PDF for printing: there-can-be-good-news-about-scotland

Images: europol.europa.eu, speakerpedia.com *

 ‘The Scottish Government has written to the UK Home Secretary (Amber Rudd) urging her to sign protocols to allow British police to remain part of the European Crime-fighting Agency, EUROPOL.’ (BBC Scotland, 30^th September 2016 at 06:30am)

Good news for the SG/SNP can be broadcast but it has to be unrelated to independence and in line with the wider BBC agenda including the support for EU membership shared by its post-Blairite senior staff.

The BBC’s senior staffing is full of people who were appointed or promoted in the Blair era. They are strongly Unionist, in their own interests. They value further promotions unrestricted by a border and self-perceive themselves as modern, outward-looking progressives. They are strongly Europhile, in their own interests. They value opportunities to travel and self-perceive themselves as modern, outward-looking progressives. Like Blair, they want to see themselves as more caring than the Tories but they don’t want to pay too much tax and they really want to retain their salaries, perks and other privileges. They are by no means Tories. They fear the nasty right-wing of the Party which does want to destroy them and their allegedly lefty bias. There was a Sutton Trust report which did suggest bias in favour of New Labour. I have to admit not being able to trace this reference. Like all elite groups, they need no conspiracy to create their patterned behaviour. They act in their own interests and their interests are the same as for that elite as a whole. They go to the same kinds of schools and universities. They recognise each other on BBC appointment panels. For example, do you remember Kirsty Wark (Wellington Girls School) as she sniped at Alex Salmond on BBC Newsnight before going off to share holiday accommodation with Jack McConnell, then New Labour First Minister?

You can see from the results below that reports unfavourable to the SG/SNP continue to dominate the early morning (06:30) broadcast. Also, reports favourable to Labour in Scotland are disproportionately common. Third, despite repeated errors by the Tories in Scotland, there are no reports on these.

My rationale for looking at the early morning reports, linking them to voter anxiety, is more fully justified in an earlier piece ‘The Power of Nightmares: Waking up to early morning bad news on BBC Scotland and fearing the unknown’ at:

https://thoughtcontrolscotland.com/2016/09/22/the-power-of-nightmares-waking-up-to-early-morning-bad-news-on-bbc-scotland-and-fearing-the-unknown/

The rest of the Friday 30^th September report covered:

1. Football bribes
2. The EUROPOL story
3. The stricken oil rig being loaded onto a ship
4. Links between Dumfries and Kenya

Running Total:

Running total 21 to 30/9/16                                              Number of reports

Bad news for SG/SNP                                                            9

Good news for SG/SNP                                                         4

Bad news for Labour                                                              1

Good news for Labour                                                           5

Bad news for CP                                                                      0

Good news for CP                                                                   0

Still Tory-arse-free and requiring some salt regarding the Good News for SG/SNP figure.

*Footnote re the images above: Wow that’s brutal! I mean the EUROPOL building, of course.

pdf for printing bbc-scotland-still-ruthless

 Images: atrl.net, Daily Torygraph

‘Tory leader Ruth Davidson ‘sends Scots money to Westminster’ (The National, September 29^th 2016)

‘Scottish charity accuses RSPCA of ‘stealing from Scotland’s animals’ (Daily Torygraph, 2009)

It’s been five days since I wrote ‘BBC Scotland is utterly Ruth-less as well as utterly useless but It is not all doom and gloom, even in Scotland’ and, in it, noted a number of newsworthy faux pas by the Scottish Tories:

‘Tory MSP blows off key parliament vote to take part in World Cup referee training’

‘Tory toff MSP claimed eye-watering £113 for taxi to airport when catching train would have cost just £8.50’

‘Moneybags Tory MSP accused of exploiting parliamentary position to further his business interests’

Back in 2009, we had the alleged theft of the Scottish SPCA’s charity income by the Royal SPCA. There’s been no further reporting of the story so I take it all has been resolved with RSPCA only getting a wee share of the Scottish money to pay for injuries to the corgis on their regular Balmoral visits. I wonder who paid for the treatment (to his foot) after a Stirling University student kicked one of them back in the ‘sixties’? I hope the above overridden buffalo will be able to draw confidently on sufficient funds for his or her treatment from the SSPCA.

The National newspaper headline, above, suggests that the Scottish Tories may have been funding the Tory Policy Research Unit, for work on non-devolved issues, with money which they can then claim back as expenses….from us! I searched and I can’t find the story anywhere else in the Scottish MSM. Needless to say BBC Scotland didn’t mention it this morning. True to failing form, the Herald headlined instead ‘SNP given bloody nose over NHS downgrade proposals.’ There’s a torrent of criticism below, by readers, but I’m too tired to join in. What’s the point?

