Media

And the EU is facilitating its quest to get your bank information

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 online so they malignly influence prospective voters’ opinions on a grand scale. A kind of mass, digital Orwellianism, to use a well worn cliché. For some years now masses of consumer and behavioural data, from open sources such as social media sites, have been collected and collated by large communication companies to develop psychographic profiles. Polish psychologist Michal Kosinski has pioneered a psychological technique based on people’s Facebook activity, what they like and so on. Kosinski has devised a personality test along the lines of what has become known in psychometrics as the Big Five test or OCEAN: Openness to new experiences and readiness to non-conventional ideas; Conscientiousness, organisational attentiveness and attention to detail; Extraversion, how socially assertive you are; Agreeableness, relating to characteristics such as kindness, compassion and willingness to co-operate; and Neuroticism, dealing with stress and anxiety. Typical questions are answered by ticking three choices: accurate, inaccurate and neutral, Options you can identify with include: I have frequent mood swings, I respect others, I enjoy hearing new ideas, and I believe in the importance of art, and so on. Although the answers are of course subjective it is claimed that from this information a reasonably accurate picture can be built that tells us about individuals’ personality traits – whether they are driven predominantly by fear or curiosity for instance. Such tests are obviously open to our own cloudy, subjective and distorting biases – both positive and negative. Nevertheless it is claimed that when the data are cleaned up an accurate and potentially predictive picture emerges of a person’s political leanings. After this a type of sentiment analysis (the identification and extraction of subjective information from text, also known as opinion mining) is used to compile a database profile of millions of voters’ preferences. Three technologies are used: behavioural science (behavioural communications), data analytics and addressable ad technology. Deployed together they microtarget both consumers and citizens voting in elections. The potential abuse of such technology is evidently disquieting. For a democracy to function properly citizens need access to as much information as possible, so they can make informed decisions. They can’t make informed decisions if the information that they are fed is micro-tailored to their ill-informed predispositions. Worse, it is unlikely that expressed preferences will be subtle enough to register that voters’ actually care about others’ preferences too. That votes can and should be cast for a vision of society not just for the voter’s material furtherance. In particular that that vision should embrace the rights of others, of minorities, of the vulnerable, even of the despised. Of course conclusions drawn from big data may not be as precise as many companies would like us to believe. Statistical analysis is based on probabilities and doesn’t always accurately predict voting preferences. Moreover future actions do not always follow from past behaviours and present attitudes. And the methodology behind the science isn’t completely clear. Yet in a sense this isn’t the point. Paralleling the history of democracy, there have been concerted and often successful attempts to influence and control public opinion to suit the ends of elite political and economic groups. Edward Bernays, the father of the modern public relations industry and a nephew of Sigmund Freud, clearly understood this as long ago as the early 20th century. In ‘Propaganda’ (1928), Bernays argued that: “The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country. …We are governed, our minds are molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of. This is a logical result of the way in which our democratic society is organized”. The point is that microtargeting people based on their psychological profile only has to work on the margins for it to be effective – a targeted group in a tight constituency say: low-hanging fruit. The medium is not the message here: messages driven by microtargetting will tend to particular content. Microtargeting is well adapted, indeed conducive, to the technocratic ethos of neoliberalism: identify, measure, control. In this brave new world the only standard of value becomes market utility. In the US millions of people have been fed on a diet of targeted propaganda and blatant misinformation by Fox News for years; many of those same people came out to vote in their droves for Trump. The agenda is Rupert Murdoch’s. In our economically stagnating world, we are seeing populations lurch toward radical far-right ideologies and autocratic leaders. So what happens if an unscrupulous demagogue decides to weaponise this type of technology in the future? The misuse and abuse of the social sciences, in particular psychology, for propagandistic ends has happened before, notably with Nazism and Goebbels. We must only read Hannah Arendt and Primo Levi to know where it ends. Arendt warned us in the wake of WWII, after the persecution and industrial destruction of both European Jewry and the Roma and Sinti, of what happens to seemingly ordinary people when we are exposed to mass political manipulation for extreme causes and ideologies, and the very real and inevitable violence that follows. ‘We’ or ‘they’, depending on how you see it, become as Arendt put it as a result of this exposure quite literally ‘thoughtless’ in the face of injustice and oppression. That is we become incapable or unwilling to think for ourselves, and to understand the world from the point of view of the other-particularly if we have been primed to see the ‘other’ as either socially, racially, culturally or economically less

