Ceredigion council head honchos have again taken aim at the Cambrian News over its reporting, this time labelling a story about the authority’s debt numbers – that its finance chief says are correct – as ‘misleading’.

Last week, the Cambrian News reported on data obtained by the BBC’s Shared Data Unit that showed Ceredigion owes £1,723.13 for every man, woman and child living in the county, and that over the past year, Ceredigion officials have added nearly £20m to the debt pile which now stands at £126m.

Despite the accuracy of those figures, a Cabinet meeting on 2 September heard senior councillors take aim at the Cambrian News – as they are often wont to do – this time even going so far as to belittle the biggest selling weekly newspaper in Wales, by joking amongst themselves that ‘so few people’ read the Cambrian News despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary.

Finance Cabinet member Cllr Gareth Davies, speaking during the meeting on a report into the authority’s finances said he was going to “take the opportunity to respond to an article that appeared in the Cambrian News last week regarding council borrowing.”

“The headline in the Cambrian News and how the headline was written in general was very misleading. “It could be very damaging to the council when the situation is portrayed in such a misleading way.”

Cllr Davies said external debt had fallen at the council since 2020, but conceded it had increased year on year - as stated in the Cambrian News article. He said that the increase in debt was due to borrowing for the Aberaeron Coastal Defence scheme – and that no extra burden will fall on taxpayers.

“The Cambrian News article tried to undermine the council’s financial credibility,” Cllr Davies told members.

Cllr Keith Evans suggested writing a letter to the editor giving Ceredigion County Council’s position to “set the facts straight.”

A smirking Cllr Bryan Davies replied: “To be honest, so few people read the Cambrian News now, I don’t know how many people read it, but I’ll write a letter to the editor anyway.”

Cambrian News Editor Mick O’Reilly said: “Some 14,000 people read the print editions covering Ceredigion each week, Or, putting it in numbers even Cllr Davies can understand, 373 people voted for him in the last election, more than 5,000 vote to buy the paper each week in Ceredigion alone.

“Last year alone, 6.4 million people clicked on the Cambrian News online, 600,000 do so every month and our engagement or time spent on the website is consistently in the top 10 of 900 news websites across the UK.

“We stand by our story,” the editor said. “We gave Ceredigion the figures beforehand, they spent two days putting together a response and they didn’t dispute the figures then - but they dispute it now? That’s Trumpian to say the least.

“If the council feels so hard done by, they can complain to IPSO, the press standards organisation. They did it before with seven articles, and lost each case emphatically.

“Maybe the council should deal with the red ink, not worry so much about what we print in black ink,” Mr O’Reilly said.