Two headlines sum it all up for us?

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BBC Wales and BBC Scotland react, both on the 9th September, to the latest Pisa results. The BBC Wales reporting is especially notable given these:

Imagine if Scotland had been bottom, how BBC Scotland would have covered.

Of course, the English figures are fiddled. They’ve just recruited image consultants to present their still dodgy data so that they don’t nearly get chucked off the whole thing as in 2022. See: https://talkingupscotlandtwo.com/2026/09/08/two-leading-academics-cast-doubt-on-englands-supposedly-better-pisa-scores-as-their-sample-is-revealed-to-be-skewed-toward-high-achievers-by-schools-gaming-the-system-again/

Help Talking-up Scotland keep goin

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Back to BBC Wales – In April this year, even as Labour in Wales faced defeat in election to the devolved parliament, BBC Wales maintained standards of balance, impartiality and fairness utterly alien to BBC Scotland:

On Friday 17^th April 2026, only three weeks before the Scottish Parliament election on May 7^th, 2026, a research team at Talking-up Scotland completed a 100-day survey of the BBC Wales and BBC Scotland’s inserts in BBC Breakfast, Monday to Friday 6 to 9am. Despite both operating within a dramatic political context with pro-independence parties, Plaid Cymru (PC) and SNP, for the first time likely to win in both countries, the coverage differed markedly in terms of the politicisation of reports and in the overall level of negativity know to influence voter behaviour.

A 2023 study published by Talking-up Scotland, prior to the recent surge in support for Plaid Cymru, had revealed BBC Scotland to be twice as likely as BBC Wales, to politicise negative reporting, to platform opposition voices and to ‘accuse’ the devolved government.¹

A similar study, in the same year found that BBC Scotland was very significantly more likely than STV, to report bad news, by a ratio of more than 5 to 3, and was 3 times more likely to link bad news to the Scottish Government or ministers.²

Researchers have found that heavy consumption of negative news triggers the release of stress hormones and consequent increases in anxiety. ^3,4,5 Studies of voting patterns have found that those with a ‘negativity bias’ derived from fear and anxiety about the world they live in, have a tendency to vote for conservative political groups often promising to prevent change or to return to earlier imagined more familiar times. ^6,7,8

In 2014, research which covered the period from September 2012 to September 2013 which took in 730 hours of early evening TV news coverage broadcast by the BBC revealed the No campaign benefited by a ratio of 3:2 and personalised independence arguments as being the wishes of Alex Salmond, considered a divisive character by some. They appeared 35 times with no such personalisation of any of the No campaign’s arguments^.9

This most recent study, of around 200 BBC Wales reports and 300 BBC Scotland reports, found, as in earlier studies many similarities between the two, of the kind some will argue is the nature of journalism – an emphasis in both on bad news and a tendency to try win audiences with moving tales of the lives of individuals who are in many ways similar to their audiences and with whom they might empathise.

BBC Scotland’s surface similarities, however, conceal sharp and hard differences in the underlying political messages being communicated and which researchers have shown will influence voter decisions.

First, BBC Scotland had significantly, nearly 50%, more negative reports, by 171 to 124, suggesting a darker, anxiety-inducing representations/constructions of life in Scotland, predisposing voters to prefer the more change-averse, conservative ideologies of the Unionist parties to the more radical, change-welcoming views of the SNP and Scottish Greens.

Second, more significantly, BBC Scotland was far more likely, by 39 to 9, to mention the Scottish Government in reports of problems facing their audiences. At times the Scottish Government or the SNP would be directly accused by an opposition politician of responsibility for events even though they were more accurately the direct responsibility of a health board, a chief of police or a local council. Repeated enough as any propagandist has long known since the time of Goebbels in Nazi Germany, this contaminates the SNP with apparent failures in, for example, schools, hospitals or in criminal events. BBC Wales did this rarely, 9 times in 200 reports.

Finally, BBC Scotland were three times more likely, 14 to 5 times, to report positively on the achievements of the UK Government.

Taken together, we have here evidence of unbalanced, inaccurate and deceptive, reporting of the news in Scotland, over a very prolonged period, which has played a significant role in suppressing support for the SNP and in particular, among BBC Scotland’s more mature audience.

That this is unchanged in BBC Scotland but not yet apparent in BBC Wales, despite the recent nationalist threat to their future, suggests a deep culture which takes years to embed and to become so resilient that it can quickly condition, if necessary, new staff

Sources:

1. https://talkingupscotlandtwo.com/2023/06/02/new-research-finds-bbc-scotland-is-twice-as-likely-to-politicise-negative-reporting-to-platform-opposition-voices-and-to-accuse-the-devolved-government/
2. https://talkingupscotlandtwo.com/2023/06/30/research-bbc-scotland-news-constructs-a-far-more-anxious-and-conservative-world-than-stv-news-does/
3. https://patient.info/news-and-features/is-watching-the-news-bad-for-your-mental-health
4. https://www.apa.org/monitor/2022/11/strain-media-overload
5. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9135112/
6. https://www.psychologytoday.com/gb/blog/mind-in-the-machine/201612/fear-and-anxiety-drive-conservatives-political-attitudes
7. https://www.apa.org/news/apa/2020/fear-motivator-elections
8. chrome-extension://efaidnbmnnnibpcajpcglclefindmkaj/https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/158607199.pdf
9. https://newsnetscotland.com/8598-broadcasters-favouring-no-campaign-according-to-new-academic-study/

Help Talking-up Scotland keep goin

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