BRAND NEW, FULL COLOUR TABLOID...SAME OLD BIAS

Today we get the first edition of the new tabloid-sized Dundee "Courier", which they euphemistically term “compact”. I would like to say that it’s a welcome, fresh and new face to the Scottish media scene but unfortunately, I can’t. The best I can do is say that it is shockingly partisan and riddled with mistakes. So no change there then!


I would have thought that it would be impossible for as paper as pro-Tory and pro-Union as the "Courier" to be more biased, but with its re-launch it has somehow managed it. 


Political Editor, David Clegg, launches the new paper with an interview with David Cameron, which is continued and fleshed out on page 10 under the headline “Leafy town key to fate of Union”. 

The leafy town in question is David Cameron’s constituency of Witney in Oxfordshire. What follows is one of the most pro-Union, pro-Tory puffs I have ever had the misfortune to waste ten minutes of my life on. You can just picture David Clegg simpering and drooling over the PM and failing to ask a single hard hitting question.


If DC Thomson wanted to increase the circulation of the "Courier", instead of tinkering with its format and rumoured price hike of a whopping 25% to 60p, a good way might have been to cater for the political aspirations of its potential readers. 


And that might have been indicated to them by observing the voting patterns of the folk in Dundee, Angus, Perth and Fife, which are most certainly not Conservative!

Instead DCT prefers to continue to frustrate them with this nauseating interview with the UK prime minister in which “Call Me” is allowed to expound the virtues of the Union and repeat ad nauseam that he “cares deeply” for it an that he “profoundly hopes” that people will vote for it.


Additionally, whilst in Witney, Mr Clegg conducted a vox pop of a supposed cross section of folk that he met. All, strangely, seem to agree with their leader. 


Clegg tells us that the majority of people he spoke to wanted Scotland to remain in the Union, which is a little odd considering that every poll conducted in England shows a majority for Scots leaving the Union. 


Is he trying to tell us that people in Witney in Oxfordshire are in inverse proportion to the rest of England? Or did he search out his respondents carefully before asking the question in an attempt to portray the English as dewy eyed lovers of all things Scots? (Instead of what they really think, which is mostly that Scots are a bunch of drunk, drug addicted, moaning spongers and subsidy junkies. 


Really, David (Clegg), if you are going to try that kind of thing, it might be a good idea to at least try to keep it within the bounds of reality and not in the most far flung realms of cloud cuckoo land where the sky is a bluer Tory blue and the birds sing out for England and St George.

Now on the paper itself. One would have expected that with the re-launch all the stops would have been pulled out to avoid the perennial "Courier" blunders. (For those of you who don’t read it, the "Courier" is hilariously badly proof read, in fact I don’t think it is proof read at all. Apart from the usual typos, repeat words, spelling mistakes and grammatical snafus, stories end, mid sentence, on a word like “and” with whole sections missing, and even worse, sometimes an entire story is repeated verbatim later in paper.) 


In the new paper I did not spot a mistake until page three, where we get the following “...Mr Hutchison said told the 'Courier'...”. Clearly Mr Hutchison at one point had 'said' something and later it was edited to him 'telling the Courier' but the word 'said' was left in. There are several more mistakes of a similar nature throughout the paper that are the result of sloppy editing and poor proof reading.


So all in all, not much change then... oh, except for the tabloid format and anticipated price hike of 25%.