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 journalism seemed to be shorter in the US. Resignations precipitated by good and revelatory work actually happened, normally promptly, and acknowledgment of fault or duplicity tended to be forthcoming and formal from both the public and private sectors. An express, media-wide obsession with validity and accuracy was new to me. The opaque crosstalk and untruths of the 2016 presidential race added immensely to the regular burden on US reporters, editors, and fact-checkers, who collectively upped their game in response. Fact-checker was not a designation I had encountered at home. Did it exist there? Does it exist in a different guise? It exists, as it happens, in the form of an Irish reporter with TheJournal.ie, Dan Mac Guill. Mac Guill has been running FactCheck, a dedicated fact-checking vertical at the website, since February 2016. In the last six months, as mounting anxiety with regard to truth and veracity addles the world at large, Mac Guill’s work in Ireland has come into sharper focus. Not before time. The 2016 general election brought about the introduction of The Journal’s fact-checking service, for reasons broadly similar to those outlined above. It was the idea of website editor Susan Daly. Daly said that, faced with “weeks of campaign hyperbole, PR stunts and political fisticuffs”, there was a need decisively, under one banner, to interrogate the integrity of what was being declared. “From the perspective of the newsroom, it was invigorating to set the agenda, rather than have to slavishly follow the campaign trail alone, reacting to every latest ‘he said/she said’ sideshow”, Daly said. Election promises were obvious fodder for FactCheck, but the potential for debunking other claims made in radio debates, television appearances, and election literature rapidly became clear. Mac Guill and his colleagues admired prominent overseas fact-checking operations like Politfact, Factcheck.org, and the work of Libération and the ‘Les Décodeurs’ section at at Le Monde, which, together, provided a guiding precedent. Heartened by the reader response to his contribution during the campaign, Mac Guill persisted with the mission, and Daly made a decision to give the project a permanent footing. The organisation has since become party to the International Fact-Checking Network’s Code of Principles. Mac Guill, who started at The Journal in 2014, has been working remotely since the beginning of 2015. He is exceptionally remote — based outside Washington DC — but, in step with staffers of most modern newsrooms, spends compensatory amounts of time in conversation with his colleagues online. He publishes between two and three stories through Factcheck each week. In a year, more than 160 claims were fact-checked by the service, covering everything from reported side effects of the HPV vaccine, to the size of the gender pay-gap, to deaths allegedly caused by air pollution, to whether Trump can be legally banned from Ireland, to the quantity of detox beds in the country, to whether “Irish slaves” built the White House. Mac Guill busies himself with high-profile claims made in established settings. Readers’ tips account for more than a third of claims checked. The 6.1 News and Tonight with Vincent Browne also tend to be bountiful sources. A preponderance of Mac Guill’s day is spent consuming Irish news, but regional reporting can evade him, and readers have gamely picked up that slack. What else qualifies? There are no hard and fast rules to follow, but a quibble with a friend in a pub isn’t going to be looked into, Mac Guill said, and he doesn’t really have the time to take on rumours. In recent months, Mac Guill has noticed a marked increase in interest in the project. Increased preoccupation with ideas like “fake news”, “alternative facts”, and “post-truth”, issuing forth from the Trump administration, predominantly, has led to greater scrutiny of news media everywhere. “Interest in Ireland is intensifying”, he said, “even if consumers of news aren’t coming into contact with the emergence of that [fake news] specifically”. Fake news, rather than being a useful label, has been abused to the point of obsolescence, according to Mac Guill, who works off the following definition: “provocation of disgust and biases with online virality as an aim, and advertising revenue as a final goal”. And it is true that, in Ireland, nothing falls squarely into the category of the now-infamous Denver Post, or other fictional outlets that publish made-up stories, or Facebook accounts propagating seductive or inflammatory myths. Were there, they might not manage the same mileage in Ireland, in Mac Guill’s view. He has said he believes Irish consumers of news to be “highly informed, scrupulous, skeptical, and keen”. On an overcast day in October of last year, Minister for Social Protection, Leo Varadkar, waited until the Ceann Comhairle had quietened a number of rowdy opponents in the Dáíl chamber before continuing. “What I’ve said is that jobseeker’s [payment] rates for young people in Northern Ireland are much lower than they are in the Republic of Ireland”, said Varadkar, keeping his customary cool. “Deputy Brady has said that’s untrue. I would welcome someone to do a fact check on that — perhaps on TheJournal.ie — and we’ll see how that comes out”. While unusual, particularly because the request pertained to his own assertion, it is something of a testament to Mac Guill’s public service that it took just eight months for FactCheck to be deemed serious and credible enough by a government minister to raise during a parliamentary debate. Of course, Varadkar’s claim was true. I asked Mac Guill whether the extension of the remit to cover other indiscretions —such as bias, error, or plagiarism —  would be a logical progression, or was tempting to him in any way. Cordially and professionally, he

With trust in Irish media dropping to an all-time low of 29 percent, reputation is an asset, to be tended to as advertising declines.

