In the Herald today:

Scotland’s top media academic: ‘BBC Scotland is biased branch office.’ Professor Catherine Happer leads Glasgow University’s acclaimed Media Group. She talks to our Writer at Large about why the national broadcaster is haemorrhaging public trust

When I saw her explanation of how this comes about, I fully agree with what is essentially a version of Hermann & Chomsky’s in Manufacturing Consent, forty years ago and one which I have largely embraced since then.

Many activists, I know, reject its subtlety and see, certainly in the reporting of the likes of Glen Campbell or Sarah Smith, a more intentional, explicitly Unionist agenda to harm the movement and the SNP.

Here’s what she says as reported by Neil Mackay:

Indeed.

I wish I’d kept them but in 2014, Chomsky and I had a wee email exchange where I like to think I converted him to the cause after explaining to him that Scottish Nationalism was of an inclusive and civic, not ethnic, form and essentially an anti-imperialist campaign at the end of the British Empire.