It started within a year of a minority SNP administration being elected in 2007 when some in the SNP made the ludicrous claim that they had done more in the first eight weeks/months than the previous lot had managed in eight years. The response from the media, had they been doing their jobs, should have been simple: prove it. Instead the bombastic boasts of wee Salmond and his cohorts were allowed to go unchallenged.
And this has continued throughout wee Salmond's second term: his propaganda chief forged a letter from an academic for him to read out and when rumbled claimed it was 'an honest mistake', in a TV interview he was asked a direct question and answered 'we have, yes' then claimed that any fair person would take that to mean 'we haven't no' and just last week we had him claiming he was increasing college budgets when in fact he was cutting them.
If any of this had happened at Westminster then a resignation would have followed.
Why don't we in Scotland hold the Holyrood administration to account and expect the same honesty as that expected from our Westminster government?
Why is wee Salmond's buffoonish antics and egotistical boasting laughed off or ignored by our media?
The answer is a simple one: we don't take Holyrood as seriously as we take Westminster. We can see it in the respective turnouts when half our fellow Scots can't be bothered to vote in the Holyrood elections and we know fine well that the office of first minister doesn't bring with it the responsibilities of that of prime minister. The media seem to believe that as long as wee Salmond is good for a laugh his particular brand of bravado, egocentric bombast and mountebankism will be indulged and anyway what harm can he do?
However, as we approach the referendum it's time for our media to ignore the first minister's buffoonery and start taking him seriously - and that means looking behind that smug Salmond chuckle and start challenging his baseless assertions ...
