Five times Scottish Nationalists bullied the media

#2. Made the Beeb launch a new channel which has (almost) ZERO viewers

Here at The Majority, after two weeks of existence, our readership is already double the number of viewers of the BBC’s new Scotland channel, with their prime output The Nine. Named after the time it goes out at, not the number of people who tune in – that’s actually a little more at 5,000 (lost) souls.

Nicola Sturgeon herself called for a radical reform of the BBC back in 2015, and the creation of a new, dedicated Scotland-only channel, which, ostensibly, nobody wanted, except those with a political agenda.

The channel cost £32m to set up, which could have been easily ploughed into good quality, homegrown content and, of course, BBC 1 Scotland’s current Reporting Scotland news output, but that would not be on-message enough for the Nationalists (I refer you to the previous point).

Journalism professor and former BBC editor, Tim Luckhurst, told the Scottish Daily Mail:

The figures are deplorable, but they simply confirm the central flaw in the entire project; there was never a shred of audience demand for it. It was launched in a forlorn attempt to please the SNP, a classic example of why the BBC should never bow to political bullying.

Indeed.