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    Marketing in politics – a route to fascism

    Communication techniques in politics (marketing and advertising) are becoming increasingly targeted. Online political marketing is now increasingly tailored for individual voters based on their political preferences, ideals, and values, fears even. So far, so relatively mundane. That is until, inevitably, someone comes along and finds out a way to manipulate all the mass data available […]

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    Paying for Tubs, Miriam etc.

    The idea for a television licence decoupled from ownership of a television, proposed by Fine Gael as long ago as the 2011 election campaign as a “content tax” or “public broadcasting charge to apply to all households and applicable businesses, regardless of the device they use to access content” has undergone several iterations since, but […]

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    No fat cheque for factcheck

    In 2015, I moved to New York City from Dublin and passed much of the year paying maniacal attention to American news media. I fixated on a wide range of output, people, processes, and interaction between journalists. One difference was more immediately apparent to me than others. The arc bending towards justice as facilitated by […]

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    Naming and faming not naming and shaming

    (2010) The king of Irish investigative journalists, Paul Williams, will join forces with the Irish News of The World on March 10 [2010] as its crime editor.  The clamorous controversy about his departure from the Sunday World is indicative of how he has become the indisputable media godfather of crime reporting.  But  does “the journalist […]

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    Irish Times struggles with non-Catholic abuse

    In 2001 Irish Times reporter Carol Coulter wrote a short article outlining allegations of abuse affecting Smyly’s Church of Ireland Children’s Home. The report referred to preparation of a report by the health board. What the report said and indeed whether it was written were never reported. The paper did not investigate further. On 16 […]

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