The Scottish press has chosen its latest martyr well. Perhaps aware that the average politician – whose day job is basically one long playground name-calling session – doesn’t tend to cut a very convincing figure as the subject of “bullying”, this week the print and broadcast media chose someone a little more sympathetic to portray as a broken, pitiful victim of the Evil Cybernat Hordes: a poor vulnerable wee lassie.

A tiny 4’11”, Susan Calman is nevertheless a former lawyer (who’s worked on Death Row in the USA) as well as a comedian, and one might reasonably expect that she’d be fairly used to both being asked for evidence and being heckled. It’s quite difficult to imagine that any time she was challenged in a courtroom, with someone’s life hanging in the balance, she crumbled in tears at the shock of anybody requesting that she support her case with some sort of verifiable facts.

And as the privately-educated daughter of a knight of the realm, who’s appeared on national TV almost-naked and painted bright green in the persona of an aggressive sexual bondage-goblin, or demanding (successfully) to have someone urinate in her mouth, it’s also not unreasonable to assume a certain degree of robust self-confidence might be present. Indeed, Ms Calman herself concurs with that assessment, telling the Scotsman in 2006 that when it comes to abuse from audiences:

Yet this strong, confident, successful woman of the world, who also managed to come through a challenging adolescence as a lesbian, has been suddenly set before the concerned Scottish public as a helpless, quivering, sobbing wretch, reduced to this pathetic state by – well, nobody seems to know quite what, with days of searching the internet for the offending comments turning up a big fat blank.

And the oddest thing is that the Yes camp has meekly gone along with it all. SNP MSPs and Yes Scotland figures, and several normally-rational pro-independence commentators (not just the usual WetNat suspects), have lined up to bemoan the – alleged, unproven – attacks on Calman, treating them unquestioningly as fact. Why?

Is it really just because she’s a woman? Can it be that simple? Does the No camp merely need to react to any criticism or challenge by putting up a crying female and playing the “misogynist bullying” card? It’s a disturbing thought.

The other thing that’s been hard to avoid in 2013 is articles professing to examine why the Yes Scotland campaign is failing and what it can do to turn the situation around. But wait a minute. Every opinion poll published this year has shown a narrowing of the gap between Yes and No. In October we were being told incessantly that support was down to 23%, yet in 2013 it’s constantly been in the mid-30s, with only a 5% swing required to take the lead.

By doing little other than sitting back and letting the No camp drive its own supporters away with increasingly shrill, hysterical negativity, Blair Jenkins’ organisation is still making solid progress while keeping most of its powder dry until nearer the vote when people will be paying far more attention. Yet the media narrative is of failure.

Just as with “Calmangate”, we’re invited to pontificate over “solutions” to a problem which exists only as an unsupported assertion, subtly setting the agenda of the debate on a false premise that isn’t very far removed from “Have you stopped beating your wife?” – and in the case of poor wee defenceless Susan Calman, so traumatised by being quite reasonably asked if she can support her own claims that she’s closed down her Twitter account and gone into hiding, barely removed from it at all.

This site absolutely condemns personal online attacks. We get deluged with them every day (including, ironically, by Susan Calman), and quite apart from being ugly, they’re utterly counter-productive. We’re happy to leave that sort of thing to the Unionist side, which is the worst offender by a spectacular distance, and as such we actually fully agree with the broader thrust of Ms Calman’s original blog post.

But it is NOT “bullying” to ask for evidence for serious allegations and to question the veracity of those allegations if it’s not produced. It is in fact the most basic primary function of journalism, and anyone who portrays inquiry as abuse must be treated with the greatest suspicion. Wings Over Scotland supports all of its factual assertions with sourced and linked corroboration, and we expect the same standards of anyone else.

Many on the Yes side have allowed themselves to be played for chumps this week, intimidated into compliance by the cynical portrayal – whether by the media, Calman herself or both – of Susan Calman as a victim. “Calmangate”, like the broader strategy being deployed around it, reeks to high heaven.