Independent Scottish Media since 2007

It has become completely normalised that we live in a society that has a built-in bias in its media. The landscape of Scottish media is completely broken and uneven and people rarely even talk about it anymore. We live in a country where still, despite everything, around 50% of people polled support independence. This is remarkable despite the fact that almost all of the daily messaging that people receive is either explicitly anti-independence or has such a hard-wired set of assumptions about Scotland that the message is the same. What are these assumptions? They vary but repeated themes and tropes are: everything about Scotland is awful; we are a beggar nation reliant on hand-outs from our benevolent neighbour; everything about our political institutions is broken, corrupt or failing; we have no real culture to speak of, other than a sort of cartoon caricature; anyone who aspires to better for Scotland is madly delusional.

Of the twenty-three newspapers listed here – only one supports independence. Several of these are based in England and have a Scottish edition, so publish only passing reference to Scotland at all. Some are passive rather than actively hostile to constitutional change, but many are actively hostile to a change supported by half the population.

In broadcast media – as we reported here ‘London-based companies dominate BBC output in Scotland‘ – even the content that’s supposed to be created here to sustain and nurture a Scottish-based ecosystem of cultural works and output – is actually outsourced and bypassed south of the border. This has been going on for a long time, and nobody cares and nothing is done about it. What’s the consequence of that? It’s disempowering and self-fulfilling. Rather than have a creative industry that connects writers and artists through theatre, tv and film industries – with all the attendant technical and production crew that goes with that – we have the opposite – a shell of an industry and sector to what it could be. This is NOT to argue that a Scottish industry should or would be pumping out political ideology – absolutely not – but it would be a place where you were having a live conversation about what kind of society you lived in and wanted to live in. Instead, we put up with an extractive industry, funded by us.

Since 2007 we have tried to create a space for public dialogue, to make the case for having real aspirations for a better Scotland, and for challenging some of the shibboleths about his place that prevail. We have tried to develop new writers (over 1400 listed here) and have worked with others (such as Pass the Mic) to make the media more diverse and representative.

But we have done this on a shoestring and we need your support to develop. Please go here to support us and please share the link in your networks and urge others to support us (use the hashtag #backingbella)…

Backing Bella Caledonia 2025 – for an independent media fighting for Scotland