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    Skewed Irish Times asylum coverage

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    The received narrative in a democracy is that there is an inherent adversarial relationship between politicians and civil servants on one side and journalists on the other. The job of the diligent journalist is to pursue transparency by scrutinising policy; they should hold government to account through critical engagement in order to arrive at the truth, or at least an approximation of the truth. The citizen is then properly informed on government policy by the journalist acting in the public interest as a watchdog on power. Well, that’s the theory at least. In Ireland and elsewhere however an incestuous nexus between media and government exists. Journalists frequently rely on anonymous sources—who are often Cabinet members and senior civil servants—to the detriment of real transparency and accountability. One story that illustrates this point well is coverage over the past year in the Irish Times of attempted reforms of the Direct Provision system and, more recently, the governmental response to the so-called ‘migrant’ crisis. Following months of protest in Direct Provision centres last summer, the Minister for Justice set up a working group, chaired by retired High Court Justice Bryan McMahon, to look into reform of the system. The group was an ‘independent’ vehicle comprising members from various NGOs and representatives from the relevant state departments including the Department of Justice (DoJ). A week after the announcement of the group, an article by Conor Lally headlined ‘Asylum claims increase for the first time in over a decade’ was published in the Irish Times. The article, apparently sourced from the DoJ, reported – accurately but well before official statistics were due to be announced – a 40% year-on-year increase in asylum applications. Lally, who is the Irish Times’ crime correspondent, had not written about statistics on asylum since 2006. In December of that year, Lally delivered another article, headlined ‘Asylum claims up 45% in first rise since 2000’. In this second piece, which again included accurate statistics before their official publication, Lally allowed anonymity to a “senior justice source” who said that “the fact the Republic was regarded internationally as recovering from its recessionary years may be a contributory factor for some of the increase”. In other words, the implication is, the increase in asylum-seeker numbers is down to crafty economic migrants falsely claiming asylum in Ireland to take advantage of our growing economy. At the time of the article, a number of “senior justice” officials were involved in the working group. The DoJ, in an attempt to limit the potential reforms being discussed by the group, had an incentive to push the narrative that the increasing numbers of asylum claims were due to an influx of ‘economic migrants’. Was Lally’s senior source involved in negotiations on the working group at the time? We may never know because Lally granted him or her anonymity for no clear reason except, perhaps, in the source’s interest. Fast forward to June 2015. Barring a couple of contentious resignations, the working group successfully completed its task and produced a report which called for minor reforms of Ireland’s Direct Provision and asylum systems. On the morning after the report was delivered to government, the front page of the Irish Times featured a story entitled ‘Minister Raises Concerns over Immigration Spike’. This article, by Fiach Kelly, was based entirely on anonymous sources. Before covering the McMahon report, Kelly gave his source prominence to say that “an estimated 700 migrants had entered the country in the space of one month”. Unlike for Lally’s statistics, there is no evidence to back up this ‘700’ figure. When he finally mentions the working group report, Kelly quotes “concern in the Coalition” that improving Direct Provision could make Ireland “a destination country for immigrants”. As a journalist, Kelly has a duty to ensure his reporting is in the public interest. It is not clear that the public interest is best served by granting anonymity to senior government sources so that they can engender and promote, using unverified figures, a concocted anxiety about welfare-seeking migrating hordes. It’s not clear if the public interest is served by contrasting the release of a long-awaited report with anonymous ‘concern’ that any change to the status quo would lead to increased immigration by people “who are in essence illegal immigrants”, as another anonymous source said in the article. What is clear, though, is that some within government and the DoJ had an interest in controlling, directing and containing the immediate political and media discourse surrounding the publication of the McMahon report. Kelly’s article allowed his sources to do that; in effect he let certain figures distort the release of the report under cover of anonymity. The intricate and incestuous nexus between government and media in this instance, you could say, trumped the democratic theory, and the imaginary adversarial relationship which we are told exists. After the release of the report, events in the Mediterranean and beyond overshadowed any Direct Provision reforms. The huge numbers of refugees arriving in Europe suddenly became big news after a number of tragedies including the death of three-year-old Aylan Kurdi in September. The EU slowly moved towards a response, finally agreeing to two refugee-relocation programmes in addition to a previous resettlement programme. Ireland agreed to take in around 4,000 under these programmes, and the government set up the Irish Refugee Protection Programme (IRPP), led by the DoJ, to deal with the logistics. The Irish Times’ coverage of the ‘migrant’ crisis on the fringes of Europe has been good. If you want to find out what’s happening in Serbia or on the Greek island of Lesbos, the Times will inform you. However, their coverage of the IRPP leaves a lot to be desired. The government is setting up, as part of the IRPP, a series of Emergency Reception and Orientation Centres (EROCs) to host and process the relocated refugees yet to arrive. Kitty Holland has produced some excellent reports on the first orientation centre (for resettled, as opposed to relocated, refugees), the Hazel Hotel in Monastarevin,

