“Who the hell reads the second paragraph?” snarls the hardened newspaper editor Walter Burns in the play “The Front Page”, currently running on Broadway.

I laughed at that line, for it contained an important truth: journalists have a habit of taking themselves too seriously, deluding themselves that every sentence they write is devoured by the masses.

Of course those days are long gone, although that doesn’t mean good reporting (and analysis) has somehow diminished in importance. Set in the bawdy Chicago of the 1920s, the play depicts journalism from a different era, when hacks weren’t necessarily trusted but their output wildly popular.

The year that recently ended was, among so many other things, an uncomfortable one for the media. From the over-reliance on pollsters – who failed to predict the SNP losing its majority in May, Brexit in June or Trump’s victory in November – to concerns that out-of-touch editors were habitually missing the “real” story.

Many of these criticisms are justified, but as ever it’s vital to separate – so to speak – the newsprint from the trees, for journalism has never perfectly reflected the imperfect world it attempts to record, but mistakes do not a conspiracy or “biased” agenda make.

Try telling that to President-elect Trump, who delights in railing against the “failing” New York Times (although of course he still grants it interviews), or the unholy alliance of Nigel Farage, assorted Tory MPs and the SNP all accusing the BBC of lacking patriotism towards the UK/Brexit/Scotland, delete as appropriate.

None of them, of course, would dream of acting on their oft-stated “principles” by actually refusing to appear on BBC outlets. And, as usual, such attacks only serve to distract from more substantial critiques. Read any of the recent books about the EU referendum, for example, and you’ll see how frustrated the UK Government was with the BBC’s policy of “balance” when it came to reporting even the wildest claims from the “Leave” side of the debate.

And as in coverage of the 2012-14 independence referendum, this often ended up giving the impression that tenuous claims, usually economic, were somehow as empirically robust as those coming from the other side. But having set its own precedent in Scotland, the network BBC clearly felt it couldn’t simply revert to the more editorially robust principle of impartiality – i.e. leaving themselves room to decide which campaigning claims were credible and which were not.

This year, meanwhile, looks likely to bring more of the same difficulties. Within a few weeks the BBC will reach a decision about the “Scottish Six”, rational opposition to which now ranks as treason in certain quarters, and BBC Scotland will find itself between a rock and a hard place: if it goes ahead, Unionists will accuse it of capitulating to Nationalist pressure, and if it does not, Nationalists will claim the Unionist establishment has killed off another Scottish aspiration.

In recent remarks Donalda MacKinnon, BBC Scotland’s new director, left some wriggle room, saying she would only back a Scottish Six were adequate “resources” committed to the made-in-Scotland bulletin. That sounded to me like the ground was being laid for a Third Way, most likely an enhanced Reporting Scotland with more cash, reporters and minutes. It seems London lost interest during a second round of pilots in the autumn; after all, the national and international news has been coming via the Imperial Capital for almost a century, it seemed unlikely they’d give that up without a fight.

Yet by publicly announcing last year that the Scottish Six was under renewed consideration, the BBC created expectations it couldn’t easily meet. In her interview, Ms MacKinnon also acknowledged that some viewers had lost faith in the Beeb during the independence referendum and therefore she saw it as part of her job to put that right.

As if on cue Ronnie Cowan, the SNP MP for Inverclyde, demonstrated what she and the Corporation are up against. “People”, he tweeted without qualification, “lost faith” because the BBC “campaigned against them”. “When the BBC admits that,” he added for good measure, “then they can start to build bridges.”

This, of course, is an accurate summary of what many Nationalists from the former First Minister Alex Salmond to fellow MP (and ex-BBC presenter) John Nicolson appear to believe. Not, you understand, zealots on the fringes of the “National Movement”, but former leaders and Question Time panellists.

But therein lies the point. Some Nationalists, such as Mr Cowan, won’t be happy until BBC Scotland, to borrow his terminology, is literally “campaigning” for independence, running Nicola Sturgeon’s speeches live and unedited and producing ten-part documentaries on the cultural significance of National Collective. Even then they probably wouldn’t be content, for in the paranoid world which sees bias in every edit and hears a slant in every inflection, they’d find something to complain about.

These people don’t want to make the BBC better resourced and more impartial, they want to destroy it. And as I’ve argued before, the widespread proof of this disingenuousness is the elevation of hyper-partisan websites and blogs over professional outlets which actually take care to provide a platform for both pro- and anti-independence voices. Combatting (perceived) bias with stridently partisan – not to mention downright puerile and nasty – rants is a curious strategy.

The same analysis applies to individual journalists. Over the past year I’ve occasionally made mistakes either of fact or interpretation, and doubtless lots of people from the First Minister down think I’m too harsh. But when this has happened I’ve made an effort to fess up, usually on Twitter. My critics, of course, take that as an admission of a mainstream media conspiracy rather than a genuine lapse, for of course keyboard warriors never make mistakes.

Over the next year the media landscape will continue to change, often in welcome ways. Some of the best analytical work during 2016, for example, came from non-journalists: Kevin Hague on economics, Lucy Hunter-Blackburn on higher education and James McEnaney on teaching. Each has specialist knowledge and gets their fare share of abuse, proving that it isn’t just the MSM some Nationalists object to, but anyone who uncovers inconvenient truths – often those deliberately concealed by the Scottish Government.

So while in the United States there is pressure for the media to become the official opposition, here in Scotland some want to refashion it as the propaganda wing of the ongoing campaign for independence. It goes without saying that journalists, newspapers and broadcasters should rigorously avoid becoming either.

But scrutiny and cynicism, applied both to those in power and those doing the reporting, is healthy, necessary and also nothing new. At one point in “The Front Page” the escaped murderer Earl Williams asks his wife Mollie if it’s true what they’ve been saying in the papers, that she planned to marry him on the gallows. “Well, if it’s in the papers, it must be true,” she replies. “They wouldn’t print a lie.”