When day doesn’t follow night Posted on July 07, 2014 by Rev. Stuart Campbell Most people only read one newspaper, if that. We, for our sins, read almost all of them, and if you do that you learn stuff that other people don’t know. Firstly, you spot how many agency stories pop up in multiple papers, almost word-for-word identical. (Though it can also be fascinating to see which paragraphs sometimes get left out.) And secondly, you find out how many stories aren’t the result of journalism, but of one paper’s hack reading something in another paper the day before, lifting the quotes and presenting it to readers as their own story. (Occasionally they’ll credit the original source, eg “such-and-such made the comments in the Guardian yesterday”, but more often they won’t bother, and will just write “said in an interview” or similar.) And as with the agency stories, it’s interesting to note which stories DON’T get stolen. Yesterday we highlighted a piece in the Sunday Times (crediting the source, of course, as we always do) in which a director of the pro-devolution Reform Scotland thinktank made a stinging attack on the UK government’s pessimistic projections for an independent Scotland’s oil revenues, and claimed that the likely true figure was a breathtaking £8bn a year higher – enough money to completely wipe out even the highest estimates of the country’s deficit. Pretty big deal, right? So you’d naturally assume that the rest of the media would pick up on a representative of a respectable organisation endorsed by the No campaign making such a dramatic and potentially game-changing statement. At least, you would if you’d never read this site before. So we checked for you. DAILY RECORD: nothing SCOTTISH SUN: nothing THE SCOTSMAN: nothing THE HERALD: nothing SCOTTISH DAILY EXPRESS: nothing SCOTTISH DAILY MAIL: nothing GUARDIAN: nothing COURIER: nothing PRESS & JOURNAL: nothing BBC WEBSITE: nothing STV WEBSITE: nothing What most papers DO pick up on, however, is an embarrassingly feeble non-story about a tiny handful of businessmen who “feel like” they’ve been pressured by the Scottish Government to remain silent on the subject of independence. It’s based on a Channel 4 “Dispatches” show airing tonight, in which just FIVE business leaders (out of 50 surveyed) said they felt like there had been “implicit” suggestions that they should stay quiet in the debate. In other words, 90% of the survey said nobody had tried to exert pressure, and of the rest nobody could actually identify or quote a single comment or message, merely a vague feeling. It’s a laughable nothing of a result, yet it’s covered prominently in the Record, the Express, the Sun, the Scotsman (where it’s the front-page lead, no less), the Times, the Mail, the Guardian, the Herald, the Courier, the Press & Journal and, we have no doubt, the Auchtermuchty Observer. The Sun and Record also both pick up a bizarre piece from the Sunday Times about Scotland manager Jock Stein trying to cancel a 1982 scouting trip to New Zealand before that year’s World Cup because he thought Margaret Thatcher was about to start a nuclear war over the Falklands. But they don’t think there’s anything even slightly newsworthy about the fact that the UK government is trying to massively mislead Scots about their finances, to the tune of BILLIONS of pounds, in order to scare them into voting No. As ever, readers can draw their own conclusions.
Posted on: Mon, 07 Jul 2014 08:36:11 +0000
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