WE all know that newspapers can be noisy and attention-seeking. As circulations decline, it seems that the noise levels have increased – some editors clearly think that those that shriek loudest will sell the most copies.

On the contrary, sometimes quiet, understated and reflective journalism makes the most lasting impact. Last week, you could barely hear yourself think for the noise that was generated by football and its seemingly intractable problems. If ever there was a case of heat failing to shed light, it is Scottish football coverage in the midst of a so-called crisis.

Last week, I read page after page of doom-mongering. In the midst of the screeching, the piece that made the lasting impact was tucked away on the inside back pages of The Times. It was not only understated – it was nigh on invisible.

The article, which had no byline, told the story of the former Hibernian, Rangers and Dunfermline player Dean Shiels, who has returned home to Northern Ireland and looks back on his life in Scotland with a sense of profound disappointment. Shiels injured an eye as a result of a childhood accident when he was eight, and in 2006 had an operation to remove the damaged eye. It is to his immense credit that he managed to overcome his disability and succeeded in a highly competitive and serendipitous profession.

During a match last year, Shiels was abused by Falkirk fans while playing for Dunfermline. The fans threw false plastic eyeballs at him, while two Falkirk players were accused of having goaded Shiels about his disability on the field of play. Although it is an incident now largely forgotten, it must rank as one of the cruellest moments in Scottish football.

Last week, Shiels, now at Coleraine, told The Times that he has no plans ever to return to Scotland. This was in marked contrast to what he told reporters at the time, when he said he had fond memories of his time in Scotland. Shamefully, I suspect he is now saying what he really thinks.

Retelling this story is more than apposite after a week when the safety of players has come under renewed scrutiny. The Hibernian fan who confronted James Tavernier of Rangers on the touchline at Easter Road did neither himself nor his club any favours. It was a televised match, a high-profile game and was clearly an unpleasant moment for the player, and condemnation rightly followed.

Fraser Wishart of the Scottish Professional Footballers’ Association (SPFA) made the important point that footballers should not be put at risk at their place of work. Paradoxically, just as he was making the point, a Birmingham City fan managed to evade stewards and attack the Aston Villa captain Jack Grealish from behind, landing a swinging punch on the side of the player’s head.

It was a savage moment, worse than anything we have seen in Scotland of late. The Birmingham fan was immediately arrested and given a 14-week jail sentence. It later transpired that he was a bar-worker from Rubery in Birmingham. He was not drunk and was a married man with a child.

It is a bitter irony, entirely lost in the furore that followed, that he had disgraced his club but also embarrassed the night-time industry where he works periodically as a bar-worker.

That industry is an important part of our economy and we have increasingly strict expectations of bar staff and door stewards. Although it was barely relevant to the on-field disgrace, bar-staff are much more likely to be attacked at work than footballers. So too are public-health workers, mental health carers, transport staff, police officers and prison wardens.

In showing concern for the safety of professional footballers, we should not exaggerate the danger they work under. Incidents of fans attacking players are thankfully rare.

Over the weekend games in Scotland, including the Highland and Lowland leagues, more than 125,000 people attended football, and there was only one notable arrest. It was highly visible – but it was also an exception, not the rule.

Television’s presence at high-profile football matches is now an essential part of the economy of the game but brings with it a capacity to exaggerate and over-dramatise what are isolated incidents.

The cameras catch the action, the studio panel pour over it and the management of the football clubs, in this case Hibs, are generally on hand to add their views. Television is a past master at casting dramas too, and it is fairly clear what role the executive of football clubs are expected to play – the wielder of the sword of Damocles.

Leeann Dempster, the CEO of Hibernian, reacted promptly, promising the most draconian actions. She confirmed closing one of the stands at Easter Road was not off the table, thereby punishing thousands of innocent season ticket-holders, who are, incidentally, her best customers. More often than not, over-reaction is what is demanded in the circumstances, and it inevitably leads to unworkable solutions, knee-jerk reactions which are rarely tempered with quiet reflection.

Football’s rush to judgement is unhelpful and whatever the reasons, it has a woefully poor track-record at weeding out the very small number of people who actually cause trouble at matches.

Of all the post-match comments that Leeann Dempster made, by far the most relevant were her comments on personal responsibility. “There is a big debate, a healthy debate going on in the Scottish game. But I’m going to bring it back to personal responsibility,” she said.

“Who thought it was okay to come in here with a glass bottle and throw it? Who thinks it’s alright to jump over an advertising hoarding? Ninety-nine-point-nine per cent of the people in here don’t think it’s OK and we ought to remember not to tarnish these guys as well.”

This, for me, is the crux of the matter, but it’s often lost in the noise. Newspaper headlines that scream out words like cretin, moron and nutter help even less. They are noise, not erudition, and our media by hyping bad behaviour can often be a part of the problem.

Scottish society is changing and in most respects it’s changing for the better. The vast majority of football fans don’t think that invading the pitch, threatening players or chanting ancient sectarian insults is OK. They think the exact opposite. We are at a tipping point in football, much like the drink-driving culture of bygone years, where majority attitudes are changing for the good. It is not OK, and most people get that.

This was the underlying argument behind Professor Tom Devine’s recent pronouncement that sectarianism, far from being the scourge some imagine, is actually receding in Scottish life.

Of course, pockets of sectarian chanting still persist at football matches, and yes there are residual characters who cling to the dying rituals of the ancient regime, but Devine’s point is that the kind of institutional sectarianism that impeded Irish Catholic immigrants coming into Scotland in the late 19th century is dying. There is no longer structural discrimination in housing, in the job market or in the signing policies of our clubs. They have withered on the vine.

Football has changed. The brake club riots of the 1920s are ancient history, the massed terracing battles of the 1970s are long gone and the casual culture that brought planned confrontations to city centres in the 1980s has faded.

We now have the ultras inside grounds, but mainly orchestrating chants with the occasional recourse to pyrotechnics. Going to games is far safer than it’s ever been. The last two weeks do not change the overwhelming sense that progress has been made.