(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 of his generation”, as his friend Joe Duffy has branded him, really believe that his so-called courageous crime reporting is constructive in preventing crime in Ireland?  Between May and September of 2009, I investigated how Williams’ subjects – young Irish males convicted of violent criminal offences – interpret his sensational crime reports.  I conducted research (comprising questionnaires and one-to-one interviews) with a total of thirty convicted young offenders aged between 16 and 21 years old, all of whom are currently serving prison sentences in a well-known young offenders’ institution.  While much of what they say may be considered misapprehension, the misapprehensions are nonetheless real and dangerous.  I found that these young offenders are being inspired by what they see as glorification within Paul Williams’ reporting, and consider themselves consequently, to be the ‘criminal masterminds’ of their generation. The prison co-ordinator told me, “Most of the lads in here come from low socio-economic backgrounds:it is not an excuse but it is a fact.  Their prison sentences range from a couple of months up to couple of years, depending on the severity of the crime committed.” He added, “The majority of the lads will re-offend and probably end up in Mountjoy prison several times throughout their lifetimes.  Very few go on the straight after they leave here”. Whilst ‘right thinking’ members of society may interpret Williams’ sensational crime writing as ‘naming and shaming’ for the greater good, this research revealed that the criminal mind identifies this weekly media exposure as more of a case of ‘naming and faming’.  The prison coordinator also told me that: “There is a huge appetite for Paul Williams’ crime writing amongst the prisoners.  All the politicians and journalists seem eager to crack down heavy on the act of crime but few are interested in tackling the root causes…  Most of the lads are streetwise but as you can see for yourself it is a misconception to think these lads are ‘criminal masterminds’”. The young offenders highlighted the ways in which Paul Williams glorifies gangland criminal, “You know you are up there with the best if Paul Williams calls you a ‘crime boss’ or gives you a nickname, that makes people more afraid of you.  That can’t be a bad thing in the business of crime.  He makes us out to be like the mafia godfathers – most lads love it”.  They revealed how Williams’ crime-writing acts, albeit unintentionally, as a source of encouragement towards criminality.  “When Williams writes about guns, robberies and shootings, it’s exciting.  Everyone wants a piece of the action.  His books don’t turn me off crime they make me want to be part of it.  Why would I want to go on the straight?  It’s boring in comparison”. Some of the young men serving time noted how Williams’ work risked being mistaken for promoting the ‘achievements’ of their criminal predecessors.  “Gerry Hutch is a celebrity now thanks to Williams.  All Gerry’s achievements are glorified, like getting away with the two biggest robberies ever in Irish history”.  Gerry Hutch is often known by his nickname of ‘The Monk’ he was the subject of investigation in the popular factual television series Dirty Money in which Paul Williams describes him as the “quintessential criminal mastermind”.  According to the young offenders who took part in this research Paul Williams’ crime writing serves to educate them about criminal activity.  “If prison is a villain’s university like Williams says on the [Dirty Money] DVD then it is his books that learns us the tricks of the trade”.  Another young man serving a prison sentence tells me, “To be honest Paul Williams’s books are the first proper books I have ever read in my whole life”. The most startling issue raised by the young offenders was the way in which – presumably unwittingly – Paul Williams risks his writing being used as a reliable source for their next gangland hit.  “He is actually adding fuel to all the gun crime because the boys get paranoid over his stories and then they start shooting each other”.  Other convicted criminals revealed their disgust at what they see as the misrepresentation of criminality portrayed by Paul Williams’ sensationalist reportage.  “If he cared about stopping crime he would write about how shit it feels to be locked up.  Crime should be made out to be a crap life because that’s what it is –Williams makes it out to be glamorous to everyone, but it’s not like that when you’re counting your days inside here, or looking over your shoulder when you’re on the outside.  Why doesn’t he write about that? Does he honestly think we want to be killing each other? It’s stupid”.  Another young man unhappy with Williams’ interpretation of the world of violent crime says, “I was brought up around all this shit so like it’s just normal to me.  Williams just makes people more afraid of lads like me, which will make it harder for me to go on the straight when I get out of here”. At least – according to some of those that contributed to the research – despite one hoax attempt on his life, Paul Williams is not in danger from gangland criminals.  “He wants people to think he is in danger – that is part of his act.  He will not get shot because even though we don’t like admitting it, he’s doing us a fuckin’ favour”.  The young offenders highlighted how Paul Williams indirectly advertised the Viper’s debt collection business.  Martin ‘The Viper’ Foley is one of the criminals frequently featured in Williams’column.  ‘The Viper’ has approximately 43 convictions and there have been several alleged attempts on his life including being shot on five