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    Profile: Treasury Holdings and Johnny Ronan

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    The Treasury boys are back.  Without Treasury. Great.  Richard Barrett is reported to be deploying two billion euro of investment in property and Johnny Ronan has paid Nama back and is back in business all  over town.  He’s even found time to make reference to Nazi slogans in pinpointing the injustice done to him by Nama and to get the Banking Inquiry to pull its criticism of him, lest he perhaps injunct it from publishing. The Irish Times misreported in September 2015 (and has still not corrected the error) that Treasury had “exited Nama” but in fact Treasury went bankrupt owing €2.7bn, €1.7bn to Nama alone.  This suggests they cost the country around €7oom. Johnny Ronan may have bought out his personal loans but Treasury benefited from the socialised capitalism for market losers that is the bankruptcy regime.  No swaggering market icon, Treasury. Treasury  – Johnny Ronan and Richard Barrett, inspired awe and respect in financial, political and media circles but I have had reason to be circumspect, myself, over the years. Johnny is an accountant whose father was a wealthy pig farmer in Tipperary and whose cousin is Vita Cortex’s Jack Ronan. Richard comes from a family of Ballina millers. They were at school together in Castleknock College. Treasury once had little Dublin at their feet. I first met Richard and Johnny in the mid-nineties when they were developing the Hilton (subsequently Westin) Hotel on Dublin’s College Green. I was opposing their plan for the biggest destruction of listed buildings in Dublin since the 1960s. After they got their permission from An Bord Pleanála, an academic advised us that they should clearly have carried out an Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) because of the significant “nature, size and location” of the ‘project’. We decided the scheme was unsustainable and uncivilised, Treasury’s attitude cocky and the planning authorities’ flouting of the law on EIA outrageous – so we would attack their scheme in the courts. Treasury, it was said, were vicious, and were involved in twenty-six other sets of litigation around town. An Taisce, which I had been representing, didn’t want the risk of a devastating legal-costs order, we didn’t want the inevitable PR storm to blow away vulnerable individuals and we didn’t want personal legal liability for costs, so we formed a company. We had little time so we got a pre-formed ‘shelf’ company, the chivalric-sounding, “Lancefort’. After 47 appearances in the High-Court and six days in the Supreme Court, Lancefort lost its case on the primary ground that, although it was okay to litigate through a company that had not even existed at the time of the Bord Pleanála decision which it was challenging, the protagonists in the company, primarily I, should have raised the need for an EIA before An Bord Pleanála. The chief justice Ronan Keane seemed to imply I had known of the point at the time, even though I