The National also noted that:

‘Recently the PRU was investigated by Parliament’s expenses watchdog over claims they had indirectly used public money to pay for a suite of rooms used in an orgy. In 2011 PRU booked the penthouse, costing up to £2,500 per night, at Manchester’s Light Apart Hotel for the Tory party conference. According to the Independent, PRU boss Ian Corby advertised the sex-party in the penthouse suite on gay dating app, Grindr. He was later removed from the Tory’s list of approved candidates.’

I decided against a visual image for this part of the story.

What we did get from BBC Scotland at 06:28 was:

1. New figures reveal that councils have been given £140 million for child care by the SG which has not been spent on the programme.
2. Missing person
3. Aberdeen University launch new Master programme on rig decommissioning

When will we hear anything about the Tories as they skid from one error to the next? Either way the first story reflects badly on the SG’s ability to implement its policies. The new MA programme announcement gave them a chance to extend the report beyond the actual story to remind us again of how the oil industry is on its last legs.

Running Total:

Running total 21 to 29/9/16                              Number of reports

Bad news for SG/SNP                                                             9

Good news for SG/SNP                                                          3

Bad news for Labour                                                              1

Good news for Labour                                                           5

Bad news for CP                                                                      0

Good news for CP                                                                   0

The same clear pattern getting even clearer by the day.

Sources:

http://www.thenational.scot/politics/tory-leader-ruth-davidson-sends-scots-money-to-westminster.22980

https://wordpress.com/stats/insights/thoughtcontrolscotland.com

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/scotland/4447370/Scottish-charity-accuses-RSPCA-of-stealing-from-Scotlands-animals.html

pdf for printing: the-arrival-of-the-goldfinch

Images: national galleries.org, abebooks.com, amazon.co.uk

‘One of the most iconic paintings in the world, which has never before been seen in Scotland, will make a flying visit to Edinburgh this autumn. The Goldfinch by Carel Fabritius (1622-1654) will travel to the Scottish National Gallery from its home in the Royal Picture Gallery Mauritshuis, in The Hague.’ (nationalgalleries.org)

I read recently of the impending arrival of this tiny painting in Edinburgh and it caught my attention. The Goldfinch, the bird not so much the painting, had been somehow important for me since the age of only nine. My grandfather, in his later years, had been a roadman in the Berwickshire hills above Duns where I was born. In the summer of 1961, age ten, I spent the school holidays with him while my mother was in hospital for an extended period. My father had his work to go to. During that period, as he maintained the road verges with his mighty scythe, he also introduced me to his hobby (pun?) of bird-watching. It became my hobby too and for Christmas that year, he sent me a pair of binoculars and a book of birds, the one above. I still have it. In it, I saw an image of a goldfinch for the first time. I was stunned by its exotic colouring and amazed that such a thing could live in this cold place.

I wasn’t to see a real goldfinch for another thirty years. We lived in a mining village and then a dock area in Scotland’s industrial centre. No goldfinch appeared there. Then, one winter’s day in the early 1990’s now living in Ayr, my peripheral vision picked up a flutter of wings outside my study window. It was a flock of around six or seven goldfinches feeding on a lavender bush. They were only there for a few minutes before they had devoured all the seeds and moved on. The bush died soon after and I haven’t seen them since but the Goldfinch is clearly deep in my subconscious waiting to be called on. So when I read of the iconic painting arriving in Edinburgh it seemed to trigger something. I bought a print of the painting and a copy of Donna Tartt’s novel of the same name. The book is about:

‘Theodore Decker who, at the age of 13, survives a terrorist bombing at an art museum, in which his beloved mother dies. Staggering out through the debris, he takes with him the world-famous painting of ‘The Goldfinch’. This unique object of beauty sustains him through many trials as he descends from that first theft into other crimes, including years later killing a gangster in self-defense. From that pit, he gradually climbs by returning the picture (for a huge reward) and trying to reconcile with the people he has wronged.’ (Wikipedia.org)

It is a beautiful thing, the painting, but it was only when I got the print, that I noticed something quite ugly – the bird is chained. Seeing that chain around the bird’s thin leg has changed my thinking dramatically. The beautiful thing became suddenly tragic for me.

OK, here’s the leap to politics. Don’t groan, too loudly, I know it’s a clumsy leap.

Not long after my grandfather’s introduction to the exquisite and seemingly unattainable goldfinch, his son, my father, began to introduce me to politics. He had been a Scottish Nationalist for as long as he could remember. Having left school at fourteen, his formal schooling was short. He had picked up some Scottish history and living only ten miles from the border with England, on land owned almost entirely by Anglicised gentry, this had developed into a mix of class and ethnicity-based hostilities. Freedom from ‘English’ rule was his answer and it became mine too for a while. Of course things have changed. Like you, reader, I know it’s much more complicated. My dad had never met working-class English people who he might have come to empathise with, so can be excused, I hope.

