David Leask: Why Scotland needs to learn from the Nobel laureates "fighting for facts”

But Mr Muratov had a slightly different spin on his new gong, which, replacing the ‘o’ in Novaya Gazeta, glittered in gold on his masthead.

“We are battling for facts,” read the paper’s front page headline.

This was a direct quote from Ms Ressa, five simple words which sum up the story of our information age: the journalistic and political drive to save the very concept of objective reality from those seeking to undermine it.

The Nobel prize committee may rightly have treasured freedom of expression. But it is the freedom of facts we all need most now, the freedom to know we can make decisions based on what is real, not contrived or mythologised.

Journalists like Ms Ressa and Mr Muratov are talismans of the fight for reality journalism. The former is a US-educated former CNN correspondent who set up the Rappler news site in Manila. The latter is a bearded, softly spoken “backbench” kind of journalist who lets his Moscow-based paper, always a damned good read, do most of his talking.

The pair, of course, are both up against increasingly authoritarian and criminalised regimes. Six of Mr Muratov’s reporters and contributors have died during their jobs since 2000.

“Igor Domnikov, Yuri Schekochikhin, Anna Politkovskaya, Stas Markelov, Anastasia Baburova, Natasha Estemirova,” said Mr Muratov, naming killed colleagues as his award was announced. “These people won the Nobel Prize today.”

Mr Muratov was clearly uncomfortable with being personally lauded. “I thought the award was for the paper,” he said. “When it turned out that it was for me personally that was, honestly, unpleasant.” He has given some of his prize money to a fund – set up by Vladimir Putin – to support children with chronic or rare diseases, and to a hospice. But he will also help other independent media, including those, he hinted, targeted by the Putin regime.

Rappler’s often young reporters have covered the presidency of Rodrigo Duterte, who said journalists should be treated as spies and “not exempted from assassination”. It is not easy work. Especially in an online environment where it is a usually staffer’s good name rather than life which is at risk.

“If you’re a Filipino journalist who is underpaid and who works in an environment that is not exactly secure, economically and financially, your only wealth is your reputation,” Glenda Gloria, one of Rappler’s founders, told the New York Times. “But when you’re attacked online by a troll army and accused of corruption and unfounded claims, then you lose that right."

She added: “That’s what our young reporters have gone through and are going through, and that has really hardened them a bit in terms of their courage.”

The oppression of journalists in countries like the Philippines and Russia is chilling. But it is easy to read the news of the award for Ms Ressa and Mr Muratov and scroll on, as we so often do with foreign stories, imagining this does not apply to us.

After all, we live in a state with a long tradition of a free press, of elections, of the rule of law. We take that for granted. But should we?

It is still less than a year since an ad-hoc insurgency – fuelled by a diet of online disinformation – nearly reversed the results of a presidential poll in the United States. America nearly fell on the back of a big lie, a disinformation event, a false claim, by President Donald Trump, that an election had been stolen.

That was against a backdrop of whole swathes of the United States losing their local newspapers with their strong and sometimes stuffy America traditions of reality-based journalism.

And as the old papers folded or were degraded by cutbacks, many voters tuned in to partisan TV stations or logged on to social media sites where freedom of expression trumps freedom of facts.

Ms Ressa – after getting her award – renewed her criticism of the new information infrastructure of our age, social media giants.

Facebook, she said, is the world’s biggest news publisher “yet it is biased against facts, it is biased against journalism … If you have no facts, you can’t have truths, you can’t have trust. If you don’t have any of these, you don’t have a democracy.”

Her remarks, of course, followed the appearance of a whistleblowing Facebook employee in the US Congress. “I’m here today because I believe Facebook’s products harm children, stoke division and weaken our democracy,” Frances Haugen said. “The company’s leadership knows how to make Facebook and Instagram safer, but won’t make the necessary changes because they have put their astronomical profits before people.” Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg dismissed this, saying his site makes money from advertising and advertisers do not like anger.

Maybe, like the Nobel Prize awards, this is just another foreign news item we will flick past. Maybe. But we should not.

It should be prompting a serious question in government and politics, in business, trade unions, churches, schools, third-sector and civic society organisations.

That question: who is fighting for facts?

Are you? Is your organisation?

Scrolling through Twitter or Facebook means swimming in a sea of falsehoods, including specific Scottish ones. Some of these creep into our public life, in to our mainstream media, informing votes and political decisions, big and small. This is how democracy is eroded.

So far, even when we are riven with visceral disagreements, Scotland has been relatively resilient to both misinformation and straight-up state disinformation. For example, anti-vaxxers remain a dangerous menace but most of us still got our jags. We have institutions like the BBC and STV which – much as we love to traduce them – remain devoted to public service factual broadcasting. We still have robust journalism. For now.

But Scotland is not special. We have our vulnerabilities, just like Russia, the Philippines or America.

Facts, they matter. And perhaps never more than if we have another independence referendum.

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