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          Front cover of Scottish Currency Q&A booklet

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          Portrait of Humza Yousaf

          Humza Yousaf’s plans if he becomes the SNP leader

          Media distortion

          Truth and Trust

          Kate Forbes, candidate for the SNP membership, official portrait

          Kate Forbes campaign for the SNP leadership contest 

          Health service

          Funding the Scottish Health Service 

          Sunflower in watercolour for the one year anniversary of the war in Ukraine 2022

          Euromove Scotland Campaign Raises Donations for Ukraine’s Frontline Communities.

          Nicola Sturgeon portraiture

          Nicola Sturgeon and Jacinda Ardern – what two shock resignations tell us about good leadership

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          The three minute read. Scotland must seek to reform its media

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          Kate Forbes, candidate for the SNP membership, official portrait

          Kate Forbes campaign for the SNP leadership contest 

          Ash Regan and Tim Rideout Currency launch

          Ash Regan backs Scottish currency

          blue background, A younf woman holding a large black sign that says VOTE ! in white letters

          Scottish elections: young people more likely to vote if they started at 16 – new study

          A scene of people demonstrating, holding Scotland flags. One man wears a tartan cap and holds a blue flag with both the Scottish cross and the EU stars on it.

          Is Alister Jack sane?

          Image Malcom Laverty

          The Brown plan

          The climate change impacts of Russia’s war with Ukraine

          Britain wastes £1bn on drones to monitor English Channel

          The Autumn Statement – time to take a closer look

          Photo Mtaylor848, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

          Christmas cheer for Tesco if grim reading for the political classes

          Trending Tags

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          • Johnson
          • Scottish National Party
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          Fish farm in Scotland

          A deeper dive into the history of Scottish fish farming

          Fish farms in a Scottish Loch

          How farmed salmon is produced – stage one

          Dead salmons

          Death in our waters

          Fish farming, Isle of Sky, Loch Ainort

          Fish Farming in Scotland 

          Offshore wind farm

          How will local communities get a fair share of record investment from offshore wind farms?

          Broadband optic fibres

          Scotland fulfilling its commitment to enable access to superfast broadband

          A row of tall houses on the left, with parked cars in front on the side of the street

          Saving Scotland’s tenements

          A large red researcgh vessel in the sea with ice sheets all around it on the water.

          Rosyth shipyard attracts UK Government contract to maintain fleet of scientific research vessels

          large posts saying 'Glasgow Airport Business Park' on the left and right of a road leading away from the main road in the front. . On that road leading away building with walls almost entirely existing of windows.

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            Where are the areas in Scotland most affected by lung conditions?

            Health service

            Funding the Scottish Health Service 

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            Who is knocking our doors? A putative new pandemic?

            A woman walking in a field with a jerrycan of water on her back, spraying water on the vegetation

            The Ethiopia Medical Project

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            “Leave no one behind” – the Health Foundation’s report into health inequalities in Scotland 2023.

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              The three minute read. Scotland must seek to reform its media

              Nicola Sturgeon’s resignation has seen the mainstream media reveal its bias, ignorance and insularity, writes Martin Roche

              Martin RochebyMartin Roche
              17-02-2023 10:26
              in Media, News
              BBC Scotland in dismantling letters

              Illustration by Patricia S Paton

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              The London press and its Scottish junior cadet branches have buried Nicola Sturgeon and with it, the SNP dream of independence. As is so often the case, London shows massive ignorance of Scotland’s economy and political culture. It’s an arrogance as old as the union itself. 

              Perhaps the most telling moment of the week that saw Sturgeon stand down was the BBC’s Today programme anchor, Nick Robinson, asking listeners, “why should we care who Scotland’s first minister is?” In one short sentence, he revealed the insularity and institutional superiority of the BBC. The colonial mindset writ large. This was the English Broadcasting Corporation talking to England, not the British Broadcasting Corporation talking to the United Kingdom.

              Secret meeting

              Now, I’ve long had antipathy to the idea of the London establishment viewing Scotland as a colony, a place to hunt over, keep dangerous weapons and visit Edinburgh for a couple of weeks to see the children perform at the Festival. It appeared a hackneyed and lazy notion. Maybe not now. 

              Most English people don’t think like that at all. Most English people don’t think of Scots as lesser people or of Scotland as a less important place or as a place for England to rule. 

              But that is most certainly the case in some of the higher reaches of British political and media life. We saw it with the recent secret meeting of Leave leaders and Labour heavyweights. The only Scot at the meeting was Michael Gove. Labour didn’t think Scotland important enough to invite its shadow Scottish secretary, Ian Murray. The Labour people orchestrating the meeting would simply not have considered Scotland. It would not have entered their heads. 

              Robinson’s remark on the Today programme really does confirm that the higher reaches of the BBC see it as the English Broadcasting Corporation. BBC Scotland, my spies tell me, is now little more than a branch office and one with very little influence over editorial policy. The BBC in Scotland is surely not as trusted by Scots as it once was.

              The BBC has sold its soul

              The corporation has sold its soul on the alter of impartiality. It really should have at the core of its reporting a burning desire to seek out and report what is true and to do so objectively. Impartiality has been used to neuter the BBC. A wise person once said that the BBC was the only institution that kept Britain straight. It is no surprise that standards in public life, mainly if not exclusively in Whitehall and Westminster, have slipped so low at the same time as the BBC has put impartiality above truth.

              Scotland is not being well served by the BBC or most of the print media. Whether via more devolution or independence, Scotland must have its own media regulation regime and have the ability to legislate about media ownership. It is simply not a fair deal that influence over Scottish public opinion is firmly in the hands of a right-wing BBC and the Murdoch, Rothermere and Barclay family press. If there were a monopolies commission that measured the political bias of the Scottish media, it would surely order radical re-ordering of the market. 

              As for Robinson, he’s not credible when it comes to reporting any Scottish politics. He’ll be incapable of seeing himself as anything other than right. That’s a tragedy for the once-great BBC and for objective reporting.

              Media freedom sacrosanct

              Media freedom should be sacrosanct in any mature liberal democracy. Scotland must have a hard-hitting, truth seeking media to hold our political class to account. At present we have a wholly unbalanced regime that makes it incredibly difficult for views to be heard that don’t suit the right-wing press or the new look BBC. What we need is variety across media ownership. Until we get it, Scotland will be reported with deliberate bias cast overwhelmingly to the right. 

              We need a fresh start. A tabula rasa.

                  Great read!  Let me buy you a coffee.
              Tags: Main Stream MediaNews
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              Martin Roche

              Martin Roche

              Aged 15, Martin began his working life on a Scottish evening newspaper. He then ran his family business before reading politics and international relations at Aberdeen University, as a mature student. He worked in London in investment promotion attraction for Scottish development agencies, followed by a 35-year career in international PR consultancy. He has been a columnist on African Leadership magazine, commenting on geopolitics, a regular contributor to foreign direct investment media and has written for business publications worldwide. He recently returned to Scotland. He lives in Glasgow.

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