A number of papers today report a manufactured furore concerning some comments we made on Twitter a couple of days ago about Tory MSP Alex Johnstone while watching Scotland Tonight. The Herald, astonishingly, makes it the second-lead story on its website, with political editor Magnus Gardham gleefully seizing the opportunity to stick the boot in after being the subject of much criticism on this site.

The Times also has a large piece about the tweet and it gets a quarter page in the Daily Mail, while the Scotsman’s coverage is more muted – which is perhaps out of embarrassment at coming on the same day the paper had to grudgingly publish a belated correction and “apology” for two grotesque and utterly false smears about us last week. Even Holyrood Magazine gets in on the act, as does the Courier.

That’s all fine and good. Getting monstered by Unionist newspapers isn’t exactly a new experience for us, after all. But there’s something odd about all of the stories.

And that’s the fact that we weren’t contacted by any of them for a quote. In this kind of situation, and especially when making a big deal of the incident, any competent journalist will always ask the “offender” for a quote, in the hope that they’ll either apologise or say something offensive again, either of which makes for a better story.

(Or that they’ll decline, enabling the paper to say that “X refused to comment”, which makes the perpetrator look shifty, whereas not apparently even attempting to get the other side of the story makes the newspaper seem unprofessional and biased.)

But none of them did, and readers might be wondering why. The answer can be found in the reply the one paper that DID ask for a comment on the issue yesterday – Aberdeen’s Press & Journal – got when it emailed yesterday asking if I regretted the comments and wanted to say sorry.

“No, I don’t. We’ve never been abusive to an individual on Wings Over Scotland in two-and-a-half years of the site’s existence, but we made an exception for Alex Johnstone because of his despicable attacks on a couple of ordinary, decent Scots who’ve done untold amounts of good for worthy causes and have never sought the public eye. When he retracts and apologises for the disgusting comments he made about Chris and Colin Weir I’ll withdraw my view that he’s scum.”

Did you spot it, folks? We weren’t asked for a response because if we had been, the media would have been obliged to report it, and in doing so to draw people’s attention to the reason that we describe Alex Johnstone, alone among MSPs, in the way we do.

It would have had to remind readers of the fact that Mr Johnstone attacked ordinary, decent members of the public in a far worse manner than Campbell Gunn did last week, for which Gunn was pilloried by the press in blanket print, TV and radio coverage for days on end while Johnstone got off scot-free for his attacks.

Today’s furore is in every paper on the basis of a single quite rude tweet from our Twitter account, which has under 14,000 followers and is known for being much more knockabout and likely to be sprinkled with occasional swearies than the site itself. It was only retweeted 15 times and nobody paid much attention to it except, ironically, a couple of Labour politicians bleating that we were being beastly to a Tory.

Yet we called Johnstone FAR worse (“arsehole”, “sewer-dwelling vermin”, “disgusting, arrogant, patronising, condescending piece of toilet-scraping” and “repellent sack of filth in a suit” ) over a month ago, far more prominently, in an article that was read over 50,000 times, and there wasn’t a dicky-bird in the press about it.

(We were asked about it at the time by Scotland Tonight in an interview recorded for TV. We explained the reason. That interview was never broadcast either.)

Why? Because if the media had reported that they’d have also had to cover the reason we said it, whereas with the tweet they could separate the two and pretend it was unprovoked. And sure enough, the P&J – the only paper we gave a quote to, in which we mentioned the Weirs – is one of the few that DOESN’T cover the story today.

Journalists getting their own back on us for spending much of the last two and a half years exposing their misdeeds is all well and dandy. We dish it out and we can take it, and on this occasion (unlike the lies printed in several articles in the Scotsman in the last week) we at least did actually say the thing we’re accused of saying.

But the telling, and far more important, aspect is that in having a go at us, Scotland’s media is still careful to distort the independence debate by amplifying rudeness from the Yes side while completely whitewashing much worse abuse from the No side. Readers can, as ever, draw their own conclusions from the evidence.