By Professor John Robertson OBA
The BBC Scotland report on last night’s fireworks events is one of the simplest best examples of media bias and you could use it with 11 year-olds.
It’s so naked and simple, you might force a wee ironic snigger.
It opens with
Firefighters attacked on Bonfire Night as crews take 1,000 calls
and goes on with 32 (count them) paragraphs describing incidents, interspersed with images, including those of masked hooded youths with big fireworks.
Then and only then from paragraphs 33 to 36, we hear:
Overall, the force said the incidents of serious disorder had fallen this year.
As part of Operation Moonbeam, a police operation launched in 2020 to deal with disorder at this time of year, specialist resources were deployed 26 times on 5 November last year – this year there were 18 deployments.
The number of injured officers has also reduced significantly – 62 last year compared to one this year.
Assistant Chief Constable Tim Mairs, gold commander for Operation Moonbeam said challenging scenes had not escalated to mass disorder as it had last year.
BBC Scotland reporter – ‘It was a damp squib boss, what will we do?’
BBC Scotland News Editor (James Cook) – ‘There was some trouble. Drag it out and big it up as long as you can. Put the facts in briefly at the end so we can claim fairness and balance. No one reads our stuff all the way to the end.’
Support Scots Independent, Scotland’s oldest pro-independence newspaper and host of the OBA (Oliver Brown Award) at: https://scotsindependent.scot/FWShop/shop/
The Oliver Brown Award for advancing the cause of Scotland’s self respect, previously awarded to Dr Philippa Whitford, Alex Salmond and Sean Connery: https://scotsindependent.scot/?page_id=116
About Oliver Brown, the first Scottish National Party candidate to save his deposit in a Parliamentary election: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oliver_Brown_(Scottish_activis
Talking-up Scotland 'Albatraz' 
MSM Monitor Twitter account stated that regarding this particular headline the BBC website has changed it four times this morning !
As the current top story it has a headline:
“Firefighters bombarded in Bonfire Night disorder”
Previous BBC headlines on their main Scotland page this morning include various similar versions of the above headline that also has one version that notes the “Police being attacked with Fireworks”.
Actually looking at the four previous BBC headlines on this story as noted by MSM Monitor in his twitter account, then the current new BBC headline on their website is actually a fifth amendment today on their various BBC headlines on this same story.
I assume then that the UK media will promote this as a UK wide #BAD story as they did when there was riots in England recently , but none in Scotland, but they the UK media promoted them as UK wide riots.
I jest of course, as obviously they will promote this as a ‘local’ (Scottish) occurrence, and so it will be framed by them as a #BAD Scottish incident and not as #BAD UK wide incident by the UK (English) media.
The same UK (English) media who do all of the heavy lifting for any of the #BAD English incidents in presenting them as UK wide #BAD incidents while simultanously they, as an English media, always just love to drop Scotland in it as being the #BADDIES within the whole UK when something #BAD ever happens here.
Rule is when it’s bad in England it then becomes #UKBAD (and all of the various UK governments are then to be seen as being blameless as others must take the blame for them).
Other rule being when it is (promoted as being) bad in Scotland then it remains always #SCOTLANDBAD together with also being #SNPBAD (as the SNP must always be blamed for everything in Scotland especially all of the things that are the fault of the various UK governments).
Mind you that’s what some Scots in the 2024 UK GE voted for to both accept and embrace did they not ??
LikeLiked by 3 people