Sad to see a good newspaper lose the plot so comprehensively. Today’s (28th February) Herald has:

• its lead two-column article on Page 1 -  ‘Pressure on Sir Fred to do the right thing on pension’.
• a full-length single column continuation of this on Page 2, inside the front cover
• almost all of Page 5- a right hand page – on the Goodwin pension issue, under the page-wide banner headline: ‘Heat falls on Myners as blame game begins over ‘Fred the Shred’ pension

And of all of this copy, a total of about two column inches – at the end of the major piece on the Page 5 spread above, is devoted to this:

‘Of course, given all the heat the UK Government has taken on the banking crisis, it comes as no surprise that Mr Brown and his colleagues are keen to keep the limelight firmly on Sir Fred and his £16.6m pension pot rather than the little matter of the UK Government’s biggest ever financial commitment, the taking on of the banks’ bad debt which could ultimately run to £600bn’.

There’s a simple solution to this that the editor of The Herald might consider. You can recognise that the Government strategy is to turn the spotlight on Fred Goodwin’s pension and keep the public barely aware of the major morass into which it has led the national economy – but you do not have to help to do it. And you deserve little but contempt for the hypocrisy of trying to maintain some credibility by saying what you see in a throwaway paragraph at the end of a rabble-rousing splurge. Face up to your very real responsibilities.

For Argyll is no apologist for bankers but there is something profoundly distasteful about the nationwide baying over the Goodwin pension. The distaste is not just for the mass bullying. It is for the lack of independent thought and for the inadequate pubished scrutiny of Government behaviour.

The Herald, on its front page piece, quotes Prime Minister Gordon Brown in Oxford yesterday, expressing ‘anger’ at Sir Fred’s pension and saying that it is ‘ “unjustifiable and unacceptable” given Sir Fred had led the bank to the brink of collapse and to a record £24bn annual loss’.

Yet the paper did not attempt to set Brown’s comments in context. These remarks were, after all, made by the man who has led the entire country to the brink of collapse and to a record and unimaginable volume of national debt – £2 trillion and rising. Sir Fred’s £693 thousand pension is peanuts and it never was the issue.

The newspaper industry is in deep trouble – in America, where Seattle, Denver and Tucson are about to lose major titles – and in the UK. It is in trouble because it has failed to renew itself and to translate itself to operate in today’s media environment. Here we have a rightly respected Scottish newspaper letting itself down badly – demonstrating that it has not even rethought the outdated journalistic ruts of yesterday.