SOMETIMES you get all nostalgic for the days when tabloid reporters raked through bins looking for dirt on the people they wanted to smear. At least that entailed a modicum of effort and a bit of commitment. However in these days of social media the tabloid media can indulge its grubby muck-raking nature without much bother or effort at all. All it needs to do is trawl through social media until it finds some immature person making an outrageous comment. It can then present that comment as an example of the behaviour of an entire group of people, no matter how unrepresentative the remark is, and invite us all to be suitably disgusted and appalled. It’s the guilt by association fallacy, and it’s standard practice in the British media.

The sad death of David Bowie was, for certain sections of the Unionist press, nothing more than an opportunity to smear independence supporters. Even before his body had gone cold in a morgue in New York, while his family were still crying and had still not even begun to process the reality of his loss, a couple of tabloid newspapers had their reporters on social media looking through the hundreds of thousands of responses for critical comments made by “cybernats”.

Well, I say reporters: collating comments made on Facebook by teenagers isn’t exactly cutting-edge investigative journalism. If you go searching amongst the immature for immature comments, it’s not exactly difficult to find them. Within a couple of hours of the news of Bowie’s death breaking, some Unionist tabloids had published stories condemning “cybernat abuse”. And naturally they found what they’d set out to look for.

Bowie’s half-hearted intervention by proxy in the independence referendum was more significant to an insignificant number of people than his artistic and musical legacy. The moral of this story being that if you go searching for something to be offended by, you’ll always find it if you cast your net wide enough. On social media you can cast your net very wide indeed and the death of a figure with the stature of Bowie provoked an outpouring of responses.

No matter what the topic, no matter who the individual, someone somewhere will have said something childish and nasty, and when there are so many comments, by the simple law of averages there are going to be a few that are outrageously cruel. What’s perhaps more surprising is that the comments which were initially reported were actually rather mild, and one at least originated from a well known Unionist – although he was of course presented as a “cybernat”.

The point of the media exercise was to monster supporters of Scottish independence and to portray us all as immature and lacking in empathy or compassion. The existence of a handful of asinine remarks by a small number of people is presented in the press as a characteristic of the 45% of the Scottish population who voted in favour of independence. It’s a crude and transparent attempt to warn off those who had voted No from changing their minds about independence, and to change the minds of those who had voted Yes. Just look at the kind of people you’ll be associating yourself with, is the subtext of the articles in the tabloids. It was a crude and tasteless attempt to use the death of a much-loved singer as a means of getting one over the political opponents of Unionist newspapers.

WHAT actually happens is that most people are adult enough to distinguish between the behaviour and comments of a tiny minority and a political movement which enjoys the support of half the Scottish population. They’re also adult enough to recognise when a publication is abusing the death of a famous individual in an attempt to score a cheap political point. The stories in the media are counterproductive.

They don’t encourage people to disassociate themselves from a particular political point of view at all, because people are mature enough to recognise the difference between childish and cruel comments on Facebook and a mature consideration of the constitutional future of Scotland. What this kind of story does encourage however is people disassociating themselves from the newspapers that print them. There’s a law of diminishing returns with this kind of reporting. It should be clear to even the most obtuse tabloid editor by now, as they look at their declining sales figures, that the tactic is no longer working. Yet rather than change their strategy, they just try the same old tricks, only louder and more insistent and more pathetically transparent. It tries to tell us that the opinions of a teenager in Dundee about a musician he has never heard of are somehow significant and meaningful. But all it is significant of is the loss of trust in what was once a respected publication.

We’re now at the point where the most credible story in your average Unionist tabloid is the horoscope. When a newspaper is reduced to reproducing the exchanges of teenagers on Facebook as some sort of meaningful news story, it has lost all right to call itself a newspaper. The only difference between a kid’s comic and a British tabloid newspaper is that the comic is funny on purpose. This is why SNPbad became a thing.

As soon as I heard the sad news about Bowie’s death I wondered how long it would take for a Unionist newspaper to use it to create an SNPbad story. It didn’t even take until lunchtime. Then the same papers complain that no one is listening to them any more. It’s become a predictable ritual. Some event occurs, and within an hour or two the Unionist tabloids have reporters scouring social media for comments which can be used to depict supporters of Scottish independence as lacking the attributes of proper human beings and how this is shameful for the SNP. The one great certainty of social media is that someone, somewhere, has said something outrageous, foul, and worthy of condemnation. What our newspapers seem to have forgotten is that if you go snorkelling in sewage and then triumphantly surface with a jobby in your net, it’s you who smells bad, and it’s you who people will want to avoid.

People are avoiding the tabloid press in ever-increasing numbers. David Bowie’s music will live forever. You can’t say the same for Britain’s rabid tabloid press – its days are numbered.