One of the uglier facets of opposition to the hugely-popular but now-repealed Offensive Behaviour (Football) Act was the 100% uniform stance against it in the Scottish press. Despite the Act being backed by a large majority of voters across every demographic and political divide, not one print or broadcast journalist ever stood up for the public.

The reason, of course, is that bigots (and lurid stories about them) are a large part of what keeps the Scottish media’s life support machine functioning, and so the media panders cynically to the extremist sections of the Celtic and “Rangers” support who still buy papers for the latest transfer gossip and soft-soap interviews with ex-players.

And so it is with a remarkably mad front-page lead in today’s Sunday Herald.

The paper reports that “over half” – 44 out of 86 – outstanding OBFA charges have been “converted” into other types of offences and are still being prosecuted by the independent Crown Office, claiming without explanation that this is “an embarrassing move for the SNP Government”.

But it rather seems like the opposite is true.

The repeal of the 2012 Act clearly specified that the possibility to transfer offences to a different charge would remain an option, and it’s being exercised in 51% of cases. But bizarrely, the piece then asserts:

…when the exact reverse appears to be plainly true. What those figures suggest to any logical interpretation is that existing laws only covered about HALF of the offences, and in fact the OBFA was necessary to bring the other half. Otherwise all 86 would have been transferred to existing offences, not just 44. Like, duh.

The paper then wheels out the usual anti-OBFA suspects – ie James Kelly MSP and poisonously partisan Labour activist Jeanette Findlay – to whinge about the statistic without actually offering any argument for why the prosecutions are now inappropriate.

Which is strange, given that their argument was never “people shouldn’t be prosecuted for sectarian behaviour”, but that “people can be prosecuted for sectarian behaviour without this specific law”.

In a further two pages of coverage inside, the paper inexplicably repeats the irrational claim that the Crown Office transferring half of the charges somehow proves the case that all sectarian offences were covered by existing legislation:

Andrew Tickell – lecturer in law at Glasgow Caledonian University, and no fan of OBFA – pointed out the somewhat gaping hole in reasoning on his Twitter account.

In fairness, since we know that James Kelly has a lot of trouble with basic counting, it’s possible that he simply doesn’t understand that 44 is only half of 86. The inhabitants of the Herald offices famously aren’t all that great at identifying how much a half is either.

Nevertheless, it’s a grim state of affairs that a newspaper at the supposedly “quality” end of the spectrum could spend three pages on such an open perversion of the facts, flatly claiming that two plus two equalling four somehow proves it also equals eight.

But maybe it goes part of the way to explain why the Scottish media shows no sign of changing its ways in the face of sales figures that are falling faster than almost anywhere else in the world. Perhaps they show so little concern because they think that if your circulation is cut in half, it isn’t actually dropping at all.