Dear Media: Bloody Sort Yourselves Out!

Yesterday we were notified that a friend of ours had an issue with the thermometer in her baby box - it had been giving a false low reading which, had she trusted it, could have caused serious problems. She also noted that there were some press stories about problems with the included thermometer. So I went to check...

What I found were two stories, one of which was locked behind a paywall, and the other of which was a repeat/summary of the first. Both had a lurid headline damning the Scottish Government over a cavalier attitude to the safety and accuracy about the included thermometers.

The reality was rather more prosaic: an update to advice had indicated that in-ear thermometers should not be used with very young children (under four weeks), the Scottish government had switched to an under-arm thermometer, but they had waited to use up existing stocks first. There was no indication that the original thermometers had general problems, needed a recall, or were otherwise problematic - and certainly no justification for the panic-mongering headline.

Of course, the reason for this all comes down to one word: independence.

Scotland's media is almost universally opposed to independence, and therefore loathes the SNP government. As a consequence of this every single action of the SNP government, even if it is completely unrelated to independence, and even if it is a massive social good like the baby boxes, must be torn down, trashed, and denigrated at every possible opportunity. Nothing can be good, or work well; every flaw must be magnified to the ultimate degree.

With the consequence that the media are utterly and completely unreliable. "News" in Scotland is useless.

(That, incidentally, also applies to our one and only pro-independence newspaper, the National. For the opposite reason - they can't criticise the government, but must instead act as cheerleaders.)

The thing is, on most topics that really doesn't matter. We just factor the complete bloody uselessness of the media into our calculations, completely ignore them, and move on. But this was a very serious matter of public health - if those thermometers really were faulty, we needed to know. And, equally, if they're not then it's frankly dangerous for the media to try to promote a panic about them.

There's a line there, and it has been crossed. Hence the title of this post.