In case you don’t know, Alan Roden is the former Scottish Daily Mail politics editor who’s now Scottish Labour’s director of communications. We haven’t edited this pic in any way, those genuinely are two consecutive tweets he posted yesterday.

So this is almost too beautiful.

The Herald’s correction only corrects about half of what it actually got wrong in the story, and omits the most serious error of all (reporting 12-month averages as the figures for July 2017, which were far better), but at least the piece has been pulled from its website entirely, as has a similar one from its sister paper the Evening Times.

We can’t recall the last time a paper’s front-page lead was completely disappeared in less than 24 hours. That really is something.

However, the Daily Record, Scottish Daily Mail and Courier – which also made the same mistakes as the Herald – have NOT published any corrections, nor in the Record and Courier’s case removed or edited their online stories. (The Mail website didn’t run it, only the print edition.) Their readers’ editors have not replied to our polite emails, so it looks like we’ll have to take the matter to IPSO.

The Record, in fact, doubled down on the clanger today, with a Kezia Dugdale column that was evidently too late for the dim-witted branch office manager to change in time, repeating the lie.

Alan Roden, meanwhile – who in his role as Communications Director will have been responsible for feeding the story to all the papers – is hotly attempting to deflect from his and Labour’s embarrassment by smearing the only media outlet that actually did “check stuff” and get its facts right – this one.

(Although that wasn’t his first stab at spelling “professor”.)

So overall today is a pretty sweet day. But let there be no remaining doubt about the Scottish media for its defenders to cling to. Any paper with a shred of care for its reputation would have prominently ensured its readers were informed of the reality, but the Herald has tucked a partial correction into the bottom corner of page 2 and the others look like they’re going to have to be dragged to the regulator to eventually do the same thing weeks later.

This isn’t a result of funding cuts or “honest mistakes”. Those things might (slightly) excuse or explain running a dodgy press release from a political party unchecked as a lead story in the first place, but it doesn’t cost anything to put a single paragraph into the tiny correction columns most papers carry when the truth is revealed.

The refusal to promptly address serious falsehoods without being forced to at gunpoint tells you everything you need to know about the journalistic integrity of Scotland’s newspapers and their editors. They are a plague of lies on the nation.

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(In fairness to Andrew Nicoll of the Scottish Sun at the top of the article, despite Alan Roden’s very best efforts at making him look like an idiot his paper was one of only three in Scotland that as far as we can tell didn’t run Labour’s hapless, ham-fisted smear job yesterday, along with the Scotsman and the Express.)