https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ajd4R-9BEIw
I hope this doesn’t seem vain. I just thought it was time for a wee reminder of how the media will distort the news in the run-up to Indyref2. I’m not watching Revolting Scotland for health reasons so I don’t really know how things are.
114 375 seems a lot but it still leaves millions of voters who haven’t seen it and might get some insight from it. Please share it if you think somebody might do so.
This was one of the very first posts in my blog back in 2014.
Talking-up Scotland 
Oh thank you so much for posting this (again) John. I feel like I should have done more internet stalking of you now (Or read your blog from the start??). I saw London’s Calling, and searched for you and Craig to find your blogs but really didn’t have any previous knowledge of your work. I really did stick to mainstream media during the 2014 referendum debate, not newspapers because I hated them anyway, mainly TV and mainly the BBC. But I have a funny little brain, so when I hear ‘…a blow to the independence…’ , it thinks to itself ‘oh really? And why would that be?’, if it is not adequately explained the ‘blow’ gets filed under -unlikely-. Anyway, the cumulative effect on me, after everything was duly filed away, filtered, categorised, broken down, simplified and synthesised (it really DOES take me a long time to make a decision), was that the only argument against independence was that we were likely to get targeted by a rogue asteroid heading straight for Scotland, and the argument for it seemed to have some good solid economic reasoning and a greater social awareness. This was from my initial stand point of it would be nice to have, but not at any cost. But, as I say, I have a funny brain, it does all that stuff itself (sometimes).
What is interesting, is at the time, I did not hear of your report – although there was some mention of bias in the BBC – and the only independence blogger that was mentioned was the radical, extremist wings over Scotland. Imagine my surprise when I venture to that blog in later years to find, not only that it is still going strong, but that it is a perfectly rational, mostly professionally written, very informative blog. Still looking for the extremism.
So, as we know people tend to tar others with the same brush as themselves, those that have labelled WoS as extremist must themselves be extremist,,, as I have now decided unionists are. They are NOT the norm, support for independence is the normal way to be.
So, is the BBC and the media worse, the same, or better? I would say they are worse – but is that because I am more aware of the bias now? I don’t think so, I had to seek out independence blogs, and my reasons for doing so was due to media coverage around the EU referendum – I would say the media became more extreme around that time. I noticed blanket coverage in the media of some inane news item when I wanted to hear about certain issues going on in parliament and things. The final straw for me was the debate on trident not being mentioned at all, wrote to my MP and watched the thing first hand and everything, because there was no news – and got angry at not getting the news. I mean, ALL the newspapers and TV stations report on exactly the same thing – too much of a coincidence. Anyway, the only outlets giving a variety of news items were, are, bizarrely, independence blogs! Even when the subject matter is not directly related to independence, these are the places to go to find out what is actually happening.
I’ve rambled on about me, me, me again here, but I’ve let it out now. It’s a really good video John, and very much worth repeated postings – you might think you are repeating yourself, but you don’t know when someone new is joining you & might benefit from these insights. Now that you are proactively countering the bad news, instead of retrospectively commenting on it, I can see clearly the large amount of propaganda aimed at putting us back in the box. I really am surprised at the number of good things there is about Scotland. Don’t ever go back to watching the BBC! You’d be too tempted to counter what they say rather than only looking out the positive things.
LikeLike
Good advice, thanks
LikeLike