The former Daily Record editor and recent Yes convert Murray Foote caught a few people’s eyes on Twitter this morning with the audacious use of the phrase “decent Tories like Adam Tomkins”.
But it was a piece he wrote for The Times that we found harder to swallow.
We’ve got some spare time today, so let’s go through it all.
Fair’s fair, can’t expect a former Record ed to start without a reflexive “SNP BAD”. It’s their equivalent of “Hello”.
Two paragraphs of waffly vague innuendo and smear with no specific examples cited. Not much anyone can do with that, but it helps pad the word count. Come on, Murray, get to the meat.
And we’re finally off for real, with the implication that a single tiny misstep caused the Sunday Herald’s readers to revolt in such apocalyptic and unreasonable outrage that it may have triggered the closure of the entire paper.
The reality is that independence supporters – and particularly SNP voters – had been increasingly disillusioned with the SH for years by that point. A new editor had seemed to be on a mission to antagonise the Yes mainstream in favour of far-left micro-parties like RISE, and an angry personal character hadn’t helped. For many the front cover on the Glasgow march was just the last in a series of straws.
This is a very strange argument if you actually stop for a moment and examine the statistics. Coming out as a pro-independence paper more than doubled the Sunday Herald’s sales. And those readers actually remained remarkably loyal in the face of a determined attempt to alienate them – it took years for the paper’s circulation to drop back down below where it had been when it declared for Yes.
During that time, of course, its rivals kept on falling. So even after its slump the SH is currently still shifting 50% more copies than its main competitor Scotland On Sunday (18K to 12K), which used to outsell it by a similar margin before 2014 (33K to 24K).
By any rational assessment, even after its relationship with readers soured, going indy was a positive economic move for the paper. Its sales are down 25% over the entire period, whereas the staunchly Unionist SoS is down by 64%.
Foote then makes an even stranger deduction. He notes that when another paper shifted in the opposite direction – away from mainstream soft-left pro-Holyrood Scottish political opinion and into the crowded right-wing market – its sales tanked.
A reasonable person might conclude from these two events that abandoning an under-served pro-Scottish sector for an oversaturated extreme-UK one was a bad idea, whereas moving into a pro-indy gap in the market had worked out well. Foote instead decides that the two very different outcomes somehow prove that all change is bad.
But then we start to get to the crux of the article.
Aha! It was big vile cybernats that did it and ran away! Apparently, holding newspapers to account by pointing out when they tell lies has “irredeemably poisoned” the well, so that no newspaper could possibly succeed no matter what it did.
But as we’ve just noted, the Sunday Herald DID gain – and gain significantly – by taking a Yes stance. People WERE still prepared to demonstrate faith. The simple fact is that the SH blew it.
Handed a vast influx of new readers desperate to trust it, it slowly squandered that trust by targeting a tiny niche and by attacking people on its own side. (It probably didn’t help that its two most prominent political reporters were – how can we put this? – perhaps not felt by the readership to be fully on board with the new direction.)
What Foote reveals here is that when it comes to the crunch, the mainstream media will always put aside its own differences and unite against the grubby proletariat who dare to question what they’re given.
And that’s neither surprising nor unique to journalism. These are people in the same industry, who go to the same pubs and parties and awards ceremonies, and who are locked in a siege mentality because their publications are all plunging down the same toilet, in more senses than one.
They’re all in the same boat, that boat is sinking, and they refuse to accept any degree of responsibility for the fact that they’ve been setting off cannons on board. It has to be SOMEONE else’s fault, so let’s somehow blame a handful of loonies on Twitter for the fact that you’ve binned 200,000 readers in seven years.
Murray chuckles this one off with a dismissive magnanimity, as if he’s above such base, crude unpleasantries. Which would work okay if he hadn’t called this site “A world of conspiracy theories, hatred and paranoia… a brand of nationalism that seeks to peddle falsehoods and unfounded allegations against anyone who isn’t a believer… nasty, sewage politics that debases public life” when we dared to suggest in 2015 that perhaps Scottish Labour had hired an actress to portray an NHS nurse in a leaflet.
(We suggested it as a possibility because they’d pictured her in her uniform, which is against NHS rules for real employees and could easily have recklessly got an actual nurse fired. It turned out that what we’d done was simply underestimate Scottish Labour’s legendary incompetence in failing to airbrush the logo out.)
If you go around calling other people sewage, you really can’t suddenly try to reclaim the moral high ground if someone calls you shite. (And we’re sure it was a total coincidence that this outburst came just days after the Record had finally had to grudgingly retract an absolute £20bn whopper of a front-page lie that we’d highlighted months earlier.)
This is a weirdly contradictory paragraph. On the one hand is says that the best you can aim for is balance, but at the same time claims that the Record’s readership is so poisonously entrenched in its politics (and whose fault is that, readers might wonder) that even introducing a contradictory viewpoint once a week can cost it readers.
But the penultimate sentence is a nonsense. Nobody is a critic of newspapers as a concept. They’re a fantastic concept. What people in Scotland actually want is BETTER newspapers, but having cried out in vain for decades, more and more of them are concluding that they’d rather have none at all than terrible ones that do nothing but spew lies at them every day.
Dreadful dishonest journalism isn’t any cheaper than doing it well. This site has spent six years documenting how the Scottish media doesn’t report the news but MISreports it, deliberately misleading readers with spin and distortion. And there’s no need to do that. It’s a choice. As Foote acknowledges in the paragraph above, editors do it to try to desperately cling to their existing readers by pandering to their prejudices.
If they reported the news calmly and accurately and fairly, rather than trying to hype every last thing into FURY and OUTRAGE and SHOCK, their readerships might not be so petrified (in every sense of that word) of any sort of change.
Well, they do say you should try to end on a joke. After boldly having a shot at claiming that people who want truthful news are Trumpite fascists, Foote manages to somehow deadpan his way through a line about the UK’s joke of a “press regulator”, IPSO, which – when it can be bothered to pursue things at all – savagely slams erring publications with the onerous responsibility of, um, a microscopic correction at the bottom of page 2 several weeks after the event.
If the Scottish and UK press were to sign up to any sort of meaningful regulation, where doing bad things had any real consequences – like fines, or corrections of equal prominence to the original falsehood – they might actually have (a) some trust again from readers, and (b) an incentive to be better at journalism in the first place.
But whenever it’s suggested, they circle the wagons together against the outsiders yet again and scream about “press freedom” and how regulation would hamper their ability to do the serious investigative stories that none of them ever actually do any more because they’re full of rehashed press releases from PR firms and political parties or paparazzi shots of “celebrities” flashing their underwear.
“Shut up when we tell malicious lies about you, for the good of the country” is a pretty ambitious line to close on. The truth of the matter is that everyone wants a free press holding power to account, but since that isn’t even remotely what we’ve got – in Scotland less so than almost anywhere else, since nearly none of our press is native – then dire warnings about its loss are an empty threat.
Because at the end of the day – as Murray Foote himself suggested indirectly in his Adam Tomkins tweet – having an active evil present in public life is worse than having nothing. And some things are better emasculated.
