As I fought my way through the crowds following Friday’s inauguration ceremony in Washington DC, I overheard some supporters of the new president speculate about the likely media coverage.

“The media will try to say that Obama’s inauguration attracted bigger crowds,” said one young woman confidently, “they’ll try to claim there was nobody here.” And a little later I saw two guys harangue a lady with a banner imploring Donald Trump to “stop lying”. “Hah!” said one of them, “it’s the media that should stop lying!”

Of course nowadays you expect to hear sentiments like these, not just in the US but at political gatherings in Scotland too, but what you don’t expect to see are conspiracy-minded tropes endorsed by those in positions of power and responsibility. Yet the day after the inauguration, that’s exactly what happened.

In his first outing on Saturday afternoon, new White House press secretary Sean Spicer claimed Trump had drawn “the largest audience to ever witness an inauguration” (untrue), that DC Metro usage was higher than at the last inauguration (also untrue), and that new security measures had prevented “hundreds of thousands of people” from viewing the ceremony (ditto).

Not to be outdone, speaking at the CIA headquarters President Trump claimed 1.5 million people had attended his swearing-in ceremony (demonstrably untrue) and that journalists – “among the most dishonest human beings on earth” – had invented his feud with the US intelligence services (comically untrue), while the news media had used photographs of “an empty field” to make his inauguration appear under-attended (where to begin?).

To this, for what it’s worth, I can add my own personal testimony. Where I watched proceedings was certainly busy, but then you’d expect that of the seated press sections near the Capitol itself. When it was over, meanwhile, the Mall emptied surprisingly quickly – it takes longer after the Royal Military Tattoo in Edinburgh – and, strikingly, the crowds watching the inaugural parade were just two or three people deep. Turnout for Saturday’s Women’s March on Washington was, by all reasonable measurements, considerably greater.

But the depressing thing is that for many of those present, judging by the snatches of conversations I overheard, they’ll happily side with their new Commander in Chief rather than the Fourth Estate. And no wonder Trump inspires such devotion, for he purposefully reinforces many of his supporters’ prejudices, particularly when it comes to the “mainstream media”.

It’s now quite clear that even with November’s divisive election out of the way, the new president intends to continue denigrating and delegitimising those whose job it is to hold him to account. In doing so, of course, it’ll make the job of scrutinising a Trump administration much harder. This isn’t just irresponsible, it’s downright dangerous.

Now of course spin and selective quotation have long been with us, just look at presentation of the Scottish Government’s current Budget, but what’s happening in the US, and to a lesser extent in the UK, is on an altogether different scale. Republicans have even begun requisitioning the phrase “fake news” and applying it to “failing” (copyright: D. Trump) news outlets such as the New York Times and BuzzFeed.

Strangely muted in response to all of this have been the usual suspects in the “National Movement”, not just keyboard warriors on Twitter but the sort of Scottish Nationalist who thinks Russia Today a more impartial news provider than the BBC. The former First Minister Alex Salmond, for example, recently highlighted what he called Trump’s “character flaw”, although their respective approaches to the “mainstream media” aren’t altogether different.

To repeat, it was on a different scale, but it’s worth remembering that Salmond regularly attacked individual journalists (including yours truly), endorsed protests outside BBC Scotland’s Glasgow HQ, accused media outlets of systematic bias (without offering compelling evidence) and personally oversaw the guest list for his resignation press conference. What exactly separates that from the behaviour of the new US President?

Mercifully, the present First Minister generally resists such nonsense, even though it seems likely she’s no more approving of Scottish journalistic output than her more confrontational predecessor. Where Salmond attacked the BBC’s Nick Robinson, Sturgeon took him for dinner, while she recently told the Big Issue that a “downside” of the “new media” was that “some of the stuff” circulating on social media “is rubbish”. It says a lot that a politician pointing out the empirically obvious is cause for cheer.

It’s also unthinkable that Nicola Sturgeon’s press spokespeople would ever sink as low as Trump’s did on Saturday afternoon, so we should be grateful for small mercies. Unfortunately, the SNP leader cannot necessarily control other elements of the “movement” she leads, thus two of her MPs happily admit to having lobbied STV against one of its former journalists. And whether or not Stephen Daisley was “gagged” as a result isn’t really the point, the behaviour of elected representatives is.

A couple of weekends ago I attended the Scottish Independence Convention in Glasgow, a gathering that highlighted the movement’s confused approach to the media. Richard Walker, formerly of the Sunday Herald and The National, tried to inject some balance and good sense, robustly informing those present that much of what they believe to be true about the Scottish media is little more than paranoid nonsense.

But judging from the questions and contributions that followed, much of what Walker said had fallen on deaf ears. Some suggested outsourcing journalistic “fact checking” to Yes activists, others said we (i.e. the media) had to be called out for what they were, in other words willing lackeys of the Unionist establishment. But the confusion sprang from an accompanying grudging realisation that the often hysterical attacks on reporters and broadcasters deployed at the last referendum can’t be repeated second time round.

Also present in Glasgow was SNP MP Mhairi Black, who spoiled an otherwise genuine attempt to inject some reason into proceedings by referring to journalists as “lazy” and making the bizarre observation that “all” news was filtered through a London lens, which will come as a surprise to newsrooms across Scotland.

So what is to be done? The cynic in me suspects it is already too late, for the media has so many structural and financial problems that mounting a spirited defence will be all but impossible. But maintaining a cool head and certain standards would at least be a start.

One aspect of the weekend’s events in Washington illustrate what I’m talking about. Reporters there did make one mistake, reporting that the new President had removed a bust of Martin Luther King from the Oval Office. He had not, but the reporter in question then retracted and apologised. Only when Trump and his advisers show some of the same humility will we know that the obvious danger in all of this has passed.