Reporting Scotland, as often before, heads off on a different path from BBC Scotland’s website, promotes the animal welfare crisis to headline story and replaces that ‘ugly’ dug with kittens.

Readers will know that the cost-of-living crisis has not yet been successfully dumped at the door of the Scottish Government despite repeated attempts do so such as the recent, astonishing example where Scottish Labour tell that SNP Government to ‘use its existing powers’ and compensate for the two-child benefit cap! You know that benefit-cap which their leader, Sir Keir Starver, has told them Labour cannot afford to promise to end?

Imagine this was about something more clearly in the Scottish Government’s camp – drug deaths, waiting times, police staffing, affordable housing – what would come inevitably at the end of the Reporting Scotland broadcast and at the bottom off of the fuller report on the above website?

‘The Scottish Government says it is….’

In this case, ‘The UK Government says it is…’ does not appear in the short broadcast or in the longer report. Why not? Well, clearly it’s not the job of BBC Scotland to tell you anything bad about the UK Government just in case you might think the Scottish Government could do better.

For hard evidence that BBC Scotland does almost always add ‘The Scottish Government says it is’ and does so far more so than BBC Wales or STV, see these:

New Research finds BBC Scotland is twice as likely to politicise negative reporting, to platform opposition voices and to ‘accuse’ the devolved government.

Research: BBC Scotland News constructs a far more anxious and conservative world than STV News does: