When is an expert not an expert?

Today’s Scotsman carries a story headlined: “Expert accuses SNP of bending truth on tax.” This expert turns out to be Professor Arthur Midwinter. As the paper points out Midwinter is a paid adviser to the Scottish Labour Party. Laughably the story goes on to say that Midwinter’s comments are “intended to be an independent analysis” apparently unconnected with  his day job. This is a bit like saying: “Expert oil economist says Scotland would be better off Independent,” and then revealing that the oil economist is Alex Salmond but that his analysis is intended to be independent of his politics. 

 If you go the article by clicking on the link above, similar points are made by some of the many online contributors who have submitted comments on this article. The Scotsman attracts huge numbers of comments on its politics stories (164 by 3.30 pm today on this relatively minor story). As always with online comments there is the usual mixture of the paranoid and the personal but also some serious points about the SNP’s local income tax proposal and Midwinter’s professional background, which certainly added something to the original story. For some proponents of the idea of deliberative democracy the advent of online commenting seemed to open the door to greater participation, and perhaps ultimately better policy-making in the democratic process. For others, such forums are simply arenas for the politically committed (and obsessed?) to slag each other off. If you’re interested in this debate the sheer weight of comments on The Scotsman site is a useful place to gather evidence.

Talking Points Memo

I’m doing some academic research into the comparative editorial standards of political blogs and traditional mainstream political reporting (it’s one of the reasons for starting this blog as I thought if I was going to write about blogging I should have a go myself).  As part of that research I’ve started to look at some major US blogs. The scale of these sites is impressive – particularly

Talking Points Memo, a liberal blog that looks like a professional operation. Indeed it employs what it calls “blogger-reporters”.  There’s nothing like it in the UK, even high-quality political sites such as Iain Dale and Conservative Home clearly don’t have anything like TPM’s resources.

At first glance, and it is only a first glance, the TPM site suggests that the gap between professional newspaper columnists and bloggers is not as wide as some think (in the UK at least – maybe there’s less of a distinction anyway in the US).  I’ve already argued on this blog that highly-regarded columnists employ techniques similar to those that bloggers are criticised for.    

The biggest cringe in Scotland

Today’s Sunday Times Scottish edition includes a classic piece of self-loathingfrom columnist Jenny Hjul.  Jenny is horrified at the prospect of a news bulletin produced from Scotland replacing the network six o’clock news. The usual argument from opponents of a Scottish Six is trotted out: the weakness of Reporting Scotland and Newsnight Scotland. But in her enthusiasm Jenny just makes some stuff up. She reports that when Jeremy Paxman says: “Let’s go to Washington to hear the latest from the American elections” viewers in Scotland have to put up with a re-hash of an old Scottish story. Really?  I watch Newsnight nearly every night. I live in Scotland and have watched hours of US election coverage before the 11 pm opt-out. 

But rational argument is not really what Jenny is about. It all boils down to the fact that she thinks we in Scotland are just too rubbish to produce a national news bulletin. A  Scottish Six would be “nationalistic” and parochial apparently. The point is, of course, that it would be anything but. In fact it would completely alter the outlook of BBC Scotland.  Yes, Reporting Scotland is a regional programme with regional values. But that’s because that’s what the producers are told to produce. A Scottish Six would cover Scottish, UK and international stories. In fact what makes Jenny’s argument seem most odd is that she works in Scotland for a newspaper – the Scottish edition of the Sunday Times that aims to cover, er, Scottish, UK and international stories. But I assume she thinks it’s just a load of nationalistic, parochial rubbish. I am waiting for next week’s column when she urges people to write to the editor of The Sunday Times urging an end to the Scottish edition so that readers can get the proper UK agenda with lots of stories about the US elections instead of all these terrible Scottish columnists.  

Update: more of the same from Tom Little of Scotland on Sunday but with a desperate new twist - Jonathan Ross’s obscene salary now appears to be another reason why we should not have a Scottish Six. Yes, he’s serious. 

 

 

Ranting in The Sun

I haven’t seen a copy of The Scottish Sun yet today but I’m guessing this column from Jon Gaunt didn’t make it into the Scottish edition. It’s entertaining enough I suppose, albeit with the unpleasant references to “Jock Ministers” and ”every Tom, Dick and Abdul”. But in his enthusiasm for slagging off the Government for systematically disuniting the kingdom, “Gaunty” seems to have forgotten that only one national newspaper has ever thrown its weight full-square behind the campaign for Scottish Independence – The Sun. 

 

 

BBC response to Trust report

They just don’t get it do they? On the BBC’s Editors blog (a great innovation by the way) Mark Byford, the corporation’s Head of Journalism, reveals how they’re going to deal with the Trust’s finding that Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland are virtually ignored by network news programmes.

Here are the answers:

 (1) ”better labelling of stories to explain how they may apply differently across the UK to improve overall accuracy”. But the Trust criticised the fact that health and education stories are covered only if they apply just to England. ”Better labelling” – ie  emphasising more often that the stories do not apply at all to Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, may improve accuracy but rather misses the point of what the Trust was getting at. The idea, Mark, is to cover more stories in , you know, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland.

