Following an astonishing unattributed article posted in last week’s Edinburgh Evening News, Brian Baglow, director of the Scottish Games Network has invited the tabloid to ‘consider what it’s about’, to ‘perhaps join the rest of us in the 21st century’ and to direct all of its efforts to becoming ‘slightly less shit.’

In the article, Baglow, referred to, inaccurately, as ‘GTA V Chief’, is characterised as begging parents in games stores to not buy the game for their children.

In an attempt to slow its terminal decline into irrelevance, the Evening News used the recent release of Grand Theft Auto V for the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One, as an excuse to write a hysterical article, exploring outrage about the content of the game – which remains unchanged from the original release in September 2013.

The game’s option for players to use of a first-person viewpoint however, has allowed the Evening News to use the words ‘sickening’, ‘gore’, ‘carnage’, ‘spree’ and ‘massacre’ in an article which harks back two decades to coverage of the original game in 1997.

Baglow recently spoke to The Scotsman newspaper, in a positive and wide-ranging interview about the recently launched Game Masters exhibition at the National Museum of Scotland.

The cultural impact of gaming as a medium, the history of the sector and the value of the industry to the Scottish and UK economies were topics which were discussed. The Evening News article manages to miss all of this, instead portraying Baglow as the sole creator behind the game and instead relying on the existence of ‘Sickening videos’ on YouTube to highlight the game’s hideous influence on children. Won’t somebody PLEASE think of the children! Or buy our paper. Either one…

Baglow, writing in the Scottish Games Network, told us:

This is exactly the sort of poorly researched article which damages the games sector and shows just how out of touch the country’s media is when it comes to the games sector. The launch of Grand Theft Auto V over a year ago, was remarkably hysteria free. The Evening News is to be commended for finding a way to shoehorn irrelevance and inaccuracies into what should be a success story. Essentially pissing in the eyes of their readers, over the hopes and aspirations of their nation.



In a staggering foul-mouthed outburst, Baglow continued, characterising the paper’s article as ‘wrong,’ ‘desperate’, ‘piss’, ‘pointless’, ‘outdated’ and invited the paper to ‘stick the article up it’s arse!’

As of February 2014, the Edinburgh Evening News readership had dropped to a mere 28,000 (or 0.09% of global sales of GTA V to date).

Owners Johnston Press, announced earlier this year that the company would be moving from it’s headquarters on Holyrood Road, a mere bread roll’s throw from the Scottish Parliament, to a more modest and affordable location in outer Edinburgh, while the company’s executive team are now based in London.

The new residents of the now former Scotsman building will be Rockstar North, developers of the Grand Theft Auto series, which the paper finds so reprehensible.

The Herald, based in Glasgow, managed to pick up the same article, with the same inaccuracies, running the piece yesterday. However, the paper’s inexplicable pay wall system, wouldn’t allow us to read more the first three lines. Registered users can read a whopping six articles per month. If it was 1998 then perhaps we might have bothered.

We would have contacted the Evening News editorial team for a response, but our fax machine has no bauds and we lack anthracite for the steam engine of our semaphore contrivance.

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