If our media’s a mirror, it’s a distorting fairground one

The Telegraph, has reportedly been offered the role of chairman of the BBC. Meanwhile the former editor of the Daily Mail, Paul Dacre, has been offered the job of head of Ofcom, the official media regulatory body. Saying the Mail is balanced is rather like saying that Jacob Rees-Mogg is working class.

It’s far from being the first time that Johnson has rewarded well-connected friends. The test and trace debacle in England is being headed by the Conservative peer Dido Harding, whose main qualification for the job appears to have been being the CEO of Talk Talk when it experienced a cyber attack which resulted in the personal and banking details of up to four million customers being accessed.

When asked whether the data was encrypted, she replied that she didn’t know. More recently, she confessed to not having expected that there would be a surge in demand for testing when the schools returned and people started to get back to work. As a reward she’s now been put in charge of the National Institute for Health Protection, a new body formed from the merger of Test Track and Trace with Public Health England.

However, not knowing crucial information, or being unable to foresee the blindlingly obvious, is no barrier to advancement in the Conservative Party.

Just look at Douglas Ross. In the case of the sock puppet leader of the Scottish Conservatives, we have a man who was all but appointed to the role after his democratically elected predecessor had been summarily dismissed – sorry, resigned entirely of his own accord.

For her role in the putsch, Baroness Ruth Don’t Call Me Baroness Davidson was awarded a cushy seat in the House of Lords where she can continue to, quite literally, lord it over us at public expense for the rest of her life.

Even democracy means nothing to a Conservative Party which operates on preference and patronage. Douglas and Ruth have been rewarded with a couple of opinion polls which show the Scottish Conservatives would be wiped out if there was a Westminster General Election soon. Luckily for them there won’t be. We’ll be independent by the time of the next one.

However, this most recent co-option of public bodies to serve the Conservatives’ right-wing Brexit agenda is potentially one of the most dangerous. Even Jeremy Clarkson, who’s not exactly known for his sympathies with liberal causes, said the appointment of Charles Moore as chairman of the BBC would see the corporation “go up in flames like one of my caravans”.

The media in the UK is already dangerously skewed to the right. In Scotland, it is overwhelmingly skewed against support for independence. The concept of balance in the British media appears to consist of allowing right-wing zoomers the freedom to spout lies and scare stories, as though balance means giving equal time to the implausible and unlikely. Proper balance means looking out of the window to check the weather when someone in power insists that it’s sunny out, not saying “but critics say it’s raining”.

But even that isn’t enough for the proponents of Brexit and the authoritarian agenda that the Conservatives are increasingly pushing. They seek complete domination of the media landscape.

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By some accounts, Charles Moore has boasted that he doesn’t watch television, yet is to be put in charge of the BBC. We can expect that, under his control, the corporation will move even further away from its already tattered obligation to act as a public service and will instead become even more of a platform for the right than it already is. Both Moore and Dacre are outspoken critics of the BBC. They make no bones about the fact they think it’s biased against the right.

In Scotland, we already know how out of touch with the public the BBC is. We already know how unrepresentative of public opinion our media is. Despite this being a country where a series of recent polls have confirmed that a majority support independence, we have a media where only this newspaper and its Sunday edition support a constitutional position backed by over half the country’s population.

The BBC in Scotland has already bowed to pressure from British nationalism to ensure that the Conservatives and Labour can make a political response to the First Minister’s daily public health briefings. You can imagine the outcry from the Conservatives if the BBC instituted a daily political right of reply to the UK Government’s health briefings, but in Scotland, that’s just fine.

A healthy media is supposed to hold a mirror up to a society, to reflect its views and to act as a platform for national conversations. Scotland’s media is a distorting fairground mirror which preferentially boosts some view points over others.

Under the new regulatory regime which the Conservatives have in mind, pro-independence voices will be squeezed out even further from the traditional media. If the Conservatives succeed they will shift the BBC even further away from Scottish public opinion than it already is.

For the independence movement, what this means is we are going to have to rely even more on our grassroots campaign if we are to win the next referendum, or a campaign based upon an alternative strategy following a refusal of a Section 30 order.

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This next campaign will begin as though it were that last panicked week of the 2014 campaign when Better Together and the British establishment belatedly realised that they could lose. We will be subjected to a barrage of fear, of scare stories, and of misinformation which the traditional media will propagate instead of challenging. Yet we cannot effectively deploy that grassroots campaigning as long as lockdown measures remain in force.

If Scotland had a media that was truly balanced and representative of Scottish public opinion, we’d be independent already. That’s one reason why the Conservatives are desperate to ensure that Scotland, and the UK as a whole, don’t get a representative media. The only way in which Scotland will ever have a media that is truly reflective of Scottish opinion is in an independent country.