Scottish Media

The Story the Media Should Have Told You About Glasgow Gerry Hassan May 7th 2012 The story of the recent Scottish elections was clear and unambiguous: voters are returning home to Labour and the SNP honeymoon is over. All of this is magnified in the Glasgow result: Labour holding or as most of the media interpreted it ‘gaining’ back the city it had briefly lost. All of this ‘analysis’ was done with no breakdown of the Scottish local election party share of the vote; no doubt we will have to wait until David Denver’s research several months down the

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The People’s Game Still? Punters, Pundits and Change Part Three Gerry Hassan April 13th 2012 Celtic and Rangers never used to dominate Scottish football to the degree they do now. In this concluding piece, I am going to measure the degree to which the Old Firm’s near stranglehold on the game is increasingly driving fans away, then address the role of the media, and end with some observations about how we can change the game. The scale of Celtic and Rangers attendances and the size of their support has long been one of the defining accounts of the

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Scotland Names the Big Day and the Alex Salmond-Rupert Murdoch Relationship Gerry Hassan The Guardian Comment, February 26th 2012 The launch of ‘the Sun on Sunday’ may have caused shockwaves in media and political circles in the corridors of power in London, but its headline about an Amanda Holden exclusive surely didn’t. North of the border things were very different where a distinct Scottish version of ‘the Sun on Sunday’ was even more eagerly awaited and didn’t disappoint. This was following Rupert Murdoch’s tweet this week that he was in favour of Scottish independence, declaring, ‘Let Scotland go and

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Why are so Many Women’s Voices Missing from Scottish Public Life? Gerry Hassan The Scotsman, December 24th 2011 Scotland was once a masculinised culture and society, a place where men built big, heavy things and large numbers of women stayed at home. We have changed in many respects, and to some the separate worlds of men and women’s work have almost disappeared. This is the feminisation of Scotland to some, seen in the gender revolution that was the first Scottish Parliament which saw record numbers of women MSPs, numerous women Cabinet ministers, and a raft of prominent women

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My Own Personal Enlightenment: How the Internet is Remaking Us Gerry Hassan The Scotsman, August 27th 2011 One of the biggest stories of this week was the decision of Steve Jobs, Chief Executive of Apple, recently rated the world’s most valuable company, to stand down. Apple has changed our planet. It has given us the ipad, iphone, itunes and so much more, importantly leading the way in integrating fashionable products with ingenious software. We now live in an age redefined by Facebook, Twitter and the conversations and connections the Internet offers. There have been the supposed ‘Twitter’ revolutions in

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The Time for a Scottish Media Voice Gerry Hassan The Scotsman, July 9th 2011 The world has been turned upside down these last few days. There have been elements of an old fashioned morality play and Citizen Kane all rolled into one. Things have been talked about in public which you are not meant to say in front of the children. Ed Miliband and Labour have finally after years turned on News International freed from their previous fear. David Cameron has tried desperately to find his moral compass and appeared at least temporally to have lost his political touch.

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What is going on in the BBC’s Little Britain? Gerry Hassan Open Democracy, May 25th 2011 Britain has been undergoing dramatic change in these last few weeks. The Scottish Parliament elections, and the arrival of the first ever majority SNP Government following its landslide victory, has been a story of international reach and consequences covered the world over. Strange then that our British media have struggled to address these circumstances other than by caricature or silence. The BBC in particular has not had a good post-election time. The ‘Today’ programme has had Alex Salmond on a couple of times,

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The Scottish Election Comes to Life Gerry Hassan Open Democracy, April 21st 2011 Suddenly Scotland is everywhere on the British airwaves and media. Two very different sides of the nation. Alex Salmond’s cheeky sunlit Nationalists, the scheming separatists in Labour parlance on one side, and on the other, the dark side of football, ‘the Old Firm’ and sectarianism. To some English listeners and viewers, this fantasy/nightmare Scotland portrayed by these accounts must seem like a strange land. A place where the population lives the life of reilly on English subsidies while complaining all the time that their culture of

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