TELEVISION presenter and political campaigner Carol Vorderman has retracted a tweet she posted criticising former first Minister Nicola Sturgeon for allegedly deleting all her WhatsApp messages relating to the Covid pandemic.
The story has been covered by Scottish media in a storm of performative outrage which clearly sought to draw a moral equivalence between the actions of the Scottish Government and the shameful dysfunctional chaos of the Conservative government in Westminster's mishandling of the emergency.
Scottish media was lost in one of its all too common paroxysms of burn the witch hysteria.
They called for a police investigation and allegations of criminal behaviour - forcing Sturgeon to issue a statement rebutting many of the allegations and making it clear that the Covid inquiry does indeed have messages between her and those she most regularly communicated with through informal means.
READ MORE: Five times Tories used Covid pandemic to boost support for Unionism
She also emphasised that - unlike the Conservative government of Boris Johnson, in which Rishi Sunak then served as Chancellor of the Exchequer - she did not conduct the Scottish Government's response to the pandemic via informal messaging on WhatsApp, which has been criticised for being an insecure platform.
The Covid inquiry is in fact in possession of reams of information and messages from the Scottish Government.
This is in marked contrast to the WhatsApp messages of Boris Johnson and Sunak, both of whom unlike Sturgeon, are known to have used WhatsApp for making policy decisions during the pandemic.
They told the inquiry that all those messages had been lost, giving extremely dubious and implausible excuses which do not stand up to even cursory examination.
Yet the bare faced lies of Sunak and Johnson, whose actions may very well be responsible for the unnecessary deaths of thousands of people, were met by the Scottish media with a collective, "Oh dear what a pity, now here's the fitba."
Compare and contrast with the torches and pitchforks treatment meted out to the Scottish Government, the Scottish media becomes seized by hysteria, so caught up in its own feeding frenzy of outrage that it loses all sense of perspective. What exactly do those at the head of the pitchfork parade think is being covered up?
Do they think that anyone in the Scottish Government wanted to let the bodies pile high as Johnson was reported as saying, or that scientific advice was deliberately ignored as in Sunak's lethal Eat Out to Help Out the Virus scheme?
No, there's only innuendo and desperate muck raking from the very same people who gave Johnson and Sunak a free pass.
The past week has been a salutary lesson in all that is wrong with the self-regarding Scottish media.
At this juncture it is appropriate to give you your regular reminder that Scotland has a population which is widely known to divide roughly 50/50 on the all important constitutional question which is the fulcrum of Scottish politics. Yet it has a broadcast media ultimately controlled by politicians in Westminster and only one single newspaper out of approximately 38 daily and weekly newspapers which supports independence, the constitutional solution backed by at least half the Scottish population.
When there is such a marked imbalance between the political leanings of the media and those of the public that media purports to represent, what you end up with is a grossly distorted selection of news stories.
For the most part, much of the media in Scotland acts as though its job is to fend off any rise in support for independence. It employs a blatant double standard in the intense, constant scrutiny and criticism it gives to the Scottish Government compared to the cursory scrutiny of the Westminster government which has far greater power than Holyrood.
The anti-independence media in Scotland, which is most of it, creates the overwhelming impression that it is determined to keep Scotland a part of the UK, so much so that it cares nothing about the quality of government or the probity of institutions, as long as that government and those institutions are British.
READ MORE: Scottish Government discussed how Covid changed case for independence
Following Sturgeon's statement, Vorderman had the decency to retract her previously misleading statement and to urge people to read Sturgeon's response.
There has been no such decency from the Scottish media, which in its desperation to score points against that SNP it hates so much is doing a grave disservice to people who have lost loved ones in the pandemic and to the wider Scottish public.
The latest instalment of the Scottish media's SNP bad Covid hysteria is the news that the Scottish Government discussed how the pandemic changed the case for independence.
It would have been news if an independence supporting Scottish Government had not considered what impact a global crisis had had on the case for independence.
READ MORE: Scottish Government WhatsApp policy in focus at UK inquiry
This entirely predictable and indeed responsible action is being used by anti-independence politicians and their friend in the media to whip up yet more plastic outrage and is being reported in breathless and irresponsible language which accuses the Scottish Government of "disgusting behaviour."
Real disgusting behaviour is having drunken parties in Downing Street while imposing lockdown on the rest of us.
Real disgusting behaviour is bringing in a policy to encourage people to eat out in restaurants during an actual pandemic in order to boost a politician's career and ignoring the scientific evidence that such a policy would lead to avoidable infection and death.
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