxpayer forks out billions of pounds a year to well-off mothers who don’t need that money than that we give it to someone living on a council estate in Wishaw whose kids are almost all sleeping two to a room.
The Sun explicitly refers to Mrs Greenfield as a “benefits sponger raking in handouts”, and gets some pondscum from the Tax Payers Alliance to issue the usual outraged rentaquote boilerplate. But to be honest, if it was advertised as a job we wouldn’t want to bring up 12 kids in Wishaw for £30K a year, even if that was all salary. (Since presumably Mr Findlay’s job puts food on the table and pays most of the bills.)
It sounds like pretty hard work to us, and for as long as the state actively incentivises people to breed – because it knows it needs a constant supply of bodies to pay for future pensions, and the only alternative is to set a minimum wage high enough to enable people to save for the future, which is COMMUNISM – there can be no legitimate grounds to criticise her fecundity, even if (as, to be honest, this blog is) you’re instinctively prejudiced against people who were apparently off sick the day they explained how condoms work at school. But we’re getting off the point.
We’re sure everyone at the Herald looks down their nose at Sun journalists for inhabiting the gutter end of the market. But horrible as it is, the Sun’s piece tells no lies. Pejorative terms like “sponger” are ugly and disingenuous, but ultimately they’re a matter of opinion, and the same goes for characterising state benefits as “handouts”. So far as we’re aware the Sun article is accurate with regard to the facts, albeit spun in a loathsome way.
The Herald telling its readers that Scotland’s forests were being “sold off” when in fact they’re remaining entirely in public ownership and being used to generate renewable energy and wealth for the entire nation, though, is something else. Specifically, it’s a flat-out lie, especially when they know it’s not true and eventually admit it further on in the same story. And it’s not the first one since Magnus Gardham took charge of the paper’s political coverage. We know which we hold in more contempt.
Posted comments on both the windfarm ‘story’ and Gardhams opinion piece on Holyrood committees.
They are unlikely to be published.
I thought the Scotsman had scraped the barrel with its recent badly photoshopped image of the FM on the back of Hoys bike, but The Herald seems to have joined the party.
The Herald print edition has the original version.
Excellent news. I rent my flat – I presume in the Herald’s opinion my landlord has “sold it off” to me.
How’s this for blatant dishonesty? The Dunfermline Press carries an article under the headline – SNP MSP backs Labour over schools.
The MSP referred to is Bill Walker, who was expelled from the SNP about six months ago!
And to compound their brazen dishonesty they add a photograph of Walker wearing an SNP rosette. Is it credible that the local paper could be unaware of Walker’s expulsion from the SNP? Of course it isn’t! Which means they’re lying bastards!
link to bit.ly
As soon as I began to read the herald headlines I knew it was a lie, when I continued to read the article it made no sense and confirmed to me that it was the usual shite perporated by a shite newspaper who are under the illusion that people actually believe their shite.
We should be prepared for this.
If they can’t find anything remotely the truth to bash the SNP with, they will be forced to make it up.
I wonder if they have already arranged with William that Kate should produce the heir a few weeks before the referendum, or if poor old Harry will be obliged to marry someone that week…possibly both.
If they get really desperate, heaven knows what they will do. No wonder we want away.
and yet the fact remains that Forestry Commission Scotland are selling more land than they are buying, and since the introduction of what is euphemistically called their “repositioning programme” this trend has been accelerating. On the matter of leasing rather than selling off land to windfarm developers a cynic might say that this is nothing more than a rouse to avoid having to offer the land to communities under right to buy legislation.
On the matter of those receiving “benefits” I’d love to see the Sun investigate in similar detail the handouts from the public purse that our land owners and farmers receive.
Let’s face it, most of the land managed by the Foresty Commission is “forest” only in the loosest possible sense of the word, and is certainly not “wilderness”. They are plantations, and bear no more resemblance to actual forests than wheat fields or bowling greens do.
You may well be right Dunc, but I wouldn’t, on that basis, advocate setting up a Scottish Wilderness Commission……..it sounds too much like a Scottish Labour think tank
I think the real problem is where you’ve pointed it out, jake. The vast tracks of land tied up in ownership by a handful of people who then get equally large handouts from the public purse just for the privallege of being the owners and inheritors. The land is basically wasteland other than its use as a tap into your pockets.
It is ridiculous that in such a large and unpopulated country with a population that has remained relatively stable over decades or generations land is so expensive and houses are being crammed into tinier and tinier postage-stamp spaces when all-too-often around the corner there’s clearly space for miles yet.
On the topic though I’m wondering if the Scottish media are getting worse as the big day draws near or are we all just getting better at spotting the lies? With the Zany Comedy Relief crowd in the links seemingly becoming more unhinged with time it may be a bit of both.
I saw that headline in the Herald this morning as I picked it up off the mat to stuff it in my bag before going off on the march. My immediate thought was, it’s not looking good for my trial period to see whether I want to cancel my subscription or not.
Might give it a holiday till November 2014, or earlier if it comes out for YES.
So-called journalists like the lying Magnus Gardham wouldn’t be welcome even in the world of journalism. Pond scum doesn’t really quite do it.
What can be done about bare-faced lying by newspapers?
What can be done about the PCC who fail to bring these newspapers into line for libel?
Is it left to the offended libelled party to take these newspapers to task; newspapers who seem covered by a “Freedom of the Press” ideal, which is in itself, an open door for wholesale abuse?
Can it be the actual writer of the offending piece who is personally sued for libel?
There’s something very wrong with our justice system when, as an example, characters like Kelvin McKenzie are found to have published grossly wrong comments, in his case, related with the Hillsborough tragedy – yet nothing is officially done about it.
I picked up my copy of the Sunday Herald from the doormat, to read that yesterday’s rally was a disappointment for the organisers as they’d anticipated 7000 and only 5000 turned up.
I think that’s the final straw. I think I’m going to cancel the Herald, after more than 40 years as a loyal reader. I was gritting my teeth and putting up with the spin, but the lies are too much.
There is an apparently suicidal policy heading ever-downwards for both the Herald and Scotsman, which has absolutely no business sense to it.
Both papers seem hell-bent on pursuing an anti-SNP/Scottish Government line and the bottom line must be, just what can their shareholders be thinking about as it goes crazily on taking their investments down as it does so?
Or, is there something much more to it that’s worth the cost?
Whichever way it’s looked at, democracy seems to be taking a kicking from both these organisations and if politics in this country continue, as trends now continuously illustrate, these papers will not recover anything like the support they once enjoyed.
They’ve been ditched.