THE NEWS that the BBC is scaling back on its already cigarette-paper thin coverage of the Edinburgh festivals, the world's biggest live arts event, chimes with the current overall level of coverage of Scotland and all things Scottish by the British Broadcasting Corporation. That is, to look at the BBC news this week you would think that Scotland doesn't exist. Or perhaps it's right next to the Falkland Islands on the priority list.

We in Scotland are already familiar with the BBC's squinty weather maps which, by virtue of their tilted angle, show us every cove and bay on the south coast of England yet leave us unable to distinguish the weather between Glasgow and Dundee. But now UK news programmes run start-to-finish skewed news coverage of SATS results (England), council strikes (England, Wales and Northern Ireland), a reduction in crime figures (England and Wales) while never reporting the Scottish equivalent.

It could be chagrin arising from the recent BBC Trust's optimistically entitled "impartiality report" which found, ahem, a strong partiality to an anti-Scottish bias. On the other hand, it could be the low level of commissioning of Scottish programmes - said to be as little as 3% of overall output. Perhaps such lack of Scottish programming has resulted in an "off the screen, out of mind" mentality from BBC executives?

Then of course there's the Scottish Broadcasting Commission report due soon. Although led by former BBC man Blair Jenkins, it could be causing anxiety at the BBC HQ. Maybe by being so weakened in broadcasting output terms, Scotland carries no clout. Expecting they may be evicted from the Big Brother house come independence, the BBC may have already flitted.

One thing is for sure, the political landscape has become more pluralistic since devolution. Perhaps this bias is all accidentally-on-purpose and researchers, producers and editors think "devolution has made it all too tricky to remember what's going on in Scotland It's too much detail which ruins the pacing of the news story and who cares what's going on up there anyway?"

The "male gaze" was used to describe all those shoot-em-up car chase 80s Hollywood films in which the film's producers automatically assumed the viewer was a man. The BBC has a "London gaze". It assumes its audience resides only in the south-east.

So maybe the Edinburgh festivals coverage is just the hapless bystander of the creeping erasure of Scotland from the BBC. That would be a pity, because six years ago the corporation was boasting of its most comprehensive coverage of the festivals ever.

It's not about cash. The BBC is sending an army of producers and presenters to the Olympics in Beijing at the licence fee payers' expense. More than 150 at last count. Last weekend saw wall-to-wall coverage of T in the Park on the BBC. If they can cover that why not do the same with the Edinburgh festivals?

I prefer any of these options to the last possible reason why coverage of Scotland by the BBC is so Lilliputian, that reason being a cynical political instrument to reduce national identity and its political correlation, nationalism. In which case, the last time I saw state-media bias like this I was standing in Red Square reading Pravda.

Scottish licence fee payers should get a discount on account of the lack of accuracy, relevancy and the attempts to subvert the will of the people. As it stands, we're being short-changed.