This is an edited extract from Peter Geoghegan’s ‘The People’s Referendum: Why Scotland Will Never Be the Same Again’, which is out this week, published by Luath Press…
“The media do not transmit an idea which happens to have been fed into them. It matters precious little what has been fed into them: it is the media themselves, the pervasiveness and importance of abstract, centralised, one to many communication, which itself automatically engenders the core idea of nationalism quite irrespective of what in particular is being put into the specific messages transmitted.”
Ernest Gellner, Nations and Nationalism, 1983.
ON 25 August, First Minister, Alex Salmond, and Alistair Darling, former Chancellor of the Exchequer and head of the Better Together campaign, met in the last of two televised debates before the referendum.
Their first encounter was broadcast live on STV in Scotland, attracting so many viewers online that the channel’s internet player crashed. (ITV had decided to show Alan Titchmarsh: Love Your Garden on network in England, Wales and Northern Ireland.) The second debate, for the BBC, took place at Glasgow’s Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum.
On the night of the debate, half a dozen men wrapped in Union flags stood outside the front steps of Kelvingrove. By the museum’s back entrance, an ageing man with a guitar belted out Dougie McLean’s ‘Caledonia’. A constant nationalist refrain during the campaign, the song had once featured on a commercial for Tennent’s lager. A pair of TV cameraman beamed as they panned across a huge banner that said ‘End London Rule’.
I made my way past security and into the press gallery, a long, narrow basement chamber in the bowels of Kelvingrove. Political advisors and party hacks from both Yes Scotland and Better Together buzzed around the crowded room. Near the entrance, a queue of journalists waited to speak with the then Labour leader, Johann Lamont.
Close by, a small huddle congregated around Liberal Democrat MP, Danny Alexander. SNP Minister for External Affairs, a post created after the 2011 Holyrood election, Humza Yousaf stood a few feet away, deep in conversation with a pair of journalists. Towards the back of the room, recognisable faces from national news channels practised their autocues.
I took a seat at one of three long, white benches. A journalist I knew at the next table turned to me: “I’ve to file for 10.30pm tonight. I already have a top line – ‘both sides claim victory in debate’.” But it quickly became apparent that the contest was too one-sided to be declared a score draw. Where Darling was widely seen to have edged the first debate, Alex Salmond was in control of the rematch, exuding a breezy confidence as he ventured out from behind his lectern to deliver florid asides to the surprisingly receptive audience.
As the debate dragged on, the apparatchiks in the pressroom grew increasingly nervous. Senior Better Together spindoctors paced around the back of the hall, or, in a flurry of fingers, tapped away on tablets and smartphones.
Every few minutes, one would arise and sidle over to one of the suite of journalists, whispering furtively into their ear. Once the contest ended, the press handlers prowled the room, arguing fiercely that their man had won and fielding questions from journalists.
Whether any of this made any impact on the coverage is hard to say: just about every newspaper, regardless of stripe or allegiance, declared Alex Salmond the winner. A snap post-debate poll for The Guardian gave the SNP leader victory by 71 points to 29.
Scotland’s referendum story was, in part, a story about the nation’s media, about how the campaign was covered. At times the press corps were under as much scrutiny as the politicians. Aggrieved nationalists regularly accused newspapers and broadcasters – ‘the mainstream media’ – of bias. Alex Salmond often blew dog whistles to his supporters.
The nationalists’ ire is not wholly incomprehensible. While almost 45 per cent of the electorate voted for independence, nearly all the nation’s newspapers were opposed. One title, The Sunday Herald, adopted a stridently pro-Yes line, especially in the final months of the campaign. (The paper’s year-on-year sales apparently doubled in the weeks running to the vote.) Some newspapers did toe a broadly balanced line.
In many others, however, every day seemed to bring a fresh ‘hammer blow’ for Scottish nationalism, which was often personified by Alex Salmond. In the six months up to March 2014, headlines that contained a politician’s name featured Salmond 57 per cent of the time, according to research by Dr David Patrick, a Scottish academic based in South Africa.
The next closest figure, David Cameron, appeared in one in ten.
A year-long study by the University of the West of Scotland released in January 2014 found a greater number of TV news stories deemed favourable to No on both the BBC and STV compared with news items friendly towards independence – prompting the BBC to raise objections.
In the final days of the campaign, opposition to leaving the union became increasingly overt in some Scottish and UK newspapers. The weekend before the vote, The Sunday Telegraph’s front page featured kilted soldiers carrying a Union-flag draped coffin below the headline: Scottish soldiers lost their lives trying to preserve the United Kingdom. What will their families say now: ‘Well it no longer matters’?
On the day of the vote, The Times came with a wraparound red, white and blue cover featuring a quote from Rabbie Burns’ ‘Auld Lang Syne’ on the back and ‘a brief history of the Union’ on the inside pages.
Not every outlet’s coverage was as emotive, but editorials urging a No vote appeared in The Guardian, The Herald, The Scotsman, The Daily Record as well as in most other daily newspapers.
But to pick out these individual examples is to miss a much wider, more important, point. Media, as celebrated sociologist of nationalism, Ernest Gellner, understood, plays a pivotal role in producing and sustaining the illusion of the nation-state as a permanent and immutable object.
When the nation-state itself is contested – as it is by definition during a referendum on secession – newspapers, radio and television almost unwittingly buttress the status quo, the established nation-state, against the prospective breakaway nation.
Even if the BBC had swamped the airwaves with SNP election broadcasts for months ahead of the referendum, the very existence of a British Broadcasting Corporation was testament to the power of the idea of the United Kingdom as the legitimate nation-state (or, as Tom Nairn has put it, ‘state-nation’) on the island of Britain.
That Scotland has long been accepted as a ‘nation’ made little difference in this process. State, when it comes to established media, trumps all else.
On UK network broadcasts, Scottish nationalist voices – by definition in this context anti-statist – were frequently presented as divergent and marginal.
The key difficulty for the media during the referendum was not one of intentional bias but often of an inability to reflect the vivacity of the campaign back to its participants.
That is hardly surprising. The ‘tablets of stone’ model of journalism – spindoctors and party hacks feeding morsels to favoured members of the Fourth Estate, as in the basement in Kelvingrove during the second televised debate – has long held sway in Scotland.
Part of the reason for this is financial. Scotland once had the highest newspaper readership levels in Europe. Now, average sales are down as much as ten per cent, year-on-year. Morale is low. Job losses are frequent and swingeing. Pagination has been scaled back. Beyond football and the echoey corridors of the Holyrood lobby, many Scottish titles’ coverage is increasingly threadbare.
For some papers, there were simply not enough journalists to go out and tell the stories of the referendum, so the focus remained on politicians and press releases. That was a boon for Better Together, which comfortably won the ‘air war’ with a much slicker and effective media strategy. (Yes Scotland’s press team, at times, barely seemed even to answer the phone.)
The Financial Times was widely (and rightly) hailed for the quality of its referendum coverage, which reflected an editorial decision to dedicate large amounts of space and resources to getting under the skin of the story.
The Scotsman, by contrast, was often chastised by nationalists for its coverage, but the reality was that the paper was operating on severely-limited resources.
But economics was not the only reason why Scotland’s media often struggled to tell the independence story. Most Scottish newspaper readers are middle-class, a constituency that remained largely unmoved by the nationalist offering.
Most journalists were giving their readers what they wanted. Or at least what those readers that remained wanted. (Frequent sniping at members of the press on social media by independence supporters did little to endear the nationalist cause to print journalists, either).
But even before the campaign, Scottish audiences were turning away from established media, increasingly getting their information from multiple, often alternative, sources, especially social media.
While the BBC was switching off the comments on most Scottish political pieces on its website, audiences, particularly those in favour of independence, were actively seeking out media that reflected their experience of the referendum back to them.
Confirmation bias is seldom a good thing, but that independence supporters collectively donated almost £1million to pro-Yes media attests to a genuine depth of feeling.
A plethora of new ventures attracted hundreds of thousands of readers: the controversial Wings Over Scotland, Bella Caledonia, and Newsnet Scotland (for which, in the interests of full disclosure, I was an occasional paid contributor during the last six months of the referendum).
“Scotland has a national political system but is in danger of losing a national media,” journalist Iain Macwhirter wrote in a lugubrious essay on the state of the Scottish press in spring 2014.
The referendum campaign bore out Macwhirter’s fears. Often hard questions were not asked, both of nationalists and unionists.
Too much coverage relied on insider information, press releases and blunt data, too little on thoughtful storytelling.
Vast swathes of the electorate felt that their voices and opinions were not being listened to. They were probably right. But the referendum revealed something even more worrying about Scotland’s deracinated media: it increasingly lacks the resources and the inclination to hold power to account.
With new powers for the Scottish Parliament in the offing, many are calling for the devolution of broadcasting, but that alone is unlikely to be a panacea for the numerous ills afflicting Scotland’s media.
Neither, too, is the upsurge in nationalist oriented-media outlets. Scotland was once a powerhouse of quality journalism. Now, the question is how to keep the lights on in the newsroom.
Peter Geoghegan is an Irish writer and journalist based in Glasgow. He has contributed to numerous national and international publications including The Guardian, The Washington Post, The London Review of Books, The Irish Times, The Herald and The Scotsman.
‘The People’s Referendum: Why Scotland Will Never Be the Same Again’ is being launched tomorrow evening at the Oswald Street Bookshop in Glasgow. It is available online, here.