(2) ”more case examples of the differences and devolved decision-making to inform all UK audiences more fully.”  Fine – but why not run a Scottish story and then explain the different situation in England rather than the other way around.

(3) “better planning between the UK-wide news operation and our news teams across the UK.” Er, but you sacked people whose jobs were precisely that (see the letter in today’s Herald from Phil Taylor, ex BBC staffer).

(4) “increased training.” Are you joking? Are you seriously suggesting there are people in senior editorial positions at the BBC unaware of the policy impact of devolution?

Instead of all those, how about trying this: understand that you are broadcasting to the whole of the UK and cover all the nations equally. If you don’t want to do this, please stop taking our licence-fee.  

 

BBC ignores Scotland shock

The conclusions of the investigation by the BBC Trust into the corporation’s coverage, or rather non-coverage, of Scotland and Wales fall into the “no sh** Sherlock” category. Anyone who watches the BBC network news will not be surprised that in the words of Sir Michael Lyons, the Trust chairman:    “the resounding message from this review is the BBC is falling short of its own high standards and is not meeting properly its core purpose of helping to inform democracy.”

But the sheer scale of the London-centric news agenda, revealed by the report,  is still staggering. One statistic in particular should mean an instant rebate on the licence fee for everyone living in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland: ”the study found that of 136 stories about health and education, all 136 dealt with England alone. ” Not one, single story about health and education outside England was broadcast to a UK audience – totally unacceptable from news editors whose wage packets are paid for by people across the UK.

 

   

 

Modern political reporting

The piece by the excellent Rachel Sylvester in today’s Times is both a great read and a brilliant example of the questionable conventions of modern day UK political reporting. 

Rachel clearly has a real insight into the thinking of the Parliamentary Labour Party and a range of fine contacts. That degree of access to senior figures is what makes good political correspondents so valuable and distinguishes them from some, but not all, political bloggers.  But in some respects this article uses the same techniques, albeit in a more elegant fashion, as those deployed by bloggers and for which they are criticised; in particular the use of anonymous sources and rumour.

In her column – an analysis of Gordon Brown’s desire to lock up terrorist suspects for six weeks without charge - she quotes at least 3 anonymous ministers, “some insiders”, “the Prime Minister’s allies” and an anonymous “MP close to the Prime Minister”. She also repeats what she admits is a rumour: that Labour tried to silence the Director of Liberty with the offer of a peerage.  In a previous  column for the Telegraph,  she famously “revealed” another rumour – that Jack Staw had threatened to punch Ed Balls.

I don’t doubt the veracity of her sources. Unattributable comments are clearly a way of explaining what’s really going on inside a political party. Rumours are entertaining. But the extent of the use of these techniques in contemporary UK political journalism is worrying.  Who really knows who is saying what and to what purpose? When I was running the Leader’s Office at the SNP the Scottish media gorged themselves on unattributed briefings and conveyed a false impression of the way the party as a whole felt about the then leader.

I can’t help feeling that for most people this obsession with anonymous sources also leaves the impression that politics is really a private conversation between the political classes - little more than a game from which most voters are excluded.

 

 

    

The new Scottish Six orthodoxy

Today’s report by Douglas Fraser of The Herald (one of a handful of political journalists in Scotland with something interesting to say) for the IPPR sets out some arguments about the role of the media in post-devolution Britain.

As part of the report, Douglas looks at the issue of the Scottish Six and suggests, in line with other recent comment, that the debate over a Scottish produced news bulletin to replace the UK-wide six o’clock news is essentially an analogue argument in a digital age.  Viewers, so the argument goes, can get their news from a variety of sources – such as the internet  – without having to rely on the BBC’s main early evening news bulletin. Moreover there will soon be a range of Scottish digital channels, producing Scottish news, so Scottish viewers, if they want to, will be able to opt-out of the UK bulletin and into the tartan version. In short, the old 1990s debate about the influence of the BBC’s main bulletins is dead.

Except – it’s not. And all this talk about new technology ignores the realities. First of all – the internet.  The BBC last week ran a series of items asking viewers: “How slow is your broadband connection?” For the 68 per cent of households in Glasgow who, according to Ofcom, do not have broadband, that question would have seemed rather redundant.  But the presumption from those immersed in the media is that of course everyone has broadband - nobody only watches the TV anymore, stupid.   

Secondly the idea that a Scottish digital channel funded by the licence-fee payer is the answer, is well wide of the mark. The last time I looked there was no proposal for such a channel. Even if there was, this entirely misses the point. Under-resourced opt-outs are BBC Scotland’s speciality. Talented journalists are used to working on badly-funded programmes with an editorial remit which forbids producers to venture further than the Tweed. Indeed such weak programmes play into the hands of the Scottish middle-class cringe-mongers by allowing them say we must never, ever watch anything not produced by London.

The answer now, as it was in the 1990s, is in fact a well-funded national news programme, produced in Scotland covering Scottish and international news; the kind of news programme every other country in the world enjoys. This would mean an end to the nonsense of Scottish viewers hearing more about the English health, education and criminal justice systems than their own. It would mean the Scottish electorate being properly informed about their country by the BBC.  That is not a parochial aspiration. It’s what a state funded broadcaster, is supposed to do.