SOMETIMES you just have to take a flyer. We have had a week of media stramash – STV2 closing down, BBC Scotland pushing back its new channel launch to 2019, consternation by Yes supporters at various editorial statements.

I thought: let’s light a candle rather than curse the darkness. So I sent out a tweet earlier this week which got hundreds of retweets and thousands of engagements.

I wondered whether 100,000 Yes supporters could contribute £5 per month to an “indy media fund”, run by a solid, non-party-political board. What could that be spent on?

The response was mostly enthusiastic and abrim with good ideas. But it was primarily a thought experiment from me (and maybe too unambitious, in terms of numbers).

I wanted to imagine what kind of mainstream media would be made if indy supporters directly supported its production.

I have my own big suggestion at the end. But one of the most interesting things about the Scottish indy movement is that we’ve been constantly prototyping what such an indy mainstream would look like.

I’ll begin with an uncomfortable example (for some). I watched a few back editions of the Alex Salmond Show this week. I’ll admit I’m hard pushed to see the editorial hand of the Kremlin steering anything here.

It’s more a combination of Salmond rifling through his contacts book, lining up whoever says “yes” with any of his centre-left (and Scottish) concerns that week, and then exploding all over them with bonhomie and (usually) good questions.

I do agree with the moral critique – that Salmond’s punditry and presenting on RT is legitimating the propaganda arm of an oppressive and murderous Russian state. Yet for all that, it is a small example of what reasonably-funded Scottish TV editorial might look like after the establishment of a Scottish nation-state.

No, I don’t mean the permanent presence of Alex Salmond on your screens. However, I do mean attention being paid to news stories from Strasbourg, Ireland, Wales and the US, as well as the usual UK agenda.

And elements of Scottish history, anniversaries and culture given some focus, based on a presumption that the audience values such material.

There are more than 40 journalists being hired for the new news operation at the coming BBC Scotland channel. It’s presumed they’ll be partly servicing the much heralded hour-long nightly news show, mixing feeds from a Scottish/UK, European and global perspective.

Or maybe not. One of the casualties of the failure of STV’s second channel will be its attempt at a nightly 30 minutes of news, mixing these perspectives. Despite an excellent journalist-anchor in Halla Mohieddeen, the lack of resources available was all too obvious.

But there’s always been a fundamental flaw in ambitions for a nightly and comprehensive “Scottish lens” on the wider world. Scottish geopolitics at the moment is a fitful, experimental affair – part hard-nosed trade missions, part alliance with NGOs and global causes, part soft-power marketing strategy and nation-branding.

Journalists are right to regard it as partly an example of an indy-majority government acting “as if” independent, in order to show audiences (domestic and international) what a Scottish state acting autonomously in the world would be like.

If those hacks were operating on the “journalist = pissing dog, politician = lamppost” model, then a scepticism about recycling Scottish Government PR might well be expected. But this isn’t just PR. It’s a concerted effort to push the powers of our Parliament towards the horizon of independence – by using and increasing our current devolved powers (which is why consenting to changes in Holyrood’s post-Brexit powers is such a point of principle).

A “politician” seeking to establish a new state is not the same as a “politician” who accepts the primacy and continuity of the state they’re in. The latter is usually trying to hide the truth. The former is usually trying to establish a new truth.

So I accept it’s incredibly difficult for the BBC and other UK state-mandated broadcasters to cover both of these kinds of politics (and politicians) in Scotland. The historical and social pursuit of independence, including occasional voters and regular activists, involves near to half of the current population.

In terms of all media institutions in Scotland (the commercial press included), you could hardly say that this viewpoint, and world-view, is proportionately represented.

Imagine a BBC Scotland that looked wisely and responsibly at the total media landscape in Scotland – perhaps, to use the current lingo, rectifying the “market failure” to represent pro-indy views.

They might well decide that a new nightly news offering would take the Channel 4 News approach, and adapt it for Scottish circumstances.

What do I mean? Channel 4 News, without much ambiguity or hesitation, clearly sees itself as jabbing at the underbelly of the British Establishment (and its global version, if relevant).

The show hardly aligns itself with creaking models of “balance” and “fair representation”, as it goes after Cambridge Analytica, or those responsible for Grenfell or the Windrush scandal. Indeed, I’m sure they think they are rectifying deficiencies elsewhere in the news system.

Is it so unimaginable that a new BBC Scotland hour-long news show could take a strong-devolution, pre-independence position – to actually counterbalance the overwhelmingly UK-centric Scottish media landscape?

A similar shift of gravity in the mainstream media has happened before. Some of us are of an age to remember Gus MacDonald’s STV of the 1980s and 1990s. MacDonald did his best to keep the constitutional pressure cooker hissing away, with shows like Scottish Assembly, Scottish Network, Don’t Look Down and documentaries by George Rosie and others.

One even remembers a BBC Scotland of the same era, where figures with evident indy sympathies – like Lesley Riddoch, Ian and Alex Bell, Dave Batchelor and even myself – were able to broadcast about Scotland, and the world, with equal license.

Shouldn’t the current range of voices on indy-minded social media be thinking, like my devolutionary generation did, that their energy and insight might qualify them for a gig at a new BBC Scotland operation? I would invite them to ring up the Pacific Quay reception and find out how to apply (even for a laugh).

It saddens me that this seems so ludicrous an option these days. But perhaps we need to heed the words of the visionary architect and engineer Buckminster Fuller: “You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.”

We have videographers (Phantom Power, Independence Live, Broadcast Scotland). We have commentary and news workers (CommonSpace, Wings Over Scotland, Newsnet Scotland, Bella Caledonia, The Ferret, not to mention this paper). Perhaps even some refugees from the existing operations. And all this embedded within the kind of active and lively communities – their eyes and ears constantly on Scotland – that any news operation would die for.

Could all, or some, of this capacity bend itself towards producing a live daily newshour, transmitted via web streaming? We have a direct model in the US’s longstanding Democracy Now! show, which carves out a clear left-progressive agenda on American domestic and foreign policy, and mixes interview, opinion and reportage, covering three big items a show. Organisationally, they repay some study.

So: Independence Now!, 7-8pm, Monday-Friday, on a device near you? No Russki cash – just yours. Who’s up for it?