Kenneth Roy questions the skills of the journalists covering the perjury trial of Tommy Sheridan.
He recalls his days as a young Glasgow court reporter when "journalists were taught the same inviolable rule about court reporting. You reported what you heard straight and without embellishment."
Now, in an assessment of competing reports, he detects differences in supposedly verbatim reports of a 12-word sentence, citing examples from the Daily Record and The Herald and the Daily Telegraph.
He writes: "Isn't it pretty astonishing that three journalists should independently have heard different versions of the same brief testimony?"
He also takes The Sun to task for carrying a splash heading that paraphrased the quote from a witness without bothering with quotation marks.
Having questioned accuracy, he then turns to fairness, and finds The Scotsman wanting by reporting that a series of "damning allegations" were made against Sheridan.
Roy points out that this is "the paper's own opinion of these allegations." And, as he "stared disbelievingly" at the use of the adjective he recalled one of his former editors telling him: "We don't comment on the evidence... Our job is to report the facts."
He warns that as long as the reporting the trial "remains as excitable as it is at the moment, there is always a risk that two trials will be taking place in Glasgow this autumn – one arranged by the Crown Office, the other by the Greek chorus of the Scottish media."
Incidentally, yesterday it was announced in court that Sheridan had sacked his senior lawyers and will conduct his own defence from now on.
He and his wife, Gail, are accused of lying on oath during his libel case against the News of the World in 2006. He was awarded £200,000 by the jury.
The perjury trial will resume on Thursday.
Sources: Scottish Review/The Guardian
