2012/03/18 22:53
As far as I can gather, we are currently seeing a divide opening between London-based media (the big newspapers and many of the BBC's flagship programmes, such as the Andrew Marr Show) and Scottish-based media (including Scottish blogs).The London-based media are acting as if the independence referendum has already been won by the No side, and they're almost blanking out...
2011/12/10 23:18
The newspapers have recently been full of stories about how an independent Scotland will try to move closer to Scandinavia.I think it started with this article in The Independent, which was their mostly commented article for days.Then a journalist called Lesley Riddoch wrote this article in The Guardian, saying many of the same things but also drawing attention to her...
2012/05/06 20:36
The SNP did really well in Thursday’s local elections, gaining 61 extra councillors (compared to 46 extra for Labour), with these gains mainly coming from the Tories and the Liberal Democrats.
East Renfrewshire is actually quite typical in this regard: Labour 8 (+1), SNP 4 (+1), Tories 6 (-1), LibDems 0 (-1), Independents 2 (n/c).
However, if you’ve been watching the BBC, you’d think the SNP actually had a bad election. To achieve this negative image, they’ve had to doctor the figures, so instead of comparing the number of seats with the last election — as is the norm for reporting elections — they’ve decided to to compare the number of seats with the status quo ante bellum, which helps Labour immensely because they were hit by numerous defections of councillors to the SNP over the past few years.
According to the BBC, Labour therefore gained 58 seats compared to 57 seats to the SNP, and they then turn this into a story about Labour doing significantly better than the SNP. Of course they also conveniently focus more on these figures than on the absolute numbers, which are 424 SNP councillors compared to 394 Labour ones.
To reinforce their version of events, the BBC have been focusing strongly on Glasgow (where the SNP admittedly were too ambitious and thus didn’t gain quite as many seats as hoped, increasing their number of councillors “only” from 22 to 27), and been ignoring the parts of the country where the SNP had an excellent election, such as Dundee, which now has an absolute SNP majority.
The BBC’s biased reporting is not just affecting the SNP, but also the other pro-independence party, the Scottish Greens. They increased their number of councillors from 8 to 14, but this has been more or less ignored by the BBC.
This anti-independence bias has to stop now! The BBC are supposed to be impartial, and surely that should apply in Scotland as well as in England.
2012/01/15 23:16
According to this article (in Danish), the Danish government is considering a radical price increase for foreign magazines.At the moment, letters and parcels from outside the EU go through customs without any interference if the value is less than 80 Danish crowns (£9). However, if the value is more than £9, it will in most cases be intercepted, and Danish VAT (25%) is added (as well as any other custom duties that might apply); on top of this, the Danish...
2011/12/30 10:08
We had started getting an increasing number of nuisance calls, mainly recordings being played to us several times a day.So on the 30th of November, I signed up for a free service to avoid nuisance calls, the Telephone Preference Service.The website wrote that it could take up to 28 days to become effective, but we've hardly had any such calls...
2011/10/29 17:23
Many people tend to lend their friends and family their (paper) books – in this house we have many books that have been read by at least four different people.However, ebooks are sadly not as flexible. If we look at...
2011/09/27 19:56
I quite liked this interview with a trader, Alessio Rastani, on BBC:My guess is that many people are thinking like him, but it's not often they say it out loud.I just hope he's being a bit too pessimistic!
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