So, the goldfinch link is? Well, the dream of seeing Scottish independence has been with me almost as long as the dream of seeing the goldfinch dream has. Somehow, in my admittedly confused and often tangential mind, the two ‘feel’ the same. Does seeing, for the first time, that the bird was chained, make this comparison any more poignant or is it just a clumsier leap? I’m not responsible for my subconscious, scientists tell me, so I don’t really care.

I don’t know if I’ll make it through to Edinburgh to see the painting but I’ve seen the real thing, if only once. In 2014, I hoped to see the other one, unchained. There’s time yet.

Sources:

https://www.nationalgalleries.org/whatson/on-now-coming-soon/the-goldfinch/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Goldfinch_(novel)

Photograph: Mark Runnacles/Getty Images

 ‘Nicola Sturgeon vows to support steel manufacturing in Scotland’

 No, that wasn’t a BBC Scotland headline. It’s from the Guardian of 22^nd October 2015 and it reported something that BBC Scotland had clearly forgotten.

Here are the stories BBC Scotland reported on the morning of 28^th September 2016 starting at 06:27am:

1. Production is to officially resume at Scotland’s last major steelworks. The First Minister will mark the reopening…’
2. The Scottish tourist industry has been boosted through the Summer with the help of the weaker pound as business confidence more widely show signs of improvement….’slightly more firms’
3. The Broons
4. Football

 It does look good compared to previous days doesn’t it? You can let your granny watch this one without needing to worry too much about her meds. The steel story was headlined but we sure weren’t getting any visuals of Nicola anywhere near the steelworks or any mention of the SNP/SG’s role in saving the plant. We got stock moving images of steel production. I don’t know where they got them from but wouldn’t it be unsurprising if they were actually of a Chinese or Indian plant? I’m not going to count this as good news for the SG/SNP. Here’s how Common Space headlined it in March 2016:

‘Scottish steel works saved by Scottish Government-brokered deal’

Such credit was otherwise non-existent in our MSM. The Sunday Post even allowed a Tory spokesman to welcome the deal to sort of get the credit from skimmers and slow readers, in paragraph three, while it was only in paragraph seven that we heard of  ‘A huge effort by unions and Scottish Government ministers’ (!).  I’m sure the unions played a big part but ‘and the Scottish Government’ really? Where did the money come from?

Addition 17:08 pm: Say the news was the other way round and there was a suggestion that the SNP would be to blame for job losses as opposed to being responsible directly for job gains how would the BBC report it? Here are just three from 2014:

Scottish independence: Babcock predicts Clyde job losses (by Glenn Campbell)

Scottish independence: ‘Yes’ vote means loss of shipbuilding jobs, says Lamont

Scottish independence: ‘Yes’ vote carries substantial risk, says Weir Group (by James Cook & Andrew Black)

You’ll recognise the authors well I’m sure.

 So ‘the Scottish tourist industry has been boosted through the summer with the help of the weaker pound.’ No doubt it had but to select that explanation on its own is a bit unfair, isn’t it? All the workers in the tourism industry might as well have been plodding along as per usual and still get that wee boost…the lazy items. Did the BBC have evidence that the weaker pound was the major explanation? No they didn’t. It’s just an assumption. Seems plausible, I suppose yet their longer web report has no authority supporting the idea. If it’s just currency fluctuation, I suppose we should be careful not to get carried away and do anything daft like…eh….employ more folk?

‘Tourism boost to create 4,000 new jobs in Edinburgh’

Only yesterday, the Herald reported: ‘MORE than 4,000 new jobs are expected to be created in the tourism industry in the Scottish capital as visits rise by a third in the next four years.’ Are they mad? It’ll never last. Keep your money in the Royal Bank where it can be used sustainably for bonuses!

Try searching for ‘Scottish Tourism Boost’ and you’ll find that it might also have been music tourism, Outlander, whisky, heritage railways and the new Greenock cruise terminal. Come on BBC Scotland, get out a bit more! That ‘Broons’ stage play looks good. Mind you, will the tourists understand it?  There, you see, it’s never going to work is it? Just as well we have the ‘broad shoulders’ of the Union to protect us. Don’t go out. Certainly don’t go out of the Union.

Generous to a fault, I’ll give the Royal Bank report a ‘good news for the SG/SNP’ point despite the ’slightly more firms’ grudging.

Running Total:

Running total 21 to 28/9/16                            Number of reports

Bad news for SG/SNP                                                            7

Good news for SG/SNP                                                         3

Bad news for Labour                                                              1

Good news for Labour                                                           5

Bad news for CP                                                                      0

Good news for CP                                                                   0

Those Tories seem to be untouchable.  They must have done something true to their nature in the last few days.

Sources:

https://www.theguardian.com/business/2015/oct/22/nicola-sturgeon-vows-to-support-steel-manufacturing-in-scotland

https://www.commonspace.scot/articles/3747/scottish-steel-works-saved-scottish-government-brokered-deal

https://www.sundaypost.com/news/scottish-news/scottish-steel-jobs-saved-deal-struck-reopen-plants/

http://www.heraldscotland.com/news/14765789.Tourism_boost_to_create_4_000_new_jobs_in_Edinburgh/

Thought for the Day: I will accept and engage with criticism but I won’t be edited anymore

(steve-morrish.com)

I’ve been having a kind passage recently. Some may think I’ve been throwing the last of my toys out of the pram. For decades now, I’ve been under pressure to get my work published. This has often meant gritting my teeth in the face of self-important, partisan editors. Now retired, I can shed that load. More recently, I had the demoralising experience of allegedly pro-independence editors trying to modify my meanings and at other times suppress them. Naming no names, but my fondness for the left and for the anti-fracking campaign has seen two pieces rejected. Another, suggesting that Scotland has, relatively, been a kinder home for refugees drew patronising offers of improvement to counter my apparent softness on bigotry.

I’ve got a real problem with the whole notion of editors or gatekeepers. What makes them think themselves capable of editing me or you? I won’t be submitting anything ever anywhere again. I’ll post on my blog – thoughtcontrolscotland.com, happily receive comment and treat those who do so respectfully and rationally as my equals. I’ll use as my guide the words of that great German, Jurgen Habermas, who wrote:

Members of the public sphere must adhere to certain rules for an “ideal speech situation” to occur. They are:

1. Every subject with the competence to speak and act is allowed to take part in a discourse.

2a.   Everyone is allowed to question any assertion whatever.

2b.   Everyone is allowed to introduce any assertion whatever into the discourse.

2c.   Everyone is allowed to express their attitudes, desires and needs without any hesitation.

3. No speaker may be prevented, by internal or external coercion, from exercising his rights as laid down in (1) and (2)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ideal_speech_situation

If you had already reached these conclusions benefitting from your life in these digital days, I hope you’ll agree that it’s never too late.

Images: (http://content.time.com/, (http://leithbuiltships.blogspot.co.uk/)

PDF for printing: scottish-miserabilism-in-the-news

‘Scottish Miserabilism?’ Nae wunner. Look at BBC Depressing Scotland

 ‘It’s SHITE being Scottish! We’re the lowest of the low. The scum of the fucking Earth! The most wretched, miserable, servile, pathetic trash that was ever shat into civilization. Some hate the English. I don’t. They’re just wankers. We, on the other hand, are COLONIZED by wankers. Can’t even find a decent culture to be colonized BY. We’re ruled by effete arseholes. It’s a SHITE state of affairs to be in, Tommy, and ALL the fresh air in the world won’t make any fucking difference!’ (Mark ‘Rent-boy’ Renton in Trainspotting)

‘While I’m worth my room on this earth
I will be with you
While the Chief, puts sunshine on Leith
I’ll thank Him for His work
And your birth and my birth.’ (Sunshine on Leith by the Proclaimers)

Trainspotting or Sunshine on Leith, which will you have? How much will your choice be ‘you own?’ I’ll come back to the second question.

There’s a newish literary ‘movement’ (No reference to Renton in the loo above intended) doing the rounds of our media, called Scottish Miserabilism. Have a look at the recent filming of Lewis Grassic Gibbon’s Sunset Song and the lives of the characters in it and you’ll get the hang of it (Unfortunate turn of phrase?). There is and has been a lot of it about. I’ll leave you to list the examples you’ve suffered from schooldays until recent BBC adaptions. I haven’t read Sunset Song. Luckily, I got an exemption because we lived in a sunless, north-facing, flat in a dirty tenement block overlooking a canal.

Now, did the literature make us miserable or did our miserableness make the literature so? I’d go for a vicious cycle triggered in the first place by environmental factors such as poverty, rain and Calvinism. As for its maintenance today, I’d lay at least one muddy dod of blame on BBC Scotland for its endless pessimism caused at least in part by its ingrained Unionism. Is there evidence? See this from Huffington Post in February 2015:

‘What’s clear from this research is that more positive news is needed to outweigh the violence and destruction we’re exposed to every day. As psychologist Steven Pinker and international studies professor Andrew Mack write in Slate, the world is not going to hell in a handbasket, despite what the headlines suggest. Violence has actually decreased, and quality of life has improved for millions of people. Journalism should reflect these truths.’

Here’s a wee thought. Could this exposure over time lead to a preference for one word (no) over another (yes) nearly all the time?

