Boobs, tubes and pubes.

Since last Thursday's spectacularly biased Question Time, the ugly spectre of media bias has been twisting and turning throughout these tartan tinged interwebs. Blog posts have been written, complaints sent to the BBC, a collosal 10 minutes on Saturday morning before 9am were devoted to the perceived anti-Scottishness on Radio Scotland. A campaign was even started on the People-Power-Change campaign site 38Degrees (more of that later), ohh and the Scottish wing of the Labour party held their conference in the 650 seater Corran Halls in Oban.


Naturally the BBC had to cover the conference. We'd already had circa 200 hours of coverage from proper London Labour, but hey here's a chance for our Scottish media to swirl a glass or two with some holidaying big Labour hitters, getting down with their Celtic brethren whilst getting misty eyed about Grannies Hielan hame...

Friday morning conference started with Iain Gray appearing on Radio 4's Today programme, where he was given the opportunity to dazzle and shine a UK wide audience with his wit, erudition and statesman like utterings. Rather predictably he duly ignored every question Evan Davies put to him about what he would do for Scotland and instead whined out his default setting about the SNP and their 'Broken Promises'(c)Labourparty2007-2011. 

Similar cringe laden coverage continued throughout the day on the various BBC 'outlets'. The Northern British department were cock-a-hoop with delight at the thought of pressing the clammy flesh of alien-in-human form hithing Ed Miliband. Young Jamie McIvor drove North, looked Red Ed in the eye and gushed his way through his interview with the great leader in waiting. I would have given a link to this, but rather unsurprisingly 'Reporting Scotland' is 'Not available') on the BBC's iPlayer...although the Labour Party Political Broadcast is still available, as is 'Conference' which was played on BBC 1 last night and will be available until the 8th of November... 

Saturday saw bonny lassie Harriet Harman wade into the conference and upset the SNP hatefest by labelling a Lib Dem twunt a Ginger twunt .

This attack on Danny Alexander overwhelmed the rest of her speech in which she accused all Lib Dems of being Tory mutants...bang goes any chance of a reprisal of the Lib-Lab pact 1999-2007, unsurprisingly her speech is still available on the iPlayer...one blessing is that it utterly overshadowed any coverage of Iain Gray's leader speech...

Obviously BBC Scotland are a wee bit miffed that they'll have to wait until nex year to continue the live Labour love in, but that doesn't stop them giving prominence to the best of the conference throughout their website and letting us read the thoughts of Anne McKechin Labour's shiny new shadow Secretary for the State of Scotland...no, me neither... I don't mean to be overtly insensitive here, but, could someone please suggest the poor woman undergoes a SuBo type transformation. I mean FFS I thought this was Prescott in a wig at first. Back when I were a lad the lassies that supported Labour were hot-to-trot-sassy-right-on-young-things, what the chuff have they morphed into? Have the Baillies, Lamont's and Currans of this world eaten their aesthetically pleasing easy on the eye Labourite lovelies...and not in a good way?

However, I digress, as per normal. Now that the Conference season has finally come to an end, it's interesting to note the differing coverage given to Labour's Northern British branch versus that given to the Scottish Government. SLAB were give live streaming throughout the conference Friday to Sunday. The SNP were given the Tartan Overlords speech on the Saturday. Labour proclamations were reported as good news, SNP utterances were prefixed with the phrase 'SNP Accused of' (c) Scotsman 1926-2011

Now I'm sure this is just the usual canard of paranoia that we Independence supporters are routinely told we suffer from...but the following images, I think tell a wee tale. The first is a screen grab of todays Politics section on the Scotsman, you'll note there are exactly nine articles headed 'Scottish Labour Party Conference'. The other  image is a screen grab from Monday the 18th of October, the day after the SNP conference in Perth, it has five stories headed 'SNP Conference'. The Labour articles are reported with gravitas, even the fluff job the normally splendid Kenny Farquharson gives Iain Gray, although his charismatic tattie scone gag falls a bit flat, as does the alarming prospect of retro Labour. The corresponding SNP articles are mostly trivialised coverage e.g, 'A tip of the hat to FM's wife' and and Angus Robertson laughing at himself...ho and indeed ho.

 

 

All of which makes your average Independence supporter ponder just how heavily stacked in favour of Labour are the media cards? Even something as simple as the Conference tv coverage is dubious, SLAB on Beeb One last night. SNP on BBC Two two weeks earlier, now everyone knows that BBC One has higher audience figures than Two, so why did the Beeb in Scotland choose Beeb One for Labour?

Those admirable coves at Newsnet Scotland have covered the perceived media bias extensively, as have Ms GoLassieGo, Gerry Hassan and even the Borders favourite stay-at-home blogging Spectatorite Alex Massie joined in, with a youth speak dig at Dimbleby. I was therefore delighted to discover that someone had decided to suggested a campaign against this malarkey to 38Degrees. They've recently thrown themselves behind such campaigns as Stopping the Tories selling off the Forests and fighting the UK governments plans to store phone and internet data..those campaigns received, respectively 71 and 38 votes before the organisation set about their targets with great vim and gusto. So far, so admirable. Yet the current number for a campaign against Media Bias is sitting at some 673 votes with a respectible 204 comments. Enquiries as to when they might engage with the campaign or even chat about it, are met by a firewall of silence...Could it be that our hip young digital age gunslingers are only interested in the big issues that like concern London and Londoners? Are these Nathan Barley's at all interested in points North of the M25...If you're on facebook, give their page a visit and make their acquaintance, you might even want to leave a message on their wall.