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 January 2003 Coulter commented on: “…the stereotypical treatment of our longest-standing minority, the Protestant community, which has been presented as a homogenous group whose minority status somehow puts it beyond any criticism or analytical discussion”. Coulter, who was from a Protestant small-farming background in the west of Ireland, is now Director of the Child Care Law Reporting Project and Adjunct Professor in the School of Law, NUI Galway. She further observed: “In college I was puzzled, and sometimes irritated, by the distorted and extraordinarily benign view my Catholic friends had of the Protestant community in Ireland… [It did] not accommodate differences in historical origin, geography or class. It glosse[d] over the undeniably unpleasant aspects of this history, like the disproportionately powerful grip a section of the Protestant community held, up into the 1960s, on swathes of the Irish economy, and the religious bigotry which surfaced from time to time. Nor d[id] it accommodate the reality of the economically underprivileged in the community”. Coulter noted of a neighbour’s child sent to a Dublin orphanage, due to her mother being unable to manage financially on a small farm after her husband’s death: “… this girl was now the beneficiary of Protestant ‘charity’, and would be trapped in this exclusive environment at the lowest level of its rigid hierarchy, destined to work at the bottom of the service industry, often run by prosperous members of the same religion”. In the course of researching the untold story of marginalised southern Protestants, I met ‘John’, another victim of this process. He was the institutionalised son of a Protestant unmarried mother. After birth in 1946 in the Church of Ireland Magdalen Home, its associated Nursery Rescue Society farmed him out, literally. John became a free agricultural labourer from the age of five, offered to families masquerading as foster parents, who treated him appallingly. For example, Christmas Day typically consisted of eating scraps separately from his ‘family’, and receipt of a colouring book and crayons as a ‘present’. Approximately six other similar children he knew during the 1950s and 1960s descended into a life of poverty, depression, alcohol and drug misuse. Deeply affected and profoundly depressed by physical and emotional knocks that kept on coming (discovering at age 58 a separated twin sister, adopted in Northern Ireland), only he survived to tell the tale. John’s is one of many such stories, largely hidden. As Coulter noted also in her 2003 piece: “While the backgrounds and situations of the [Roman Catholic] children in […] industrial schools received widespread public discussion, no one thought to inquire about the children in Protestant orphanages. Where did these children come from? Why were they there? If these children did have living family members, why were they in institutions? None of these questions were asked, as if they fell outside the known boundaries of public discourse about Catholic and non-Catholic, rich and poor, privileged and marginalised, into which the other discussion of the children’s institutions fell”. These were, assuredly, important questions, contributed on the basis of personal and professional experience, in a newspaper that was a product of the community about which Coulter wrote. Her reference to “prosperous members of the same religion” could encapsulate the work of 1959-74 Irish Times Chairman Ralph Walker. He was involved in the regulation of unmarried mothers and their abandoned children in the Protestant evangelical Bethany Home, through his legal firm, Hayes and Sons. In addition, his father sat on Bethany’s Managing Committee, while his aunt ran it. The Irish Times The Irish Times is considered one of the more open and accessible newspapers. It was originally the newspaper of business interests within a relatively privileged Protestant and mainly pro-British unionist minority, the remnant of a colonial ruling elite. After partition came into effect in 1922, the numerically declining Protestant population adapted to life in an overwhelmingly Roman Catholic and Irish nationalist 26-County state. However, residual privileges remained intact, largely preserved by protectionist economic policies. Despite dire predictions, Roman Catholics generally had no interest in doing to Protestants what had been done, historically, to them, and continued to tolerate widespread employment discrimination. Under its last Protestant Editor Douglas Gageby (1963-74 and 1977-86) and in line with the progressive evolution of southern Protestant attitudes, the paper became a recognisably Irish nationalist, liberal and also pluralist newspaper. Gageby’s Irish Times’ nationalism and republicanism were nurtured as he grew up in 1930s Belfast. He was influenced by the “broad, generous doctrine” he encountered in editor Frank Gallagher’s new Irish Press newspaper. Under Gageby, the paper experienced a steadily rising circulation, attracting liberal Catholic, left-wing, and republican readers. They were disenchanted with the southern state’s facilitation of the Roman Catholic Church’s overweening conservative influence. In helping to effect change, the newspaper became a recognisable pillar in the post-1960s modernisation of southern Irish society. It was not a seamless transition. When the Northern Ireland Troubles broke out, then managing director Major Thomas McDowell and ‘friends on the board’ intrigued against Gageby and some of his reporters. After offering his services to the British government, in October 1969 McDowell advised the British Ambassador that Gageby, though “an excellent man”, was on Northern Ireland matters “a renegade or white nigger”. When news of this racist-sectarian epithet emerged in 2003, McDowell denied he had used it, though it is clear he had betrayed the newspaper’s trust. In 1974, partly in response to political volatility introduced by the conflict, the Irish Times Trust was set up, largely under McDowell’s control. Existing directors, including Gageby, were bought out. Gageby retired as editor, though he came back in 1977, due to an editorial and financial crisis. The Irish Times still operates within