Brexit.

Innula Zenovka

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That video is blocked in the UK.

Click here for a long list of Euro-Myths from the British press

If we compare England and the USA to functional western style democracies, there are two factors that are so obviously missing: A free, critical, reliable press and a good educational system. That may explain a lot.

I think the thing to remember is that, for the last 30 years, this sort of nonsense, along with malign falsehoods about immigrants, asylum-seekers and Muslims, has been the staple of tabloid front page headlines in the UK.

This means that people are constantly bombarded with the misleading and sensationalised headlines, designed to catch people's attention so they buy a paper to read more, about these myths -- you simply can't escape them, since every time you pass a news stall, or go into a supermarket or station bookstore, you see and register them, even if you don't read them.

The messages have then been picked up and amplified by Conservative and UKIP politicians, with the result that they provide a constant background of racist, xenophobic and anti-EU messages, and since most people aren't particularly interested in news about the EU, that's pretty much all the news about it that they see, even if they're not really taking conscious note of it.

It's not that we lack a free, critical and independent press -- if you read The Guardian, The Independent, the Financial Times or the mass circulation tabloid Daily Mirror, you do get a different perspective, but the numbers who read those, as a proportion of people who are exposed to masses of anti-EU propaganda every time they walk past the newspaper display at the local supermarket, is quite small.

Nor, of course, has it helped that successive British governments have used the EU as an excuse for all sorts of things -- whenever they introduce a bill to give legal force to an EU directive, both Labour and Conservative governments have taken the opportunity to include related measures that aren't actually required by the EU, and then deflect any criticism by suggesting the EU insist on whatever it is.

Similarly, "We can't do such-and-such because the EU won't let us" is a frequent (and usually false) claim that generally gets the government off the hook when it doesn't want to do something.
 
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Bartholomew Gallacher

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It's not that we lack a free, critical and independent press -- if you read The Guardian, The Independent, the Financial Times or the mass circulation tabloid Daily Mirror, you do get a different perspective, but the numbers who read those, as a proportion of people who are exposed to masses of anti-EU propaganda every time they walk past the newspaper display at the local supermarket, is quite small.
Well this has been not only the case in the UK, but many different other member states as well: all good comes from the own national capital, all bad things from Brussels.

What's more interesting though is despite of how the media landscape in the UK looks like, that the Scottish people are in vast majority for remaining in the EU. So the question is: how comes? Do they have got other newspapers? Are the politiicians more openly speaking about the benefits of being in the EU? Or are they just witnessing those with their own eyes enough?

What's the explanation of this? I thought about it, and guess it is a mixture of different things but still have no real grasp about it.
 

Veritable Quandry

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Just putting out a theory, but Scotland has long been the second partner in the UK. So on the one hand, they don't have the illusion that they ever had control like England has. On the other hand, the EU gave Scotland a counterweight to English political parties by enforcing broader protections for consumers and civil rights, among other things.
 

Wesleytron

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Do they have got other newspapers?
They do, but it's also been observed on a number of occasions that even the Scottish editions of the UK papers often run with very different headlines and stories to the rest of the nation, often taking a different angle.

I don't know if that's because they know the Scottish generally already think a different way so just publish the news in a way that will sell more newspapers (because that's all they care about), or maybe the owners of those papers have a vested interested in Scotland leaving the rest of UK at some point!

eg: Two front pages reveal The Sun’s hypocrisy about Jeremy Corbyn

 
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Innula Zenovka

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Well this has been not only the case in the UK, but many different other member states as well: all good comes from the own national capital, all bad things from Brussels.

What's more interesting though is despite of how the media landscape in the UK looks like, that the Scottish people are in vast majority for remaining in the EU. So the question is: how comes? Do they have got other newspapers? Are the politiicians more openly speaking about the benefits of being in the EU? Or are they just witnessing those with their own eyes enough?

What's the explanation of this? I thought about it, and guess it is a mixture of different things but still have no real grasp about it.
Certainly they have different newspapers, and even the Scottish editions of London newspapers are often very different from their English counterparts -- notoriously Rupert Murdoch's Sun newspaper frequently has radically different headlines and editorial sympathies depending on which side of the border you buy a copy.

But I think the real point is that Scotland is a separate country and many people there, whatever their political sympathies, see their relationship with London in much the same way as do many Leave voters see their relationship with Brussels, and are thus completely unimpressed by arguments about "sovereignty" when they're made by a Westminster politician with an English accent.
 

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When you are from a smaller or sub-group (if I can use that term) of a larger community I think you are generally more apt to read different takes on an issue. You may be more able to detect bias.
 
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Kara Spengler

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That video is blocked in the UK.
Plus the US, so much for switching my VPN to the UK then. I wonder where it is available?
 

Kara Spengler

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Aww.
It's probably copyright issues rather than censorship. For those who can't see it, it's a segment from QI series E, episode 5. They're reading some of the silliest "EU Regulations" stories the British Fantasy Press had produced and making fun of the people who are actually stupid enough to fall for it.
A decade later it turned out half the British population was stupid enough to fall for it.
Graham Hughes has done a few vids on headlines like that, here is one:

 

Bartholomew Gallacher

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Well thanks for all the explanations, now I do understand better. Though I do view Scotland as more of a state in the UK than an own country, I mean being 500 years together in the same kingdom kind of blurry such lines.

Anyway, here's a nice image which has something for everyone:

 
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Innula Zenovka

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It's perhaps no great surprise, but the amount of anti-Labour bias shown by the British press in the election campaign is quite extraordinary:


The academics said the findings were “important context” to studying the election and that while Labour politicians may have had more coverage in the national press than the Conservatives, “a large proportion of this was negative”.

The study of the first week weighted each news item about the election based on whether it contained a negative or positive implication for each party, scoring either -1 or +1 respectively, while balanced news items produced a 0 score.

The result was a positive score of +4 for the Conservatives, and a negative score of -91 for Labour, suggesting coverage had been overwhelmingly negative for the main opposition.

Other opposition parties scored less extreme negative coverage: the Liberal Democrats -14, the SNP -8 and the Brexit party -2. The researchers said this “largely reflected their marginality in newspaper coverage”.
 

Tigger

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During the debate between Corbyn and Johnson the conservatice central office press account on twitter renamed and re-branded itself to pretend to be a fact checker and commented extensively on the debate. This is in contravention of Twitters rules on impersonation and the conduct of verified accounts.

 

Innula Zenovka

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During the debate between Corbyn and Johnson the conservatice central office press account on twitter renamed and re-branded itself to pretend to be a fact checker and commented extensively on the debate. This is in contravention of Twitters rules on impersonation and the conduct of verified accounts.

Someone has fought fire with fire: