BBC Scotland’s definition of propaganda

Words have a dictionary definition, they also have emotional colouring which can be either positive or negative, that emotional coloration is an essential part of the word’s meaning and it is disingenuous to use a word with a strongly negative emotional colouring and to pretend that your use of the word was intended in a purely neutral sense. One such word is ‘propaganda’ whose strict definition is the spreading of ideas, information, or rumour for the purpose of helping or injuring an institution, a cause, or a person. However the word also has a strongly negative emotional overtone and carries the strong sense that the ideas or information so described are false, misleading, or reprehensible.

During a BBC broadcast on the Radio 4 Media Show on Thursday evening, BBC Scotland’s business and economy editor Douglas Fraser twice used the word propaganda to refer to the output of Scotland’s sole pro independence newspaper The National.

Discussing the the challenges facing the Scottish media, and the impact of politics on Scottish media outlets, Fraser told host Ros Atkins: “It’s not so clear that the big issues like [independence] have been as important to selling newspapers and indeed subscriptions for news publishers. One title with a strong propaganda approach to supporting independence, The National, a sister paper of The Herald, based in Glasgow, makes some waves politically through its propaganda.” Propaganda is a pejorative word, and Douglas Fraser knows that, yet he was not challenged on his use of the word by Atkins.

There are several newspapers in Scotland with strong, indeed vehement, stances against Scottish independence, amongst them the Scotsman, the Daily Mail, and the Express, yet Fraser did not describe these publications as having a strong propaganda approach to the independence issue, nor did he refer to their content as propaganda. Just about every newspaper published in the UK has a political point of view, yet it is only the one newspaper which is open in its support for Scottish independence which gets singled out and labelled with the pejorative term ‘propaganda’.

Douglas Fraser has form for this sort of thing. He was particularly contemptuous of supporters of independence when he still worked for The Herald newspaper and in 2023 he said on air that the SNP “appear to have a sort of North Korean tendency”. Fraser very clearly breached impartiality guidelines. But he wasn’t censured.

Following a complaint by The National’s editor, Laura Webster, BBC Scotland responded, saying it accepts that the word “propaganda” should not have been used. However, an apology was not issued.

In a statement, a BBC spokesperson said: “In a live BBC radio interview Douglas was making the point that the National is strongly supportive of one side of the constitutional debate, but we accept he should not have used the word propaganda.”

Yet this goes way beyond a single presenter or broadcaster. Fraser’s comments are part of a systemic pattern of behaviour and editorialising in the Scottish media. It is worth pointing out yet again, as I have done many times before, that even though Scotland’s population is split roughly 50/50 on the issue of independence, only one Scottish newspaper out of approximately 38 daily and weekly newspapers published in this country supports independence while the broadcast media is ultimately controlled and regulated by Westminster. Yet the existence of that single pro-independence publication is treated with angry hysterics by those who resent its intrusion into British nationalism’s former total domination of the Scottish media landscape, because its very existence highlights the bias and hypocrisy of a Scottish Unionist media  – in particular BBC Scotland – that preens itself on its supposed neutrality when it is in fact very strongly advocating for one side in Scotland’s constitutional debate.

The preferential platforming of anti-independence content and the habitual framing of stories in a manner which is damaging to Scottish independence or the parties which support it while overlooking, down playing or ignoring stories which are positive for Scottish independence and the parties which support it are all part and parcel of the anti-independence media landscape in Scotland.

These practices are widespread in the Scottish media but are not presented to the public which consumes such media as being partisan in the Scottish constitutional debate, far less are they described as propagandistic – even though that is exactly what they are. Such media practices are framed and presented as being ‘neutral’ or ‘unbiased’. The anti-independence media in Scotland, which is to say the great majority of the traditional media in Scotland, will no more accept that it is engaged in the wholesale production of anti-independence propaganda than opponents of independence and supporters of the post- Brexit British state will accept that they are proponents of British nationalism. Both have a wilful blind spot to their own true nature. So for example we get a Labour party which wraps itself in British flags, promises to crack down on immigration and advocates for the hard Brexit bequeathed by the Tories, all the while insisting that it is opposed to ‘nationalism’.

In the exact same way, the anti-independence media outlets in Scotland have a similar self-serving blindness. BBC Scotland is the classic case in point. The broadcaster constantly affirms that it is an unbiased and neutral public service broadcaster which eschews a political perspective on matters like Scottish independence, but BBC Scotland’s anti-independence bias is well documented and examples of it are legion.

Rule number one of the successful propagandist is to insist that you produce the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. When an outlet such as The National openly declares its political preferences it serves as an advisory and corrective to the reader, who is then able to adjust their perceptions and valuation of the newspaper’s content accordingly. A real propagandist does not do this, depriving the reader, viewer, or listener of the opportunity to make mental adjustments or correctives. Real propaganda is insidious and covert and insists that it is neutral and unbiased even as it systematically pushes a particular point of view.

This makes BBC Scotland the biggest and most distorting producer of propaganda in Scotland, but Douglas Fraser and his bosses at Pacific Quay are the very last people who will ever acknowledge that because BBC Scotland’s usefulness to the British state as a propaganda tool to be used in Westminster’s political battle against Scottish independence ceases the second that BBC Scotland’s news editors admit the truth about what they are really doing – lying by omission, distorting, and giving free passes to Labour and Conservative politicians while the SNP is subjected to constant and unremitting hostile scrutiny.

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