COMMENTING on the media has one glaring pitfall – it’s too easy to find fault. Last week, I argued on behalf of the new BBC Scotland television channel. This week I want to push optimism a stage further, and be positive about the beast that is clumsily referred to as the “mainstream media”.

I realise there is a risk and I fully expect to be dragged naked on to the public square of social media and ritually humiliated, but here goes – I quite like the Daily Record.

Like many people out there, I grew up in a family that bought the Record with religious faithfulness. I still buy it dutifully, believing that for all its faults, the Daily Record still has Scotland in its soul.

I accept this is not a view that is universally shared but I am tired of living in a culture of wholesale condemnation, reductive generalisations and crude, catch-all terms like the “Unionist press”. Most newspapers – even those that are implacably opposed to Scottish self-governance – can periodically flicker to life with a column, a story or even an entire edition that breaks with the title’s dominant views.

There are many positive things about the press in Scotland and I cannot be convinced that journalism is mostly malign, mischievous or mired in conspiracy.

There are many journalists in Scotland who advocate progressive change on a regular basis – writers who clearly want a new kind of Scotland to triumph. Dani Garavelli in Scotland on Sunday consistently brings progressive insights and popular feminism to its readers; David Pratt in the Herald as well as The National is one of the great international correspondents of our era; and Joanna Blythman is widely respected way beyond these shores as a campaigning food journalist committed to locally sourced products.

These are three independent-minded writers, advocating progress from their unique vantage points, whilst regularly reminding us that the so-called “mainstream media” is not some grand conspiracy worked from behind by evil puppet-masters.

I know that The National is the only committed supporter of independence and so is often portrayed in the spirit of David versus Goliath, the plucky little guy facing the fearsome forces of big media. But I am not convinced we live in such a monotheistic world or that total control of opinion is in any way manageable, even if newspaper owners wanted it to be the case.

Whilst I value the National, and the myriad of energetic online platforms that have erupted into life since 2014, I do not routinely despise and dismiss those with a longer legacy.

There is much that is positive to be found across Scotland’s newspapers. We may even be at a tipping point, where even the most dogged and fundamentalist media owners know that their marketplace is shifting.

Change is a great elixir. The heyday of newspaper dominance has unquestionably passed and the era when the Daily Record was the unrivalled voice of Scotland is in retreat.

In the 1980s, under the alienating years of Thatcherism, the Daily Record sold 750,000 copies, reaching an estimated household readership of over two million. That is an astonishing level of penetration that can never be bettered.

Keep in mind that this was not a time of compromise or cosy consensus either. The Record raged against the deindustrialisation of Scotland and was a powerful force against Tory ideology. Opposition to the Poll Tax and resistance to Trident were often given a fair hearing and the paper was keen to differentiate itself from its English sister paper, the Daily Mirror.

You can wince if you want. I still find value in the Daily Record, and I detect a noticeable thawing of its attitude towards Scottish self-governance, but that is not my main point. In fact, it is almost the opposite of my point.

Last week, the Daily Record profiled a wide range of opinions with strident columns by Mhairi Black eviscerating Ruth Davidson for hypocrisy on the rape clause legislation; Darren ‘Loki’ McGarvey supporting Nicola Sturgeon’s antipathy to a hard Brexit; and a Record political editorial backing the SNP’s pragmatism. The First Minister herself periodically crops up as a guest columnist. This is hardly the stuff of fevered Unionism.

The Monday edition of the Record carried a full page on health-related issues foregrounding our ageing population. There were three related stories: Billy Connolly’s fight to understand Parkinson’s Disease, Barbara Windsor’s struggle with dementia and a news story about Corinne Hutton, a quadruple amputee from Renfrewshire, who recently climbed Kilimanjaro. Corinne was already a Scottish heroine: the first quadruple amputee to climb Ben Nevis.

The story about Connolly’s Parkinson’s Disease will have reached a huge readership, raising awareness of the latest cutting-edge research into the condition. Connolly is about to embark in clinical stem cell trials at Harvard University which is expected to be a major step forward in either curing or controlling the disease. If at least one family in Scotland left the Record’s article better informed, that for me is a valuable public service.

The independence movement may not have the media it deserves but the energy and arguments of recent years have almost certainly nudged the dial – editorial attitudes are slowly changing and we need to endorse that change whenever visible.

I tire of the way journalists working for Unionist-leaning titles are routinely pilloried online. David Clegg, the Record’s political editor, was trolled only last week. The very next day he wrote an editorial which welcomed Nicola Sturgeon’s speech at the SNP conference and supported her “fair-pay” manifesto.

I cannot see the value in hounding decent journalists; it is not only counter-productive, it provides ammunition for those that love cultivating the narrative of the “cybernat” – a term that should have been buried with MySpace and Windows 3.0.

That said, journalistic respect is a two-way street, and that is a lesson that should be learnt by a very visible group of self-satisfied Scottish journalists that seem to take delight in trolling their public.

Condescension is not a pleasant trait, and I hope you agree that one of the most unseemly features of the past few years is the embarrassing sight of well-paid

journalists flocking to twitter in their wee cabals to sneer at the world and indulge in fruitless point scoring.

So my plea is for more subtlety in public discourse. I accept there will be people who bristle reading this column – those that have never forgiven the Daily Record for publishing “The Vow” on the eve of the 2014 independence referendum and those that have boycotted other papers when they parade their resistance to change.

Others will have reservations about the ailing Billy Connolly and wished that he had not demeaned our democracy by dismissing Holyrood as a “pretendy wee parliament”. It was not his finest hour.

But if I am ever asked for my favourite memory of Connolly it won’t be his dated take on modern Scotland or his toe-curling deference to Highland royalty. It will be the pioneering role he played in working-class comedy, the brave choices he made challenging sectarianism in the 1970s. It will be his scurrilous Glaswegian satire on the life and death of Jesus Christ, and his impudent performances on network chat-shows that reached audiences far beyond Scotland.

The landscape of Scotland is more diverse than people frequently claim. We live in exciting times – and you have to park your bike somewhere.

The final book in Stuart Cosgrove’s Soul Trilogy, ‘Harlem 69: the Future of Soul’, is published by Polygon.