Trump the bully has taken leaf out of the SNP’s book

THIS week, the White House press pass the President of the United States ordered to be confiscated from a CNN reporter who made him look bad on television was quietly returned to him.

In his war with news organisations who would dare to find fault with his presidency, it was a richly deserved defeat for Donald Trump.

For the crime of persisting with questions Mr President did not want to answer, you may remember, the leader of the free world had called Jim Acosta a ‘terrible person’.

Hours later, the reporter was accused of ‘placing his hands on’ a young female intern who tried to snatch the microphone away from him. Doctored footage of the incident was posted on social media by the White House press secretary to support the false allegation – or fake news, if you prefer that term.

That a president could for even two minutes far less two weeks be associated with a brazen campaign of intimidation against a journalist doing his job in the land of the free is utterly chilling, I am sure our political masters here in Scotland would agree.

Chilling

But scarcely less chilling is the extent to which those very political masters of ours are adopting the same behaviour in the land of Jock Tamson’s bairns. Indeed, they have been on display for years.

I recall a press conference in 2014 where then BBC political editor Nick Robinson pushed Alex Salmond’s buttons in a way he did not appreciate. ‘Answer the question,’ the journalist dared to say to the egotist who led Scotland at the time, and the egotist went bananas.

Why was the BBC sending London-based reporters to cover the Scottish independence referendum, he demanded. (Clue: it was a big story). Who did this Nick Robinson think he was, coming up here and asking the Scottish First Minister questions?

Such was the scale of First Ministerial disapproval for Nick Robinson and his impertinent inquiries that it prompted a protest march by Nationalists on BBC Scotland’s HQ in Glasgow. Its centrepiece was a banner which read: ‘Sack Nick “The Liar” Robinson, a totally corrupt journalist, these days typical of the British Biased Corporation.’

It looked a lot like a campaign of intimidation at the time. Alex Salmond preferred to see it as a joyous celebration of democracy.

Days later, when Scotland had rejected independence and the First Minister was announcing his resignation, he saw to it that political reporters from several newspapers, including this one, were refused admittance to his Bute House press conference. In the case of another newspaper, he stipulated which reporter it must send.

Quite rightly, the paper took the view that it was its decision, not a politician’s, who covered which story. It sent no one.

I understand that Mr Salmond was in a bad mood but, as we whistle through our teeth at the wrathful actions of the US president towards the more critical chroniclers of his administration, let us not imagine that our erstwhile First Minister was cut from a different cloth.

Nor should we imagine the instinct to impede the Press in the business of asking awkward questions or gathering unflattering information ended with the demise of the Salmond administration. In fact it appears thoroughly ingrained in the psyche of the governing party of the day.

This week it emerges that Education Secretary John Swinney personally intervened in more than half of the Freedom of Information requests sent to his department, many of which came from journalists.

When a politician running a government department is vetting the release of facts and figures from that department, it seems to me that is not freedom of information at all. It is public relations. It is collusion in the culture of government opaqueness which this newspaper’s Secret Scotland campaign rails against.

Secrecy

Perhaps the most chilling example of all of the kneejerk secrecy pervading our political institutions came at a meeting last week of the SNPled Glasgow City Council.

If you are someone who cares what is happening in your community, you could do a lot worse than attend meetings of your local council which, of course, are open to the public because we live in modern Scotland and not Soviet-era Russia. If you can’t make it to the meeting, you can usually catch up with what happened there in the local newspaper.

That, as I always understood it, was the point of sending local newspaper reporters to council meetings.

Yet, at this particular council meeting where a Police Scotland inspector was due to present crime statistics, proceedings were halted when an official detected a reporter in their midst.

You would think a spy had just been unmasked among the tea trolley staff in the Cabinet Office. Hastily, the report the inspector had been due to present was abridged to thwart the infiltrator’s mission to pass on to the public details of what was happening in their area.

What drives this obsession with suppressing information? And what point, exactly, was the council clerk who spotted the reporter trying to make? That it is all right for Joe Public to see local government in action but if a journalist who intends to write about it pops his head round the door information must be squirrelled away before he sees any of it?

Trump’s attitude to Press freedom stinks. But there’s something rank behind the platitudes here too.