Our poll story yesterday was a pretty interesting piece of politics news considering it’s the Christmas dead season. We put an interesting new angle on the independence question, and posted all the poll data so that reporters had plenty to get their teeth into. And we released it at lunchtime so they had plenty of time to get it into today’s editions.

Remarkably, though, none of the Scottish media – with the honourable exception of The National, who made it their front page splash – thought that the best numbers for independence in many months merited even a dismissive passing mention. Scotland’s political hacks doggedly ignored it on social media. And then things got weird.

The tweet above appeared briefly – having been posted at 11.44am it was gone by no later than 12.10pm – on the Twitter account of the Herald. The story it linked to cannot be found through the paper’s website, though it’s still hidden away on the servers.

(Its sister paper the Evening Times carried the story, then outright deleted it.)

And the reason why provides a fascinating insight into how the press operates.

Because if you search for that headline, you get a LOT of results.

Because a Scottish opinion poll that isn’t news to the Herald apparently IS interesting to the readers of the Droitwich Advertiser, the Basingstoke Gazette and the Croydon Guardian. (And the Dorset Echo, the Harrow Times and Chard And Ilminster News.)

(And the Oxford Mail, the Wirral Globe, the St Helens Star, the Wharfedale Observer, St Albans Review, the Cotswold Journal and the Harwich & Manningtree Standard.)

What’s plainly happened is that the Press Association – whose byline appears on most of the almost-identically-worded articles – has picked the story up, probably from The National, and put it out on the wires, where papers have automatically processed it and run it on their sites.

That, of course, isn’t especially remarkable. That’s how the modern media keeps up a stream of content despite sacking great swathes of journalists. What’s remarkable is that it got into the Herald, where it was actually appropriate to the readership, and then the Herald actively concealed it.

That’s real determination to keep some interesting news away from Scots. Readers might be forgiven for wondering why a newspaper would want to do such a thing.