Why did good news about Scotland's murder rate spark anger at media?

For Scottish police, health. social work and education officials this was just a routine but welcome sign of ongoing and remarkable international interest in an undisputed, life-saving heart-warming success.

However, for a section of independence supporters it was something quite different: yet another reason, as if one is ever needed, to be angry with journalists.

Why? Because they claimed the story wasn’t being covered, especially on the BBC. “Positive stories such as this (and there are many) are never reported by the anti-SNP state broadcaster ,” said one response on Twitter.

“Shame on you!” another user blasted at Gary Robertson, who presents Radio Scotland’s breakfast news show, citing the WEF video. “To get the real picture, I have to go elsewhere.”

Such claims are plain wrong. Scotland’s decline in violent crime has been one of the biggest stories of the last decade, repeatedly documented and explained both in newspapers, serious and tabloid, and on radio and TV.

Indeed, that is how organisations like the WEF know about the trend. And, of course, such coverage remains easy to find by anyone with a smart phone in their pocket or a laptop on their coffee table.

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There is nothing new or interesting about hostility to the mainstream media, or MSM, to use the abbreviation borrowed from the culture wars of American cyberspace.

There is also nothing new about people in Scotland’s polarised politics - claiming they turn to alternative news sites or even the propaganda wings of hostile governments, because they do not trust local outlets. And it's common for journalists to counter the claims such hyper-partisans make. The BBC's Mr Robertson, for example, rejected the assertion that the fall in murders had been ignored by the Corporation.

But something different happened after the WEF video went viral and social media users started to lash out at journalists: a public body defended reporters on social media.

The Violence Reduction Unit or VRU is the agency, part police, part Scottish Government, which has steered efforts to cut homicides.

First its former director, veteran detective John Carnochan, corrected those claiming the BBC had not covered the story enough. Then his successor, another retired police officer called Niven Rennie, joined in, saying “press coverage of the VRU has been outstanding”.

Finally, the unit’s official Twitter account added: “It’s great to reach new people however we’re grateful for the continuing fair and balanced coverage we’ve received from Scotland’s press for more than a decade.”

There are lots of issues to unpack in this little episode of fairly large numbers of people buying in to a completely false claim that a story has been ignored or underplayed.

How does it come about that people did not hear about a societal change of this scale of a halving of homicides?

What does it say about our politics, that so many people retreat to “media bias” narratives rather than discuss substantive issue of how such a change came about?

And do aggressive anti-journalism attitudes - especially groundless claim - distract from real issues affecting the media in Scotland and beyond?

Academic and journalist Fiona McKay knows how some people can miss even the most widely reported or historic trend.

“Social media platforms use algorithms to tailor news content for us on their sites based on what we have liked or shared with others," she explained. “This means that the news we read is often fed to use through a filter, creating a ‘bubble’ where some stories that don’t match up to specific criteria can be missed if we don’t necessarily seek them out.”

And so people can consume more news - and online readership for traditional sources has soared - but what they see tends to be in a narrower range than somebody flicking through a broadsheet or watching a TV bulletin from beginning to end.

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Complaints about the media missing stories are routine. But they are almost always about things that have been reported. Why? Because even in this age of presidents tweeting, most news still comes, ultimately, from journalists.

The irony? There are plenty of newsworthy developments papers, TV and radio really do miss. But, of course, the angry men and women of the internet do not know about these things because they still largely depend on journalists for their news, whether they are aware of this or not.

The 'news' may have more readers. But it also has fewer reporters. And this, reckons independent journalist Peter Geoghegan, really is contributing to trust issues.

In America, counties where there is no longer a local paper showed some of the highest turn-outs a populist president who routinely refers to journalists as “enemies of the people”. Mr Geoghegan said such "news deserts" were now appearing in the UK.

He said: "We have a media system that is very much dominated by the large cities, such as London and Glasgow. A lot of people’s lived experiences can get missed. That contributes to a lack of trust as people don’t see themselves reflected back at them in the media.

“This a sin of omission. But it drives an idea of an unseeing hand pushing journalists’ pen, say the owners of the newspaper or a political party. "The reality? Reporters just don’t know about something."

Eamonn O’Neill, a journalist and media professor at Napier University, has specialised in investigating miscarriages of justice. Increasingly he is finding his research harder because local court cases are not being covered. So he too is worried about missed stories. “Justice”, he warned, “is being done in the dark.”

But Mr O'Neill warned that social media denials of the very existence of coverage was "corrosive". He said: "Social media can magnify things out of proportion. It is a journalist’s job to restore facts and realities and proportion."

He welcomed the VRU move to correct claims about crime reporting. Yet there is more to the response of the unit than a simple statement of the obvious: that the media cover homicide trends in painful detail.

That is because the VRU did not just reach out to other parts of the public sector to deal with the scourge of violence. It also tried to change the way newspapers spoke about crime and criminals.

Scotland's media did not just report the country's combined effort to cut violent crime, a battle which recent statistics suggest is far from over. It - we - were part of that story.