did not, and there was no evidence to that effect. Usually the Supreme Court is very careful not to invent or infer false facts. Furthermore European law clearly states it is the obligation of the authorities to conduct the EIA. The Lancefort decision is generally, by academics and practitioners, accepted as wrongly-decided. Since that time – 1997 – EIA (and its plan-focused counterpart (SEA)) has taken off as a tool for residents and environmentalists in assessing the impact of what is being imposed on them – if only because it often requires photomontages of the proposed schene and an indication that the developer fully considered the alternatives. During the campaign we were assailed by Treasury and their PR team – and I guess since Johnny Ronan reckoned we cost them 6m Euro, we were fair game. Irish Times environment correspondent, Frank McDonald, is sometimes one of the most acute and courageous commentators on these matters. But he was close to Richard Barrett – as well as to some of us in the campaigning sector, and he wrote several damaging reports including pieces misrepresenting our European Law stance in a way that was likely to annoy Irish judges, mis-stating the numbers of listed/historic buildings on the site and giving extraordinary coverage to the supporters of the scheme – including a fawning profile of the ‘conservation’ architect who was writing off the value of some of the buildings to the benefit of Treasury, in an interview under the headline “Keeper of the Past”. When we lost the case Frank McDonald in the Irish Times quoted Richard Barrett saying “his [ie my] house is gone” and that “I” faced legal costs of £1m. In fact we were always going to escape the costs of the case because the company was a separate vehicle from its directors, which at various stages included, apart from me, heritage activists Garret Kelly, Ian Lumley, Tony Lowes and in the end my gamey brother. Nonetheless Lancefort finished up comprehensively liquidated. Treasury later boasted that “certain opponents of ours have underestimated our ability to cause legal havoc to their detriment”. Probably true. At one stage when the publicity was bad and the case looked fragile, we had discussions with Johnny Ronan about settling our case and it appears some of our lawyers got further with instructions we gave them than we had understood. We were then skewered by Matt Cooper in the Sunday Tribune and Cliodhna Ó’Donoghue, editor of the property section of the Irish Independent, in aggressive but not entirely unfair features that made it sound like we were seeking money for ourselves rather than building-conservation causes (which we were not). We had discussed a wide range of possible resolutions ‘without prejudice’ and got nowhere close to agreeing any of them. It emerged a little later that Cliodhna Ó’Donoghue was the beneficiary of a glittering Italian trip paid for by Treasury in 1998, an extravaganza involving a Pavarotti performance I seem to recall. I was invited by current affairs magazine, Magill, to write about all this for a new ‘rant’ column it was

