DO you care where the facts come from after you've paid 48p for your paper of a morning? Do you like to assume that if The

Herald says something is true then you can trust it?

Are you concerned whether assertions are presented as facts, or facts are cloaked under opinions?

Those of us who write for this newspaper hope that you care, but there is always the nagging doubt that the issues that we consider important don't actually register on the radar screens of our customers.

Maybe you are trying to get the kids out to school, or being jostled on a crowded commuter train.

If we as a newspaper say it, are you all that concerned by the process by which we came to say it? To a greater or lesser degree journalists think about these questions every day, especially political journalists.

When you inhabit a small world it can be too easy to assume it's the big world. As navel-gazers, political hacks are peerless.

But here is why these things do matter. A nation's executive - that is in the text-book terminology which we have been stupid enough to lumber ourselves with as a working title - holds all the cards, including all the aces, both the jokers, and a few extra up its sleeve.

That is why younger but more mature democracies set out to

create checks and balances between the executive and the legislature. The new Scotland, as a single-chamber parliament, attempted such a balancing act, with pre-legislative scrutiny by committees and with a cabinet, which, due to proportional representation, was always likely to be a cross-party coalition, answerable to parliament as a whole.

But how do the citizens find out about all this? Through reporters' accounts of the proceedings.

You could, of course, look up the parliament's website and read the full account the following day, but the reason why you pay your 48p is that you trust us to mediate for you. You accept our judgment call on what happened, why it happened, and how important it was for you.

At Westminster this mediation is done via a group of political journalists called the lobby. It remains a strictly limited group and it abides by rules, although in recent years these rules have been relaxed slightly, so that when Alastair Campbell, the prime minister's official spokesman, says something, it is now attributed as such. So much so, that they now post an edited version of his briefings on the internet.

But it was not always thus. At one time at Westminster the lobby briefing was a kind of masonic meeting which did not officially take place and, as a result, the assertions of, say Bernard Ingham, were to be treated as facts, placed in the public domain without any health warning about their source.

These days are gone. Good. When the Scottish Parliament was being established, it was decided not to go down that road. Be clear on this. As far as official business on the Mound is concerned, Herald readers should be able to distinguish between fact and assertion. Actually, facts barely exist any more. Look at employment statistics, or hospital waiting lists. All is interpretation or assertion, but at least you should know who is asserting. That means the ruling coalition make its claims on the same basis as its opponents - as rival interpretations of the real world from which the voters can draw their own conclusions. The playing field, like the Easter Road slope, has been levelled.

That does not mean that journalists do not have their own private chats with ministers, or backbenchers, or opposition MSPs, or civil servants. It would be impossible in practice to outlaw these transactions. But at least at the official level we can say where things are coming from.

That did not happen by accident. It was the result of a lengthy and tough process of negotiation by the journalists who would be working at the new parliament. This is charted in Open Scotland? by Stirling

University sociologists Philip Schlesinger, David Miller, and William Dinnan (Polygon at Edinburgh, #15.99), which argues that the procedures put in place for Holyrood have lapsed into the bad old ways of Westminster.

To which two questions can be asked: Is every briefing with the first minister's official spokesman or his deputies on the record and fully attributable? (Answer: yes, although they are not on camera.) And has a single journalist from any publication, anywhere on the planet, been denied the right to attend such a briefing? (Answer: no - all they have to do is ask.) If you are a bona fide, practising reporter who wants to participate in the scrutiny of our fledgling legislature, you can apply for a pass and use it to get into the same briefing that the regulars attend. Try doing that at Westminster. Not a chance.

The account by Schlesinger and his colleagues is a detailed and meticulous account of the coincidence, happenstance, and enemy action (to quote Ian Fleming) which led us to where we are now. The politicians, particularly the governing variety, are giving away too

little, and the journalists are not succeeding fully in securing their demands. Both groups are therefore, to some degree, culpable.

What would have been interesting would have been an international perspective. In Open Scotland? the authors have committed the same sin as many journalists, in holding up the Scottish Parliament only to its Westminster counterpart. Why compare a bonnie bairn to the mad

auntie in the attic? Where is the best and most open legislature in the world and how does Scotland's compare to that? This book tells us we stand third in the world on gender equality, but not where we stand on other indicators of openness, access, and accountability. And if after two years it has faults, at least the servants on the Mound are making efforts to listen to criticism and act on suggestions.

The book reproduces a graphic from our Sunday sister paper from a year ago mapping the relationships between members of ''Scotland's political and media elites''. It was a tortuous exercise which told us

little that we did not know - that some journalists go into politics, that some politicians share beds with journalists, that siblings have siblings. Is it any big deal that a former Labour Party aide married a woman who became a Tory candidate while he worked as a journalist in the BBC and in newspapers? What really matters is trust and belief, a contract between reporter and reader. It's what you pay your 48p for.