SO WHAT'S all this spin stuff about? You would be amazed by how often political journalists are asked that question. Relatives, old school friends, radio interviewers, pals at football matches, PhD journalism students, the list is endless. You will get your own chance to view the process of political spin this weekend in the BBC documentary tracking the Prime Minister's press aide, Alastair Campbell, although reportedly some of his expletives have been deleted or at least kept off camera. But journalists have an insider's take on the issue.

Asked the question, most of us reply that it's all hype, really. A passing fascination about something that has always gone on. The same old mixture of gossip, off-the-cuff remarks, muttered asides, deliberate briefing, score-settling, and ponderous agenda-setting. None of it is new, it's just that some of it has been rebranded - like a washing powder, appropriately enough.

What has changed most recently is the balance between content and presentation. A journey of 36 years since Marshall McLuhan first proclaimed that ''the medium is the message'' has finally hit the buffers. The lesson has at long last been learned that ''it's the content, stupid''. That's what the tactics of the Prime Minister have been about in the past few days, trying to wrest back the initiative by concentrating on content, facts, details, statistics.

It has been the misfortune of his administration to come at the end of a period of transition in British public life. No ordinary voters knew of a Prime Ministerial press aide before Joe Haines under Wilson; everybody knew Bernard Ingham under Thatcher; and now everyone has an opinion, usually hostile, on the role of Campbell under Blair. A climate of deference and the acceptance of the patrician and off-the-record nature of the process has given way to an era of scepticism and a demand for a more open system. This Government has been snared in that transitional period.

There has always been a genuine battleground between politicians and those who report their activities. They give us assertions, we demand proof. They offer facts by way of proof, and we probe them, check them, hold them up to the light. That's how it should be. The problem is that politicians, declared ideologues, look for ideological motivations in journalists, invariably detecting them but often misconstruing them.

The fact that Messrs Blair and Campbell are impatient with many in the Scottish media has been well documented. Just before the last General Election, in an interview conducted in the back seats of the then Opposition Leader's limousine, Mr Blair harrumphed in despair at what he saw as the ''theological attention to detail'' of Scottish journalists on the minutiae of devolution. He was going to give us Home Rule. Why did we have to show ingratitude by nit-picking on the small print?

There is a strong tendency in New Labour to treat any questioning voice in Scotland as prima facie proof of dangerous Nationalist tendencies. A journalist can be a former paid Labour Party official, be a sibling of a Labour MSP, or have a Cabinet member as his or her partner and nobody bats an eyelid. Overtly Tory journalists are cheerfully tolerated. Doubtless any Liberal Democrat whose party card was tucked into a wallet beside a press card would be embraced.

But ask a tricky question at a press conference and you may find yourself condemned as an SNP dupe and have nasty things said about you behind your back. Every story you write is pored over by the New Labour thought police. Each time you attend an event your performance is monitored for signs of dangerous deviationism. The assumption is that you are coming at the story from a particular perspective and will tweak it to achieve a pro-Nationalist outcome.

In fact it's nothing like that in real life. Two weeks ago when the last Cabinet row of the first year of the Parliament broke, this writer found himself accused of dangerously undue fairness to the Finance Minister Jack McConnell - a novelty, it must be said - for giving the benefit of the doubt to his new formula for treating departmental year-end savings. The expectation of some in New Labour would be that The Herald was bound to leap on this as a rod to beat the Executive. Not so. It was treated as an honest judgment call.

Then in Glasgow on Monday we gathered for the Grand Committee, an exercise which smacked of a determination on the part of MPs to retrieve their vanishing profile. On the evidence of the public reaction they have every need of such an effort. Not a single ordinary citizen was to be found in the public gallery. No pressure groups or protesters gathered in Elmbank Street to lobby them, in stark contrast to the scenes when the Scottish Parliament met there.

Trade Secretary Stephen Byers gave little cause for enthusiasm, repeating the same series of pledges on shipbuilding and North Sea union recognition which he used to woo the STUC months ago and then making a gaffe about how a higher independent measure of the unemployment rate was good news for the Government. The argument, that people are happier to sign on the dole under Labour, brought to mind Helen Liddell's response to the North-east Euro-election defeat: ''We always have difficulties in areas where people are happy.''

Labour MPs' enthusiasm for the Grand Committee matched that of the Glasgow citizenry, with fewer than half bothering to show up, so all in all the mood of the press corps collectively was fairly sceptical about the whole show. Then Minister of State, Brian Wilson, began to trumpet a political victory over the hated Nats, who had been forced under questioning to do a U-turn on cutting fuel duty, the focus of a big summer campaign.

All of the journalists present made clear that they would run with the story, provided the facts bore out the claims. Unfortunately, they didn't. With all the might of Excalibur at their disposal, Labour were unable to shake the fact that the SNP had been clear and consistent in their calls for total abolition of the fuel tax escalator (not just a year-by-year review of its use), and an end to the automatic inflation-indexed increase in duty (and thus a gradual fall in the price of petrol).

The SNP, it transpired, were a more accurate source of current Treasury policy on fuel duty than the Labour spin doctors who were trying to attack them. Labour had broken a golden rule which Brian Wilson above all should have known: if you go on the attack, get your facts right.

The following day it fell to this writer to follow up a decent exclusive by a rival saying that an independent report by the National Institute for Social and Economic Affairs savaged the performance of the New Deal. By the expectations of Labour's spinners The Herald should have joined in the attack. But the author of the report told us that he felt his work had been misrepresented and he was actually giving a cautious thumbs-up to the New Deal.

That is how The Herald reported it. How we found it. Not how we were supposedly predisposed to it. That's how it will continue.