It’s been six days now since I started bean-counting again but we had no, none, diddly, good news for the Scottish Government in the first five. Heaven knows I’m miserable now. I know ‘they’ (journos) say ‘good news is no news’ but ‘they’ didn’t get that idea on a tablet from a mount. They could report something good but, unfortunately for them, that would require saying something good about the Scottish Government.

Tuesday 27^th on BBC Scotland at 06:26am and repeated every 30 minutes until 9am.

1. First delivery to Grangemouth of US gas from fracking. No mention of environmental catastrophes in the US caused by its extraction.
2. Oil and gas capital investments falls ‘dramatically’
3. Number of jobs in oil and gas still ‘falling’
4. Labour conference
5. Tourism in Edinburgh continues to grow.

Reports 2 and 3 are obviously bad news for the Scottish Government (SG). Report 1 allowed the Ineos position that the SG moratorium is holding Scotland back to dominate. The Labour Conference story is oxygen for the party in Scotland, regardless of the content. Why wasn’t the tourism story first? Did some viewers go off to stand miserably on the back step before the tourism report?

Running Total:

Running total 21 to 26/9/16                                              Number of reports

Bad news for SG/SNP                                                            7

Good news for SG/SNP                                                         2

Bad news for Labour                                                              1

Good news for Labour                                                           5

Bad news for CP                                                                      0

Good news for CP                                                                   0

The trends continue.

Sources:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/02/19/violent-media-anxiety_n_6671732.html

PDF for printing: bbc-spiral-of-silence

The Spiral of Silence: Understanding BBC Scotland’s Bias without fear of invoking Godwin’s Rule of Nazi Analogies

 Image:  Mike Godwin (wikimedia.org)  

I’m going to mention the Nazis and Hitler in an attempt to explain why BBC Scotland’s journalism is so consistently nationalist….British nationalist. NEIN, STOP, GO BACK prof before they start calling you ‘Herr Doktor Professor’. Too late – I’ve done it. Once I’ve explained, I’ll return to the everyday business of weighing their balances and entering the numbers in my ‘Running Totals Table’. Don’t let the number-based mundanity of the latter suggest that it’s got nothing to do with these dark thoughts.

‘Godwin’s law (or Godwin’s rule of Nazi analogies)is an ‘Internet adage’ asserting that “As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazism or Hitler that is, if an online discussion (regardless of topic or scope) goes on long enough, sooner or later someone will compare someone or something to Hitler or Nazism.’ (Wikipedia.org)

I don’t know if I’ve passed or failed the test technically but either way it doesn’t look good for me, so far. Am I saying BBC Scotland reporters are Nazis? Am I guilty also of what Leo Strauss called, delightfully, ‘Reductio ad Hitlerum’ in 1951, spookily the year of my birth? Well, duh, no, I’m not. Will I stop digging in this hole? Well, no, I won’t do that neither. Here is how Elisabeth Noelle-Neumann explained the emerging of a dominant way of thinking and behaving which she applied to Nazi Germany and later to the US, in the 1970s:

‘Spiral of silence is the term meant to refer to the tendency of people to remain silent when they feel that their views are in opposition to the majority view on a subject. The theory posits that they remain silent for a few reasons:

1. Fear of isolation when the group or public realizes that the individual has a divergent opinion from the status quo.
2. Fear of reprisal or more extreme isolation, in the sense that voicing said opinion might lead to a negative consequence beyond that of mere isolation (loss of a job, status, etc.)

 For this theory to be plausible it relies on the idea that in a given situation we all possess a sort of intuitive way of knowing what the prevailing opinion happens to be.’ (masscommtheory.com)

Applying this to BBC Scotland staff doesn’t mean that they are always consciously biased against independence though they, especially the senior and managerial staff, may be so. When Glen Campbell was caught on screen tearing up an SNP leaflet, we got a wee glimpse. Rather, I’m saying that it’s mostly unconscious predispositions nudging them toward choices which favour the Union. Noam Chomsky though often accused on being a conspiracy theorist, by those who had failed to understand him, was saying essentially the same when he talked about how consent is manufactured. Stepping back onto the thin ice of a Nazi analogy, Sir Professor Kershaw’s notion of ‘Working toward the Fuhrer’, can be added to this dark way of explaining bias. Reminding us that Hitler gave few direct commands but, rather, by his speeches, set the parameters for the behaviour of those below him in the Nazi system, to please him. Here’s how Kershaw puts it:

‘Everyone who has the opportunity to observe it knows that the Fuhrer can hardly dictate from above everything which he intends to realise sooner or later. On the contrary, up till now everyone with a post in the new Germany has worked best when he has, so to speak, worked towards the Fuhrer. Very often and in many spheres it has been the case—in previous years as well—that individuals have simply waited for orders and instructions. Unfortunately, the same will be true in the future; but in fact it is the duty of everybody to try to work towards the Fuhrer along the lines he would wish. Anyone who makes mistakes will notice it soon enough. But anyone who really works towards the Fuhrer along his lines and towards his goal will certainly both now and in the future one day have the finest reward in the form of the sudden legal confirmation of his work.’ (wikipedia.org)

Try reading that but substituting the words ‘Head of News’ for ‘Fuhrer’ and ‘reporter’ for ‘his’, ‘everyone’ or ‘everybody’.

