Alert readers may recall that a few months ago the Scottish press got itself in a right old lather about a temporary closure of the Forth Road Bridge. The SNP were attacked relentlessly in the media for what a subsequent inquiry in fact found to have been an “unforeseeable” fault on the bridge which posed no risk to life. But fair enough.

This week, 17 schools in the Edinburgh area were closed down over fears that they might be unsafe after the wall of one of them fell off in high winds, two years after another wall in an Edinburgh school collapsed and killed a 12-year-old girl.

All 17 had been built under a controversial PFI scheme signed in 2001, when the UK government, Scottish Parliament and Edinburgh City Council were all controlled by Labour, and which isn’t due to be finally paid off for another 20 years.

You know where this is going, right?

Because this is how the Observer chose to report the story today:

There wasn’t a single mention of Labour anywhere in the actual text of the article, the sole occurrence of the party’s name being a passing reference in the second-to-last paragraph in a quote from Green candidate Andy Wightman. Readers were left to associate the closures with Nicola Sturgeon.

We’d noticed the exact same strange framing in a piece in the Sunday Times this morning, and that set our curiosity tingling. So we decided to have a look at the rest of the Scottish media’s coverage of the story.

BBC: no mention of Labour at all

BBC (story #2): no mention of Labour at all (even when making reference to the current Labour-controlled council)

STV: no mention of Labour at all

Daily Record: no mention of Labour at all

The Herald: no mention of Labour at all

Sunday Express: no mention of Labour at all

Edinburgh Evening News: no mention of Labour at all

Sunday Post: Labour only mentioned in Andy Wightman quote

Sunday Times: Labour only mentioned in Andy Wightman quote

The Scotsman: no mention of Labour at all, despite Wightman being quoted

Scottish Daily Mail: no mention of Labour at all, despite Wightman being quoted

In short, in a remarkable display of uniformity not one Scottish paper thought it in any way pertinent or relevant to raise the fact that Labour had built all the schools which are now in apparent danger of disintegrating barely a decade after they were opened.

We assume it’s all simply a big coincidence, of course. But as we say in the headline, just once it’d be nice if the Scottish media didn’t live down to our expectations.