Snow joke (so it isnae!)
The first snowfalls of winter are still on the ground and the mass hysteria from the media is resounding loudly. In keeping with modern practice, the main thrust of the reportage we are seeing on TV and in the print media is all about who to blame. On this occasion they have opted to foist it all on the shoulders of Transport Minister Stewart Stevenson.
Let’s have a wee think about what actually happened. The snow fell. That is not the fault of anyone in government. The snow wasn’t cleared off the roads. The responsibility for that can be distributed. Mother Nature shoulders much of the blame mainly for the overwhelmingly large amount of the white cold stuff She deposited on us. A range of private contractors and councils across (mainly) central Scotland can take a good lump of the blame for their inability to clear or keep the roads clear. The Met Office can take a lump too as their forecasts as furnished to government and councils were conflicting and inaccurate. The Holyrood government minister can take a bit of it as well as the responses from government were a bit slow and ultimately inadequate.
Thus far, so good. Now comes the bit where I risk making myself unpopular. A very large part of the responsibility for the chaos we have seen on our roads can be squarely laid at the feet of the people who ventured out on Monday with blithe disregard for the conditions they were already aware of and in blissful ignorance of the conditions they were about to face as the mis-forecast snow was dumped across the country. This may seem like a contradiction, and to an extent, it is. However, it is December, snow had already fallen in huge quantities and there was little sign of a thaw in progress. Any rational person taking their car onto the roads with the prospect of even a light fall of snow needs to take responsibility for their own situation. While accepting that many people had good reason to be out and about on Monday, it is hard to accept that problems on the roads were going to come as a surprise. The plethora of jack-knifed HGV lorries clearly could not be predicted, but the delays in reaching them to assist in getting them moving again was compounded by the accumulation of all the factors already mentioned; Mother Nature, contractors, councils and unprepared drivers.
The only innocent in this part of the scenario is Stewart Stevenson. His failure, if indeed it was such, was limited to the possible lack of co-ordination at a strategic level. The slowness of response and the apparent lack of information provided to those in trouble can be partly laid at his door, but the media didn’t exactly cover themselves in glory either. BBC Radio Scotland provided what they called, “weather updates.” What that means is that a reporter informed people stuck in the snow that it was still snowing. Wonderful stuff!
So… in the end, the roads will be cleared, traffic will move again and the snow will melt away. There may be further snowfalls and there may be further chaos and mayhem on our roads to come this winter, after all it is only December. Today in the chamber at Holyrood Alex Salmond talking in terms of climate change and how it can and should be dealt with, spoke of how our nation’s infrastructure will need to upgraded in order to deal with such conditions in years to come. His remarks were a clear call for consensus instead of blame.
Will he get such a consensus? Sadly, it has to be said that in our parliament there are three problems which make it highly unlikely that any such agreement can be made while the SNP are in office. Those three problems are the Labour party, the Conservative party and the Liberal Democrat party. All three would rather snipe and carp than offer any real assistance to an SNP administration. All three would rather pile on the blame when, if being effective in opposition, they should be making alternative proposals. All three would choose to join in with the hysteria and let their media friends put more skewed reportage into the newspapers and TV news bulletins.
They may call it politics. I call it pathetic.
Tags: BBC, climate change, milliband, Politics, Scotland, Scottish government, weather
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December 10, 2010 at 5:55 pm
From the sounds of thing those ‘media friends’ are experiencing a further drop in their circulation. Scotsman is down under 43,000 and Herald down under 53,000. These are some of their lowest figures for some time.
I think people are getting fed up with the constant ‘spinning’ of stories into anti-SNP rants. Because they have cut back on staff the newspapers are resorting to taking party press releases and re-hashing them as ‘Exclusives’ which are nothing of the sort.
Also, the generally poor quality of the journalism, print and broadcast, is probably putting people off as well. Sometimes, perhaps more than sometimes, you read a story and are no moreenlightened at the edn of it than you were at the beginning. They seem incapable of reporting the facts in any coherent way and often give the impression that they are not clear about what constitutes a fact and what constitutes a conjecture.
As to the business with Mr Stevenson the behaviour of the opposition parties on this is more to do with scoring political points than gaining emlightenment about what happened and what can be done better in future. They are not interested in that. They came to hear the Ministerial Statement with their speeches already prepared ready to read out in the chamber irrespective of anything Mr Stevenson was going to say.
An awful lot of Councils and heads of police, railways etc must think they have died and gone to heaven such has been the almost total way they have been ignored or their performance questioned while the pack hunts for Mr Stevenson’s scalp.
December 10, 2010 at 6:58 pm
Thanks for coming back and taking time to comment again Christina. More thanks also for your remarks which I agree with completely.
The falling sales of Scotland’s main broadsheet papers is a bit of a dilemma for me. I, like you, resent their falling standards of reportage, but it concerns me that they may not take steps to remedy this. It would be a tragedy if either title was to fold and disappear from our newsagents’ shelves.
Perhaps of greater concern is the blatant misuse of the BBC’s position. They make much of their ‘impartiality,’ but day after day we see less and less of it. They,like the print media seem to rehash party press releases and present them as factual. Their journalists are, to my mind, guilty of sloppy work, freely mixing up fact, opinion and conjecture.
I’ve just watched Reporting Scotland and the trashing of Stewart Stevenson continues unabated. The other responsible parties must indeed be laughing up their sleeves. The opposition parties, for all their bluster and point scoring, have yet to offer any kind of alternative proposals, and, I feel sure, would have been as unable to make any real difference to the events we saw unfold over the last few days had any of them been in the position of the SNP.
They truly are a pathetic bunch.
December 11, 2010 at 9:43 am
It is surprising how many businesses in times like these retrench rather than try to raise their game The latter option would at least persuade people to continue to support them because they would feel they are getting value for their money.
The newspapers appear to have cut their staff to the bone and as often as not are takng news stories from the organisations such as the Press Association or from the internet news sites because they do not have the staff to commit to investigations or meaningful analysis of issues.
Competition from the Internet has certainly posed problems for the media but not perhaps ones they have fully acknowledged. The Internet allows people to access original sources for themselves, for example, FMQs at Holyrood. This allows them to compare the media reports with the original source. It only takes one or two instances where the reported story diverges from the original for people to lose faith in what the papers and broadcasters are reporting accross the board. This aspect of the Internet in fact holds the media to higher standards which unfortunately many of them cannot seem to achieve.
Like you I would be sorry to see the Herald and Scotsman disappear and not just because I find it difficult to read on-line newspapers and eat by toast and marmalade at the same time!
December 11, 2010 at 12:30 pm
The mainstream print media do indeed appear to have taken their eyes off the ball as far as the internet goes. They have been quick enough to attempt to make use of its commercial potential re; advertising and “premium” content, but they have largely missed the initial point of the internet which was developed to be a means of sharing information. Their position as purveyors of information has been well and truly usurped and they are still trying to play catchup. As you point out, people can now access the same sources as the newspapers and when the discrepancies appear, folk will begin to ask themselves why they are spending good money on bad information, or skewed information tainted by political opinion or commercial imperatives.
The likes of the Herald and the Scotsman are in need of some hasty lateral thinking and upping of their standards of integrity if they have any hopes of maintaining (or regaining?) their positions as trusted sources. They surely can’t hope to remain commercially viable purely on the back of their ‘lifestyle’ pages.