Now look at my emerging balances below or look back at earlier research on BBC bias around the Referendum 2014. What do you think? Again testing the German ice, think about the wall-to-wall, Union-flag-bedecked coverage of the Olympics in 2012 and 2016. See anything?

Here’s the image I see. Imagine inside the mind of a BBC reporter or a junior editor. See little stories on paper, some favouring independence, some favouring the Union, falling downward in a spiral. Some are caught by the unconscious mind and others fall into the silence below. The unconscious mind programed by years of Unionist education, Unionist socialisation in the mainstream media and the words of current senior staff, catches mostly the pro-Union stories and reports them as representing the world, outside their minds even though they more accurately represent the world within their minds.

So, BBC Scotland staff are not Nazis. Well maybe one. You can name him below in a comment if you like. I couldn’t possibly comment. Trying to survive inside an hierarchical power-based system, they’re just like citizens under Nazism.

OK, how did they do on Monday 26^th September 2016?

Five reports with one each for Labour’s tax increase proposals, offshore safety, murder, a ferry bump and the cost of commuting. So, there was no time for the Herald’s less Labour-supportive ‘Kezia Dugdale accuses Jeremy Corbyn of trying to undermine her’, the Scotsman’s ‘Scottish Tories appeal to New Labour voters’ or even the National’s admittedly accurate but a bit unkind ‘Kezia Dugdale insists Jeremy Corbyn can unite Labour and win in 2020 … after saying the opposite.’ To be fair, they did resist the Scotsman’s mind-fucking  ‘SNP partly responsible for Brexit, claims Theresa May’. As the SNP suggested themselves, it was ‘beyond parody’. Still, fair play to BBC Scotland for rejecting it?

Running Total:

Running total 21 to 25/9/16                                              Number of reports

Bad news for SG/SNP                                                            4

Good news for SG/SNP                                                         1

Bad news for Labour                                                              1

Good news for Labour                                                           4

Bad news for CP                                                                      0

Good news for CP                                                                   0

Early days, I know, but is a picture emerging?

Sources:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Godwin%27s_law

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reductio_ad_Hitlerum

https://masscommtheory.com/theory-overviews/spiral-of-silence/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manufacturing_Consent

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ian_Kershaw

theres-been-no-spike-in

Unpatriotic Scots show little enthusiasm for treasured English traditions! BBC Scotland can’t miss the inflatable dolls at Celtic Park but miss the wider drop in hate crime post-Brexit

Two months ago, Police Scotland reported the lack of a spike in hate crime in Scotland contrasting notably you’d think with the much-reported spike in England and Wales. It had all the making of a good story:

‘Why has there not been a spike in hate crime in Scotland?’

I reported at the time:

https://thoughtcontrolscotland.com/2016/07/12/bias-by-omission-has-scotland-witnessed-a-spike-in-post-brexit-hate-crime-or-not/

The story got no coverage at all in the MSM and most media continued to refer to the spike as a wider UK phenomenon, covering Scotland by implication. I wrote to several editors on this and got no replies. BBC Scotland somehow missed this good news for Scotland, again. I suppose they don’t want our uppity Yes-supporters thinking there’s anything mature and civilised about Scotland. They’ll be going on about us all being ‘Jock Tamson’s Bairns.’ Oooooh, ‘Jock’, racism alert:

‘Yes-supporting Jocks accuse other Jocks of being Jocks!’

Then yesterday (22^nd September) the Daily Mirror and the Scotsman got it, with:

‘Post-Brexit racism: The truth of hate crime boom after Leave vote and the telling area where incidents fell’

and:

‘Hate crimes in Scotland ‘fell after Brexit vote’

Oooh, I wonder where that ‘telling  area’ is. I know, it’s Rotheram! It’s not Rotherham, it’s Scotland? No, those Jocks are always fighting! Weren’t there dozens dead and maimed after the last Old Firm game? There were none? I don’t believe that. It’s a liberal media cover-up. I wonder why the Mirror didn’t mention Scotland in the headline? Was it a wee tease or something else? I know, I’m paranoid, everybody says so.

When I wrote a piece a few days about how, relatively, Scotland had been sort of, just a wee bit, more tolerant of refugees than some other countries, my first attempt to publish it drew quite tetchy editorial comments that I was ignoring ‘the horrors of bigotry’ in Scotland and leaving out the truth of anti-refugee sentiment in Rothesay. Indyref2 then published it without requiring any changes. Make up your own mind:

http://indyref2.scot/why-scotlands-welcome-for-1000-syrian-refugees-should-be-a-matter-for-pride-but-still-kept-in-context

Bias by omission is fiendishly difficult to prove. Actually it’s impossible to prove. If BBC Scotland does report something, I can have a dig but if they ignore it completely, we might all know what they’re up to, but they can always find an excuse along the lines of having no time because of the greater public interest in the queen or our collapsing (not-really) health service.

Today, on the 23^rd September 2016, at 06.26, they gave us:

‘Figures obtained by the BBC show that more than 100 children have been trafficked into Scotland in the past six years and more than half of them came from Vietnam.’

Also we hear that Edinburgh City Council launched a survey into building after the school wall collapse saga. Not surprisingly the report was Labour Party and PFI-free. If ECC was SNP-led or if the PFI had been an SNP scheme, would that have changed the reporting, we wonder? After a murder story we got the ‘Did she or did she not?’ report on Kezia Dugdale’s missing vote. The report was from Kezia’s perspective and had crucial proof that she was there at the time but I’m not sure that will have helped her image. Finally there was a short report on a multi-faith conference at St Andrews University. Were there any Dudists (ref below) there? If not, I’m not interested. I am actually an ‘ordained’ priest of the Church of the Latter Day Dude. Do consider joining:

‘the slowest-growing religion in the world – Dudeism. An ancient philosophy that preaches non-preachiness, practices as little as possible, and above all, uh…lost my train of thought there. Anyway, if you’d like to find peace on earth and goodwill, man, we’ll help you get started. Right after a little nap.’

http://dudeism.com/

Also missing again was anything negative about Ruth Davidson or the Scottish Tories. Are Unionists including the BBC shifting ship to the Tories now? There’s plenty stuff about their double standards and wider hypocrisies. Find it yourself if you can bear to see photos of them. Have this for starters….yeuch!

http://www.dailyrecord.co.uk/news/politics/ruth-davidson-branded-hypocrite-after-8789440

__________________________________________________________________________

Running Total:

I haven’t included any of today’s stories.

Running total 21 to 23/9/16                                              Number of reports

Bad news for SG/SNP                                                            4

Good news for SG/SNP                                                         1

Bad news for Labour                                                              0

Good news for Labour                                                           1

Bad news for CP                                                                      0

Good news for CP                                                                   0

__________________________________________________________________________

Older stuff:

Previous reports are all at:

https://thoughtcontrolscotland.com/

See especially:

https://thoughtcontrolscotland.com/2016/09/22/the-power-of-nightmares-waking-up-to-early-morning-bad-news-on-bbc-scotland-and-fearing-the-unknown/

https://thoughtcontrolscotland.com/2016/09/21/now-the-news-weather-and-travel-where-you-people-are-you-can-go-out-if-you-cover-up-and-avoid-the-m74-but-dont-even-think-of-leaving-the-union/

__________________________________________________________________________

Fund raising:

I’ve got a professorial pension which took me only 40 years to earn so, if you want to reward me beyond the reading or sharing or commenting, I love, my favourite charity is:

https://www.scottishspca.org/support/donate/?gclid=CNf4uMD5pM8CFUE6Gwod_6EHQg

Watch you don’t give to the RSPA. They raise money in Scotland but don’t spend any of it here.

Sources:

https://www.commonspace.scot/articles/8731/police-scotland-no-rise-hate-crime-scotland-brexit

http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/post-brexit-racism-truth-hate-8787243

http://www.scotsman.com/news/hate-crimes-in-scotland-fell-after-brexit-vote-1-4237818

power-of-nightmares

The Power of Nightmares: Waking up to early morning bad news on BBC Scotland and fearing the unknown

http://www.shutterstock.com/                                        http://farm5.static.flickr.com/4153/4837501633_7a3fb5beda.jpg

‘The ‘baleful habitual practices of the miserable mind’ are strongest in the early morning’

Dr R Fletcher, ‘Surgeon to the Lunatic Asylum near Gloucester’ 1833 (p.206) wrote this in 1883. I know it’s not a recent and reliable source, as we used to say in Higher Education, but I think it shows that we’ve known about this effect for some time. Anyway, didn’t Dr Foster go to Gloucester? Never mind. It was no accident that medieval monks and more recently, private school boarders, got started with their religious indoctrination before dawn so as to catch them anxious, fearful and absorbent of the required sense of superiority and deep racial prejudices necessary for the conquest of lesser peoples.