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    A little misleading.

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    By Gerard Cunningham One statistic itself betrays the problem with the readership statistics collected by Newsbrands Ireland (formerly National Newspapers of Ireland) in the most recent survey of Irish newspaper readers. Ten percent. That’s how much Irish Times readership is reported to have increased in the year to June 2015. The survey, carried out by Millward Brown, shows a total of 427,000 readers of the newspaper during that period. Trouble is, Audit Bureau of Circulation (ABC) figures for the same time period show newspaper sales in decline. In the first six months of 2015, the Irish Times sold an average of 76,194 print copies – down 5.2% year-on-year. With its digital edition having a daily total of 4,853, the combined sale was 81,047. And digital sales come with a caveat, as only 18 of those subscriptions were sold at “full rate”. The inconsistency is not simply on view at the Irish Times. The Irish Independent ABC figure, for example, is down 2,859 (2.5%), yet readership holds up, and the Examiner drops 1,828 (5.2%) as readership increases. Other papers show falls in readership, yet similar disconnections in the alleged momentum of change can be seen across all daily and Sunday titles. Clearly, something is going on here. How can a newspaper show up to a ten percent boost in readership while circulation falls by five percent? Part of the explanation comes from the combining of different news products. The JNRS measures readers in print, digital, and those who read both. And while circulation revenue declines tell their own story, the most recent story registered an overall increase of 27% in online readership. The Herald registered an astonishing 78% increase online. Readership, as measured by the JNRS, has always been a more slippery concept than circulation. Circulation is on the face of it simple. Just count how many copies are sold. Titles have some leeway in that they can give away discount copies, or distribute bulks to hotels, but those numbers are broken out too by the Audit Bureau of Circulation, so ultimately there’s a concrete number that the ABC can stand over. Readership can be more amorphous. First, there’s the passaround theory. After I finish the paper I paid for, the theory goes, it may be picked up and read by a co-worker, or a spouse or other household member, or a friend in the pub. So as a rule, there’s more than one reader for every copy sold. Precisely how many is a matter of some debate. Second, not every reader buys a copy of the paper every day. In fact, fewer than one in every twelve newspaper buyers is a consistent daily purchaser. Some readers buy only one paper a week, or two, or three. And some only make a purchase once a fortnight, or once a month. So while the paper may sell around X copies on any given day, a lot more than X individuals will have bought at least one paper over the course of a week, or month, or year. Readership statistics can therefore be subject to recall rates. The survey asks if a respondent read a paper “yesterday” (or “in the last week” in the case of Sundays) but it cannot control for those who misremember how long it was since they last read. JNRS has not adjusted its measurement techniques since 2012, so a change in the definition of “reader” since the last survey period is not the explanation. It seems more likely that behaviour is changing. More people read papers, but they buy fewer copies. The industry is losing daily buyers, but gaining some new occasional buyers. Unfortunately for the bottom line, the former outnumber the latter. And then there’s online readership. Unfortunately, while the strength of online numbers suggest old readers of the paper are being more than replaced by new readers online, those new readers aren’t worth as much to the circulation departments, or advertisers. Most online readers bring in no circulation revenue at all, either accessing news that is offered for free, or behind a porous subscription paywall. The paywall trade-off: bringing in paying customers, but at the cost of advertising revenues because most browsers are unwilling to pay, accounts for the extremely leaky Irish Times paywall. Having delayed its introduction several times, Tara Street eventually went ahead with the change earlier this year. A second paywalled daily news product from the Sunday Times team, which would have competed directly with the Irish Times, is currently stuck in development hell as the two Times titles argue before the courts over whether consumers would be confused by the two similarly named websites/apps. •

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    Times tables.

