It’s not often that you see the same story on the front page of the i and the Financial Times. It’s even rarer – in fact, perhaps unprecedented – if that story’s about Scotland, because the otherwise-admirable mini-tabloid is barely even aware that there’s a part of the UK north of Newcastle.

(Its parent paper, the Independent, is we think unique among national UK newspapers in not even having a Scotland section, let alone a Scottish edition.)

So when it happens, you know it must be a pretty darned significant story – one which the Scottish press will be all over like a swarm of wasps at a jam-factory picnic. Right?

Sorry, readers. We don’t know what we could have been thinking.

The news that both of the institutions cited by the Treasury in support of its huge showpiece announcement today that independence would cost every family in Scotland eleventy-squinteen frillion pounds a second (or something) have angrily disowned its claims, saying their research has been “badly misrepresented” to inflate the real figures by a factor of 12 – should be a pretty easy sell.

After all, “Government tells flat-out lies about impartial experts’ evidence in order to terrify populace” would in any normal circumstances be splattered across hundreds of column inches in tabloids and broadsheets alike.

When the Scottish Government supposedly misled people over the mere existence of some evidence about EU advice in October 2012, for example, you couldn’t move in print or broadcast media for a week without tripping over a dozen furious headlines and editorials and on-air interrogations, and it still gets dragged up 19 months later.

But in a bizarre turn of events, a massive story about a lie on an enormous scale perpetrated against not only the Scottish people but two highly respected institutions, which makes the front pages of two UK papers at opposite ends of the journalism spectrum, gets completely airbrushed out of existence in Scotland’s own media.

Well, not quite “completely”, to be fair. The Herald is the only Scottish paper which does squeeze the story onto its front page, buried in a small corner where it’s sneakily underplayed as being a claim of Alex Salmond and the Scottish Government, rather than the academics themselves:

And of course the Scotsman does cover it on its inside pages:

You might have to look pretty closely to spot it, so we’ve helpfully highlighted it for you in the picture above. In the 10th paragraph of a page 7 story focusing on the Treasury’s fabricated claims, the paper squeezes in the tiniest conceivable mention, clocking in at a whopping 22 words:

There aren’t any excuses for this. The story broke conveniently at teatime – we covered it at 6pm and the Financial Times had its story up on its website, complete with quotes from both Prof. Dunleavy and the other expert, Prof. Robert Young of Western Ontario University, at 8pm – giving plenty of notice even for print editions.

Yet at the time of writing, the only Scottish articles we can find about it in print OR online are the Herald’s and this rather blandly-headlined one in the Press & Journal:

(In broadcast media, meanwhile, Scotland Tonight didn’t cover the story at all, the BBC’s shiny all-new current-affairs show Scotland 2014 restricted it to a single passing mention in a powderpuff interview with Danny Alexander, and Good Morning Scotland promised, but then didn’t deliver, an interview with Prof. Dunleavy.)

We really should be beyond surprise at this sort of thing by now, but the Scottish media keeps finding new ways to astound us. We salute its commitment. Tick tock.

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EDIT 4.40pm: The editor of the Scottish Daily Mail has contacted us to note that the paper DID cover the story on inside pages, and quite prominently.