Like Cryptococcus neoformans in or around every hospital there is still a sickening sub-culture in Pacific Quay

Lord Reith, The Greatest of the House Jocks and source of the Cryptococcus Britannica virus

I return to this theme often as my latest evidence of BBC bias is attributed to a paranoid conspiracy culture which I embrace. Like Chomsky, I have never pointed to any media conspiracy and like him, I know you don’t need one to get the kind of biases prevalent in our MSM.

Anyhow, ‘everybody’ tells me that the folk at BBC Scotland are all paranoid about me and some other bloggers conspiring to get them. Well we are but we never plan anything. I’m in a ‘deviant’ subculture, like the mods or the punks, along with Wings, the Wee Ginger Dug and many other cybernuts, acting in our own interests we seem to serve the shared interests our group. Nobody tells anyone what to do.

Back to the main point of all this, seriously, I feel the urge after a dog-walking reflective process, to clarify again.

There is a subculture called ‘Scottish journalism’ in which, historically, one of the central values influencing behaviour by its members, has been Unionism. Not surprisingly, that value is at its strongest in the Scottish branch of the state broadcaster.

The value of the Union has its roots for BBC Scotland in Lord Reith’s pre-war aim to have the sound of Big Ben heard in the remotest croft. Again, no all-powerful figure told the troops what to do. The staff were initially appointed by people sharing that value unconditionally and from within the mainstream of a predominantly Unionist Scottish press. No one had to tell them who to appoint. They recognised their own and in a special deal, a Labour Party elite, Glasgow University educated, were allowed the same influence that the Eton/Oxbridge elite had long exercised in Broadcasting House. MI5 had, of course, oversight and final approval.  

Then in the 21st Century, as Scottish independence began to threaten seriously, Pacific Quay became the centre of the resistance to constitutional change. Senior figures, all Labour-connected, led the campaign in the run-up to 2014 and their work was supplemented daily by the biased reporting of their juniors, eager to please but, crucially, rarely if ever bullied into compliance. Secure, salaried and pensioned, with a kind of security not found anywhere else in their trade even the most ambivalent about the Union would see the sense in doing what was ‘right’…for their families, mortgages and cars.

Finding ways to please their superiors by picking at supposed failures in public services and by demonising the leading SNP figures, ensuring a daily flow of propaganda aimed at scaring the old and the weak, they may well have stolen the referendum result.

Now, many of the big beasts have gone but younger ones, fully acculturated in Unionism, survive, especially in the teams at Reporting Scotland and Good Morning Scotland.

It won’t be over until Brian Taylor sings at the farewell do for the whole bloody thing.

17 thoughts on “Like Cryptococcus neoformans in or around every hospital there is still a sickening sub-culture in Pacific Quay”

  2. Got it to a tee John , the fight continues, we still have Labourites pulling strings all over the place in the BBC , if they are not actually working for the Scottish arm of the propaganda machine then their wife , partner , friend , son , daughter etc. is . They are on every committee , chair , board , business that they can get a shoe in on and pass on the any tit-bits they see an SNP baad headline in ! .

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    1. ‘if they are not actually working for the Scottish arm of the propaganda machine then their wife , partner , friend , son , daughter etc. is’ Yes, when they all think alike who needs a conspiracy.

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  3. I understand your point and agreed with it until this last year.
    Now i am highly suspicious that there isn’t either a high up influence by the intelligence agencies or an extremely biased executive with a planned anti Independence agenda.
    The attacks have just been too focused and consistently anti SNHS and education to fit with Manufacturing Consent.

    Elsewhere, in a national newspaper like The Guardian half of the Scottish articles are by Severin Carrell who is obviously a unionist (and also a terrible journalist), Libby Brooks seem to be more balanced but because of that The Guardian is biased without too much conspiracy. Books will be written about the Guardian’s drift (avalanche?) to the right and their overall anti-independence bias is what it is, engrained establishment unionism.

    I also understand that because there isn’t much news in Scotland they think they have to work harder to find bad stories which because they are hard to find, are often extremely petty. But look at any other regional news in England. Yorkshire for example. They don’t spend all their time trying to portray their own region as a shit hole.
    Does any other regional news repeat the same stories endlessly?

    As John promotes, what is wrong with some good stories about Scotland, if there aren’t any important bad ones? Would the Tories and Labour allow it?

    The hilarious thing is that the lies are being repeated by so called experts below the border. Lisa Nandy, who doesn’t even know the name of the SNP (at least twice in one minute).

    I am beginning to think that all this BBC bad news is not for us but for England’s consumption. I am sure this is at least partly true. State propaganda for the ruling state allowing it to feel ‘right’ about it’s colonisation, against all contrary evidence. ‘Yes they are poor and uneducated and we shouldn’t have to, but we have to rule them because they couldn’t do it themselves’.

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      1. Of course she is , she can try all she likes to wriggle out of it but she was called out and she’s having a hissy fit , anyway she is a loser like her big pal Scotland’s last union jack suit man ! .

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      2. Of course it’s deliberate. The British nationalists call the SNP the Scottish Nationalists’. It’s bcs, not so long ago, ‘nationalist’ was equated with the BNP, and even the Nazi’s, the word has MASSIVE connotations especially for the older generations. It’s an attempt to portray the SNP and their members as narrow, insular ethnic ‘nationalists’ when in fact the opposite is true. I have a friend who is originally from India, an independence voter, who said, ‘I just wish they would change their name’. In other words, the ‘National’ is/was a problem.

        It’s what the English media and the English nationalist government relied on in 2014, and they are attempting to use it again. Hell, the Brexiters, ( the real narrow ‘nationalists) are calling themselves ‘internationalists’ now. Oh the irony. They have even stolen that from the people of Scotland, along with just about everything else. I have lived in Scotland for 30 years, and quickly saw how the Scots have been so supressed and oppressed, by their neighbours in England at all levels actually, it’s sickening. I have felt very much at home in Scotland and utterly reject the Britnats’ attempts to portray my country as somehow ethnic ‘nationalist’.

        When the narrow, insular, dangerous actual ethnic Britnats are controlling the media and therefore the narrative, Scotland has a job to do and the SNP are doing it against huge odds. The Britnats absolutely abide that Nicola Sturgeon is admired, and given a voice across Europe. It’s why Johnson is attempting to ‘ban’ our FM from actually attending the Climate emergency conference in Glasgow later this year. Imagine, another country attempting to stop your democratically elected lead politician from attending such an even in their OWN country! You could hardly make it up. I don’t think many of us will allow that to happen.

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  5. Bang on John

    In recent years two of the Top hoose Jocks have been threatened with the chop.
    Gary Robertson then later Bill Whiteford. Dont know what the reasoning was. Increase their street cred?

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  6. Pingback: Glasgow’s hospitals miles better but ignored by BBC Scotland again – Talking-Up Scotland II

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