Our ever-alert readers will almost certainly recall – for it was only four days ago – this piece, in which we noted the Scottish media’s curious reluctance to cover what looked like a pretty blockbusting story.

Professor Sir Donald Mackay of the pro-devolution think tank Reform Scotland, an extremely distinguished businessman and adviser to the UK government, wrote a stinging article for the Sunday Times rubbishing the Office for Budget Responsibility’s gloomy forecasts for North Sea oil revenue in the coming decades, and suggesting that the real figures were likely to be over £8 billion a year higher.

Despite the enormous effect such a sum would have on the economy of an independent Scotland – wiping out the highest estimate of its deficit at a stroke and leaving it with an annual surplus of hundreds of millions of pounds – the rest of the media uncharacteristically didn’t swipe the ST’s story for their Monday editions.

But then the OBR issued a new forecast.

This forecast revised the predictions that Professor Sir Donald had already dismissed as absurdly pessimistic downward even further – by a whopping 25%. Of course, we’d established last week that stories about OBR oil forecasts weren’t newsworthy, but we thought it’d be best to double-check just for safety.

MEDIA WHICH REPORTED POSITIVE STORY ABOUT OIL REVENUES

The Sunday Times

MEDIA WHICH REPORTED NEGATIVE STORY ABOUT OIL REVENUES

The Times

The Telegraph

The Scotsman

The Herald

The Independent

The Scottish Sun

The Daily Record

The Courier

The Guardian

The Press & Journal (syndicated copy)

The Daily Mail

The Financial Times

BBC

STV

We should note, in fairness, that the Scottish Sun’s piece was focused on the First Minister attacking the claims. But the oddest thing was that only TWO of the articles (the Herald’s and the Courier’s) thought to even passingly reference Professor Sir Donald Mackay’s comments about the OBR from just days ago.

You’d think, from the most elementary journalistic perspective, that such remarks would be highly pertinent in the context of a new OBR forecast. Sir Donald is nobody’s idea of a nationalist or a stooge of Alex Salmond, and with an oil-industry background is extremely well qualified to express a view. Yet 12 out of 14 news outlets ignored his opinion as comprehensively as they had done on Sunday.

(Indeed, it’s slightly worse than that. Several of the reports were taken from the same Press Association newswire piece, which DID include the reference to Sir Donald’s article made by SNP MSP Jamie Hepburn, but edited it out.)

Readers may, as ever, form their own conclusions.