Making these early hours particularly effective for indoctrination, they often follow on from nightmares:

‘Nightmares tend to occur during the early morning, as opposed to late evening with night terrors, and patients usually have good recall of the events of the dream.’ (Science-based Medicine, 2014)

Moving forward to Scotland in the years after Referendum 2014, as we watch the early news from ‘where you [people] are now’, on BBC Breakfast, does the above matter? Well….

‘I would like to re-emphasise the importance of “bad news” in the genesis of psychopathology, as this does not seem to be generally recognised. Bad news, of deaths and other disasters, is not available to our primate cousins who are not equipped to exchange gossip, but has been available to our ancestors over the last few million years since language evolved. Since these ancestors lived in groups of about 150 individuals, the amount of bad news they could generate was limited, even if we add in bad news from neighbouring groups. Now, we have available the bad news of many billions of people. Since news of death or other disaster may presage the nearby existence of a predator or of raiding parties from neighbouring tribes, or of disease, it must have been adaptive for bad news to increase anxiety and promote activities to ward off occurrence, such as increased washing, checking of security arrangements, and the advantageous territorial constriction of agoraphobia.’

See that last phrase there? Is that a way of saying ‘Better Together?’ Is Unionism a kind of agoraphobia, a fear of autonomy and wide-open EU spaces?

Previously, I’ve tended to use news data from the 6-7pm period to reflect on BBC bias. I think the above evidence suggests I might be better looking at those short reports from the BBC Scotland team which are broadcast from very early in the morning (6.30 am) then repeated until around 9.00 am.

Yesterday, 21^st September 2016, I noted three relevant reports. Two were about NHS worries and one was an allegedly positive story for Labour supporters. The first two were classic ‘Project Fear’ pieces you might call ‘Blairism 2’, after Better Together supremo, Blair McDougall. To be accurate it was McDougall’s ‘number two’, Rob Shorthouse, known affectionately as ‘Shortarse’, who had scatted the term at a Tory conference. Did I make a good jobbie of vocabularising that last sentence or was it crap? Yesterday’s (21^st September) report is at:

https://thoughtcontrolscotland.com/2016/09/21/now-the-news-weather-and-travel-where-you-people-are-you-can-go-out-if-you-cover-up-and-avoid-the-m74-but-dont-even-think-of-leaving-the-union/

This morning at 06:28 am, 22^nd September 2016, we got five stories. Headlining was the deeply worrying, in the wake of recent toddler murder cases:

‘The current system of social work in Scotland is unsustainable!’

Adding to the anxiety of the elderly viewer worrying perhaps about a grandchild in the care of an unsuitable step-parent, they were to hear, also:

‘Elderly people consume more and more of social work budgets.’

OMG they might have said if they were younger.

Second, we heard that the parties are to meet to discuss the pressure on local services budgets with the suggestion of an end to the council tax freeze. Listening grandad? Will you be able to hang on to the house if they bump the council tax? It’ll be even worse if the SNP get their way.

Third it was the announcement of the publication of an ‘end-of-life facilities’ guide. That’s it! I’ve had enough! I’m off to walk the dog if he can still walk as his age. Right at the end, we heard it was actually a good news story. Really it was.  Scotland’s guide will be the first in the World! Hooray!

Fourth we had good news about five of Scotland elite universities making a World top 200. I suppose that’s good news for them but more bad news for most of us who’d like to see the gap between them and their impoverished neighbours, the ‘New’ universities who take nearly all the students from disadvantaged areas, narrowed. Either way, I’m sure the SG will get no credit for any of this. Finally there was wee report on the Crofting Commission needing to apologise to crofters. I can’t remember why nor can I guess why it had taken up space that could have been used for:

‘Scottish teachers consider suspending industrial action after workload breakthrough’

Now that is good news; thousands of weanbairns not shouting at us old folk for dithering in our part of the day.

OK, so two bad news reports for the SG, one grudging good news report for the SG and one good news story for better-off Scots and their bairnweans going ‘up’ to an Ancient university.

Running total 21 to 22/9/16                                              Number of reports

Bad news for SG/SNP                                                            4

Good news for SG/SNP                                                         1

Bad news for Labour                                                              0

Good news for Labour                                                           1

Bad news for CP                                                                      0

Good news for CP                                                                   0

Sources:

https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=BZSGPCrP3I0C&pg=PA206&lpg=PA206&dq=early+morning+influence+on+mind&source=bl&ots=QfO_qa5dQz&sig=HgzaKh-QngrVirRpXFR4M-ds3WQ&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjqgI-kkqLPAhVoBMAKHTPfBB0Q6AEIKjAC#v=onepage&q=early%20morning%20influence%20on%20mind&f=false

https://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/nightmares-night-terrors-and-potential-implications-for-pediatric-mental-health/

http://www.intechopen.com/books/new-insights-into-anxiety-disorders/an-evolutionary-perspective-on-anxiety-and-anxiety-disorders