I haven't watched any TV news over the last few days, so my main knowledge of the McGill's meltdown comes indirectly from social media, but I've just watched a full three-minute report from STV News on the subject that was posted on Twitter. To say I'm astounded by how shoddy it is would be an understatement. At the outset it states that John Swinney announced at the SNP conference that the bus network would be "nationalised" by 2031. But he didn't, did he? Personally I wish he had done, but what he actually said was that the bus network would be brought under public *control* by 2031 by means of franchising and regulation. That falls well short of nationalisation, because bus services will still be provided by private operators - almost certainly including McGill's themselves, unless they take their ball away in a huff and decline to apply for any of the franchises.
But it seems that STV felt they had to falsely use the word "nationalisation" to prevent the comment from a McGill's spokesman, which they showed a few seconds later, from looking totally unhinged. The McGill's claim was that the government was going to "take their business away without recompense", which is what "Third World dictators do", because Third World dictators "confiscate property, they confiscate assets". The thing is, though, that it's not STV's job to make bonkers comments by billionaire businessmen look saner by fibbing to their viewers about the basic facts - indeed, their job should be to actively draw attention to the gulf between factual reality and the McGill's claim, and to challenge the McGill's spokesman on that gulf.
Where, for example, did he get the idea that the company's property and assets would be confiscated? That could only happen under full nationalisation, and probably wouldn't happen even then. And how on earth did he make the even more extreme jump to claiming that McGill's property and assets would be confiscated "without recompense"? If nationalisation and confiscation was occurring, there would be an announcement at some point about whether compensation was being offered, but as nationalisation and confiscation are not occurring, no such announcement has been made and no such announcement will be made. The McGill's spokesman was, in a nutshell, lying, and STV allowed him to do it completely unchallenged.
It should certainly have been pointed out to him that Robert Mugabe did not exactly offer a "franchising" system to wealthy farmers and landowners in Zimbabwe, and that what is being proposed for buses in Scotland is actually the sort of thing western democracies do all the time (not least in London and Manchester) and is very much the sort of thing a Third World dictator would not do. I'd also like to have seen him asked why such extreme Thatcherites as the Easdale brothers, who apparently regard franchising and regulation as tantamount to communism, have donated so generously to the Labour party, and what that says about the true underlying nature of Labour in Scotland.
STV have always had their faults, but I just feel that twenty or thirty years ago they would never have put out quite such a sloppy report. Bernard Ponsonby certainly would never have put his name or voice to something so poor. Have STV just totally lost interest? All they seem to care about these days is lazily slapping their own logo onto ITV network programming - even in situations that are crying out for opt-out presentation, like Six Nations matches or Scotland games at the World Cup, they don't bother and just take the ITV feed unchanged. The only programmes they actually make themselves are the bare minimum of one local news programme and one current affairs show - and arguably they now even fall short of that bare minimum, because Ofcom have disgracefully allowed them to merge the STV Central and STV North news services. A regulator worth its salt would never have given the nod to that, because Central and North are separate ITV franchises, and a dedicated news service for each franchise area is supposed to be a requirement.
I walked past both the BBC Scotland and STV buildings in Glasgow a few weeks ago, and I noticed that the logo on the STV building now reads "STV Radio". Do they now see themselves as primarily a radio station, with the sticking-STV-branding-onto-ITV-network-programmes side of the business as nothing more than a nice little side-earner?
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In a column lauded to the skies by far-right blogger RevStew (I'm no longer going to put any caveats or qualifiers on the "far-right" descriptor, because Stew is now an outspoken supporter of public executions, for pity's sake), the Herald's Mark Smith imagined he had dreamt up an ingenious Gotcha by mocking Jenny Gilruth for pointing out that "Number 10 North" is in the southern half of the UK when she presumably doesn't want a "Number 10 North" to be based anywhere. So let me get this straight, Mark - we would have to support the principle of "Number 10 North" before we are allowed to point out the patently obvious absurdity of it being based in the south? Does that mean you have to actively support SNP policies before you're allowed to mock the details of them? Presumably that's how it works. You made the rules, Mark, and now you're going to have to stick to them.
