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By Harry Browne. During the election campaign the mainstream media confirmed their bias against the real left and Sinn Féin   From the point of view of the media, one of February’s biggest stories almost got lost in the election chaos. On Friday, February 19th, one week before polling day, the newspaper circulation figures for the second half of last year were published. In one sense, the story was a bit of a non-story: newspapers continue to sell fewer and fewer copies – the roughly 40 per cent collapse of sales that we’ve seen over the last decade or so was certainly accelerated by Ireland’s economic implosion; but whatever recovery somebody out there is enjoying, it’s not bringing newspapers back into our lives – they were down a few more per cent. That should be the starting point of any discussion about how newspapers covered the general election. This may indeed have been, as several commentators such as Oliver Callan have suggested, the most sensationalist, the most biased, the most trivial newspaper coverage of an election in the history of the State. Maybe. Whatever. There can be little doubt, though, that it was the most irrelevant. You can shout all you like about how much the journalism of the Irish daily press gets read online. “We’ve got more readers than ever (now if we could only get them to pay)” is a common refrain in the shrunken corridors of the press. The fact is that most of those readers are no longer committed to getting their news and views from any given paper, but rather they dip in and out, often critically. I suspect that on the day those circulation figures were published, more people saw a social-media post full of mockery, outrage or bemusement at the Irish Independent’s latest front-page denunciation of Sinn Fein than actually paid for a physical copy of that page. Since I merely saw an image on my phone, I still have no idea what Gerry Adams was planning to do with my pension. Is there a connection between the press’s hysteria this time around and the steady withering away of its relevance? I suspect as much. Like troubled children, the less attention we pay them, the louder they scream. Election seasons have always seen journalists at their most pompous and self-important: in the better class of newspaper the consequence is an obsessive-compulsive commitment to ‘fairness’. I can remember, back in the 1990s, a team in the Irish Times newsroom dedicated to measuring (literally, like with rulers) the coverage given to each party in a general election, with various formulae to adjust for the unfortunate fact that all column inches are not created equal. Other papers, of course, take a different approach. If there’s one thing we can say for certain about, say, the Indo’s notorious treatment of this election, it’s that they got us to notice how important they are. Once you understand the desperation of the press’s attention-seeking in its much-reduced state of health, it’s easier to understand why, for example, the Regency Hotel shooting managed to displace the election from page-ones for most of a week. If there’s one thing that the press does even more self-importantly than elections, it’s crime. This has little to do with the wonderful, generous resources gifted by Denis O’Brien and Rupert Murdoch to the investigation of wrong-doing and a lot to do with the impotence of convicted criminals to use the defamation laws to protect themselves. (No reputation to protect, no case, scumbag.) The hotel shootings showed definitively that crime journalism in Ireland is RELEVANT – more so even than the gardaí, who were absent while the crime-hacks and -snappers were very much on the scene. And when it came time to segue from “Hey, remember us! We’re newspapers! We cover crime!” to “Hey… elections!”, there was the lovely little link of Sinn Féin’s position on the Special Criminal Court. It seemed remarkably difficult to get anyone to recall a principled, non-Republican reason to oppose no-jury trials. So, even short of a major definitive research project, we can pretty safely say, that compared to times past, (1) newspapers are less relevant and (2) people are more inclined to see through media bias. (Check out Dr Rory Hearne’s research with water protesters to confirm the latter point.) However, this is not the same as saying (1) the media are irrelevant and (2) media bias doesn’t matter. When RTÉ – which unlike newspapers has a statutory obligation to be fair, to which it pays often hilarious lip-service – allowed crime-hack Paul Williams on the Late Late Show to use the issue of the Special Criminal Court to denounce Sinn Féin and its voters, on the very same day that he and we learned of his shrinking circulation relevance, it was not only a disgrace, it was most probably consequential for the election outcome. With the best will in the world – and even a half-decent will is a rarity – Sinn Féin and its voters remain another country for the vast majority of the established professionals in the Irish media. On his last NewsTalk broadcast before the election moratorium, George Hook recalled covering Mary-Lou McDonald on a canvas in Cabra: he scraped the phrase “working-claaaass peeeople” over his tonsils as if he were describing a particularly dangerous safari. When the diverse regional accents of the various returning officers are a source of novelty and excitement on election-count days, you know the media have got a problem of uniformity. John Bowman turned up on RTE radio before the election with what academic Dr Conor McCabe described aptly as “the most Irish middle-class statement ever”. Bowman said: “I caught the election bug back in school when I was on the number 10 bus from Ballsbridge to Belvedere College, and the bus would pass by a sign outside the offices of the Irish Times…”. The problem is not Bowman personally, of course, but the fact that his background remains highly