STV News loves to remind us that it is the most-watched Scottish TV News every time they’re on. To be fair, they’ve lived in the shadow of the BBC for decades so the emergence of data for 2019, showing they pull in more punters, must have been quite a boost.

For some time, I’ve detected a more balanced approach to issues affecting Scotland’s image and the debate over independence, though they too feed at the trough of NHS ‘scandals.’ I suppose you have to remember they are a business which, on the one hand, is not going to deliberately offend at least 50% of its audience which is pro-Indy but, equally, it’s not going to pass up on the morbid appeal of stories about health.

Reporting Scotland, over the last two days, showed its determination to learn nothing if that might compromise its habitual, sometimes more calculating, agenda of undermining the SNP and all its works.

This morning, they headlined the call by campaigners for alcohol sponsorship to be banned in Scottish sport. The website covered it in more detail but with no more balance or informative value. The main points:

‘An academic study found drink advertising features every 15 seconds at some high-level fixtures. Researchers found alcohol companies represented 7% of the main official sponsors or partners of Scottish football and rugby teams in 2018-19.’

I have no problem with this being reported but it needs more than just what the campaigners say.

Far more important, especially for reporting by a public service broadcaster, it contains no evidence of actual alcohol consumption or of trends in this. Why didn’t they cover this evidence?

The number of alcohol-related emergency hospital admissions has fallen by almost 6500 in the last 11 years, according to analysis. Figures from the Scottish Parliament’s Information Centre show that such admissions have dropped by 16.2% from 39,857 in 2007/08 to 33,366 in 2018/19. The number of emergency admissions to psychiatric units dropped by more than a third (36.9%) during the same period, from 2117 to 1335.

https://news.stv.tv/scotland/drop-in-alcohol-related-emergency-hospital-admissions?top

Why, also, did they not cover these earlier reports of an improving situation with regard to alcohol consumption and health consequences?

Scotland only UK nation where the alcohol-related death rate dropped this century

NHS Scotland beats drug and alcohol treatment target for three years and Reporting Scotland ignores it for the same period