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    By Gerard Cunningham For internet companies, UX is an integral part of the product. Done well, it’s invisible. The interplay of icons, taps and swiping actions on a smartphone screen. Point and click have been desktop metaphors on computers since the 1984 Macintosh introduced the world to graphical screens. Amazon one-click purchase is the exemplar. The idea is simple. Attention is fleeting, so don’t put barriers between decision and action. Newspapers are a user experience from a different era. Just as the size of a phone screen influences the design of an app, the technologies behind print production determined newspaper design, from the classical ‘pyramid structure’ of a news report to choices in font design, layout and picture placement. Part of the pain of ‘transitioning’ from print to digital news is the hangover from many of the design decisions of the print era. And those decisions, and the mindset they created, can hamper even the most forward-looking operations. All of which is a long-winded way of noting that the newly launched Irish daily digital news offering from the Sunday Times had a few teething problems. UX trains users to expect certain consequences. Everyone has heard anecdotes about toddlers poking furiously at television screens in glossy magazines, wondering why they don’t react to touch like iPads. Adults may smile at those stories, and perhaps draw some pithy conclusions about how technology is changing childhood, but we too are conditioned. And a prime piece of conditioning is how we expect to deal with new apps. Pick up a phone (or tablet), tap the iTunes store or Google Play icon, enter the app name, click install, and open. Installing the new Sunday Times app proved not to be quite so straightforward. On the tablet, two identical apps were on offer. One contained Irish news, one didn’t. On the smartphone, only one app was available. It did not contain links to Irish stories. It turns out that the Irish app is not readily available. To get the app, users must first fill out a webform giving the usual data (name,address, credit card, and for some reason, date of birth), and then receive an email with a link to the Irish news app/website. If I were a user with a single desktop or laptop computer, then this system would work pretty much flawlessly. Unfortunately, I also own a smartphone (and a tablet). That meant that my first day’s experience of the news app wasn’t of a new news source, but of frustration at inability to access a product I had paid for. There have also been reports of users having problems registering for the product if they tried to do so on their phones rather than on laptop computers. With half of all online news now consumed through smartphones, one wonders how many potential customers abandoned the registration process. Getting users to pay for news is already an uphill battle. Any minor annoyance can be enough to make many abandon an online task. It’s still teething, so it’s futile to judge the news worth of the new product on its offering in the first couple of days. Early advertising sought to position it firmly as an Irish product by emphasising GAA sports coverage, though the effect is somewhat offset when the front page at thetimes.co.uk features a menu bar offering “News”, “Opinion”, “Business”, “Sport” etc and, almost as an afterthought tucked in the right-hand corner, “Irish News”. The Irish office in Redmond’s Hill has assembled a good team for their launch, poaching talent from the Examiner, Mail, Sunday Business Post, and the online community. But managing a daily news operation is a very different operation to rolling out a Sunday newspaper, so it remains to be seen whether the team can pull it off. Redmond’s Hill can also expect to face stiff challenges from the other Times. The online launch was already delayed by several months by legal squabbles over whether readers would be confused by two separate Timeses, whether the word Times could be claimed as an exclusive trademark when both papers have existed for over a century, at one point featuring learned friends arguing over how similar two letter Ts were in the publications’ respective twitter avatars, @irishtimes and @thetimesIE. Ultimately, High Court judge John Hedigan decided readers could tell the difference, and the product launched on Monday 7 September (though a Supreme Court appeal is still technically possible). Legal faceoffs notwithstanding, the real fight will take place on screens, as the two titles scrap it out for reader attention and revenues. In line with other Murdoch titles, @thetimesIE is uncompromising. If readers want to see the content, then they have to pay. By contrast, @irishtimes has one of the leakier paywalls around, allowing readers 20 free articles a week before asking for payment. Even that restriction is easily bypassed by using multiple browsers or clearing the cookie cache. Given the ease with which it can be circumvented, it comes as no surprise that early figures show a very modest subscription uptake. The Irish Times’ paid product feels extremely cautious, as if it’s more about introducing readers to the idea of paying for news than actually charging them. On phone screens, the two products feel similar. Though their layout does differ. @IrishTimes lists stories in a single screen-wide scroll under each category, while @thetimesIE goes for a block layout. Notwithstanding the initial installation hiccups with @thetimesIE, both apps feel professional, and work well, with quick responses to touch. For a customer focused specifically on Irish news, however, the early winner feels like @irishtimes, simply on volume grounds. While @thetimesIE clearly has ambitions, and will no doubt engage both new staff and freelance contribution in the coming weeks as the courts and Oireachtas get back to business after the Summer break, Tara Street has long been dedicated to producing Irish daily content and has staff dedicated to that task, and it shows. On top of that, the Irish Times seems to be the

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    A little misleading

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    All titles show falls in readership, but distort them, getting away with it because of increasing online readership, declining daily readers and faulty memories. By Gerard Cunningham

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    RTÉ refuses Village O’ Brien ad

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    Correspondence between Village‘s editor and RTÉ’s ad-clearance Department   Editor <editor@villagemagazine.ie> 5 Jun to Hi I hope all is  well with you. Can we please get this running as soon as possible on Radio 1 (I presume is ok!) and what slots are available? Village magazine, the only Irish-owned journal to publish  Catherine Murphy’s Dail  Statement despite the legal threat, looks at how the media betrayed democracy  and free speech by  folding early to Denis O’Brien.  In  our June issue: Constantin Gurdgiev, Frank Connolly, Mannix Flynn. Referendum post-mortem. Hymn to Broadsheet.ie. RHA’s annual exhibition. VILLAGE IN NEWSAGENTS NOW. Kind regards, Michael From: adclearance Sent: 08 June 2015 13:14 To: Cc: adclearance Subject: Decision Reached: [72545] : Village Magazine Importance: High Hi The Clearance Committee have asked for backup to support the claim; Village magazine, the only Irish-owned journal to publish  Catherine Murphy’s Dail  Statement despite the legal threat, looks at how the media betrayed democracy  and free speech by  folding early to Denis O’Brien. Please ask your client to supply backup to support the claim. Regards,     Editor <editor@villagemagazine.ie> 8 June to Hi The above shows we were publishing Murphy’s comments made on 28th May while there was a legal threat (to Broadsheet from Frys solicitors for Denis O’Brien but also from the first judgment of Binchy in the High Court). The IT, RTE and the Journal all took the comments down or did not publish them. The SBP, the Mail and the Indo Group did not publish them until after the court case. The Sunday Times, the Guardian, the NYT and we alone among print publications  published them while there was a legal threat but the others are foreign owned. Broadsheet is not a journal. Let me know if you need more.  Rgds,  Michael adclearance <adclearance@rte.ie> 9 Jun to me Hi Michael The Clearance Committee re-reviewed the attached script in their clearance meeting this morning and would accept the claim on the basis the wording is amended to ‘Village magazine, the only Irish-owned print media to publish Catherine Murphy…..’ so the claim is more accurate. Please send over the amended script for final approval. Kind Regards, From: Editor [mailto:editor@villagemagazine.ie] Sent: 09 June 2015 11:15 To: adclearance Subject: Re: Decision Reached: [72545] : Village Magazine Hi Fiona. Thanks for that. That would not be grammatical. Village is not a media but a medium. No one will know what a print medium is. Hence I said journal which is defined as a magazine or newspaper. What do you think? Rgds. Michael 10 Jun to me Hi Michael, Thank you for your email. We understand that you are more directly informed regarding the publication of details of the case before the high court we are however concerned that the substance of your ad ‘at how the media betrayed democracy and free speech by folding early to Denis O’Brien’ is not a true reflection of the events. There was in place a high court injunction which prevented some media from publishing details and other media were unclear if they also were affected by that injunction. As soon as the court clarified the situation all the media involved published details. Your copy attached would need to be amended to reflect the reality of the situation. Kind Regards,   Editor <editor@villagemagazine.ie> 10 Jun to Hi This new angle is a shifting of goalposts away from the issue of what a journal is. In any event it is legally, factually, actually, substantively (any word you want to use) inaccurate to say “there was in place a high court injunction which prevented some media from publishing details and other media were unclear”.  The judge stated his order “was not intended, and could not have been intended to” affect proceedings in the Dail.  If you check Village’s twitter you will see that we predicted he would say this. The whole point is that most of the other media ludicrously and predictedly misinterpreted the order – choosing to regard themselves as prevented.  Village a) did not; b) stated the others were wrong to; and c) uniquely among Irish-owned journals published! Conveying this is the purpose of the ad. The issue relates to democracy and free speech and is not a small one. The inaccuracy in your premise makes it impossible for me to address the inferences you draw from that inaccuracy! Regards. Michael adclearance Attachments adclearance 11 Jun to me Hi Michael The Committee remain of their decision that Village Magazine were not the only Irish-owned journal to publish the statement nor does the content tell a true reflection of the events that transpired. It was reasonable, if cautious, for the media to hold off for clarity from the judge and it is our view that the wording used ‘the media betrayed democracy and free speech by folding early to Denis O’Brien’ is not a true reflection of the events. The attached script will need to be amended. Please resubmit the amended copy to us for approval. Kind Regards, Hi .  Here are three random dictionaries which suggest a journal is a newspaper or magazine.  There is no evidence, less still have ad-clearance given me any evidence, that the definition of journal extends to an online publication.  If you do not feel you are obliged to address the issue in a logical way, and if it is RTE’s official position that unsubstantiated comments (adclearance’s) are as good as  substantiated ones (mine) I guess there is no point in continuing the discussion. What do you think?  Rgds.  Michael adclearance 15 Jun to me Hi Michael The Committee would agree in there is no point in continuing the discussion as clearly there are disagreements regarding the current wording and unless it is amended the commercial will not be approved for broadcast on RTÉ Radio. I will close this submission. Regards, *Correspondence edited for length

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