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    Analysing Brendan O’Connor’s Saturday guestlist.

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    By Rónán Lynch. BrendanOConnorGuests-1 While Village can do serious analysis of serious talk radio, we can also get down with the celebrity stuff that people crave, openly or in secret. In this issue, we turn our attention to the Irish television talk show, and Brendan O’Connor’s Saturday Night Show in particular. O’Connor occupies a unique slot in the Irish media world as a talk-show host who has developed a crackling synergy between  the reality TV of the nation’s station RTÉ and the celebrity culture of the nation’s favourite newspaper, the Sunday Independent. His profile has risen on the tide of celebrity culture that has steadily filled the TV schedules. When there’s space to fill on television or in print, and there’s nothing obvious to run with, there will always be one available: the only issue is A, B or C list. RTÉ 1 is home to Ryan Tubridy’s Late Late Show on Friday and Brendan O’Connor’s Saturday Night Show, with O’Connor’s show lagging slightly behind in the ratings, and much else. Both shows promise national and international celebrities, music and comedy, with the Late Late offering the additional attraction of political guests. Tubridy also has his daily slot on 2FM, though he never seems quite as comfortable with celebrity culture as O’Connor, whose second job is his high-profile spot in the Sunday Independent where he edits Life Magazine. For this issue, Village looked over the 2013/2014 season of the Saturday Night Show, running from September 2013 to May 2014, drawing up a list of 128 guests who appeared on the show, but broadly excluding singers who didn’t sit to talk to the host. Predictably, the Saturday Night Show is a TV show about television. So, if you like television, or more particularly Irish television, you may like it. For more than a decade the Sunday Independent has given O’Connor free rein to troll the nation. He’s dropped some spectacular clangers over the years, including his exhortation for people to plunge into the property market in September 2007, just as prices went off the cliff, and his resolute defence of Bertie Ahern long after most had decided that the former Taoiseach was living in an alternative reality. O’Connor’s broadcasting career began with a stint on the comedy show Don’t Feed the Gondolas with Seán Montcrieff as host during the 1990s, followed by a spell as a judge on the RTÉ talent show You’re A Star, and two years as host of the TV3 show The Apprentice: You’re Fired! O’Connor’s Apprentice was a ratings success despite its low production costs. The producers could film two shows in an afternoon and still compete in the ratings with RTÉ. The synergy between O’Connor’s television career and his Sunday Independent column and editorship of the paper’s celebrity magazine Life encouraged the paper to campaign for O’Connor’s installation as a talk show in his own right. O’Connor’s move to prime time came in 2010, when Pat Kenny’s decision to vacate the Late Late Show caused a reshuffle at RTÉ, which moved Ryan Tubridy from his Saturday night Tubridy Tonight show over to the Late Late Show on Friday nights, leaving an empty slot on Saturday nights. RTE initially pitched a Brendan O’Connor-fronted show against the slicker Craig Doyle, with O’Connor’s show proving the more popular, particularly in the Sunday Independent, and he was invested as the regular host in 2011. After three seasons of interviewing celebrities with nothing to say beyond promoting their products, O’Connor decided to ramp up the seriousness quotient, as he interviewed Barry Egan, the chief celebrant of celebrity at the Sunday Independent. Egan gazed down the couch at O’Connor and asked him how it feels to interview celebrities and soap stars every week. “I love it”, said O’Connor, going on to explain that the show would try to avoid the ‘PR rollercoaster’. “Some people only want to talk about their product. It’s like if I came in and kept going on about the Saturday Night Show is coming back on Saturday night at ten to ten, don’t miss it and all that”, said O’Connor, brilliantly satirising the onanism of the celebrity editor being interviewed by his own celebrity features writer while talking about the narcissism of celebrities. Of course, being a scion of the Sindo, it’s not entirely clear if O’Connor was being tongue-in-cheek. Watching a Saturday-night talk-show, viewers aren’t expecting the parade of politicians and other worthies who populate daytime and weekend radio talk shows, and only three politicians featured during the entire season we looked at: Mary Mitchell O’Connor, who was talking about fundraising for breast cancer; the now-retired Mary O’Rourke; and Joan Burton, another surprising Sindo favourite, talking about her ambition to become leader of the Labour party. The clever strategy of avoiding the PR rollercoaster turns out to be entirely aspirational, and the workaday formula turns out a lifestyle-oriented list of TV people and celebrities, chefs, sports stars, authors, stylists and comedians, though the show does have a good share of ordinary people, who make up about 15 per cent of the guests. Unfortunately, to qualify as an ordinary person on a television talk show, you generally need to have undergone some life-changing tragedy in the form of an execrable illness or the unexpected or impending death of a close family member. That’s the trade-off: most ordinary people only share their tragedies in public once. Most celebrities share the intimate details of their private lives with the general public as often and as vacantly as possible in exchange for wealth, fame and influence in the form of a rotating presence on the small screen. The phenomenon of reality television and its attendant celebrity especially rising/falling celebrity permeates the Saturday Night Show. Little did celebrity culture realise that it spent 300 years awaiting the rise of reality TV. Not that celebrity culture is anything new. From the eighteenth century, editors and reporters looked for publicly recognisable figures whose exploits would sell papers. The travails of jockeys, boxers, actors,

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    Mediatribe

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    By Rónán Lynch A vast amount of energy and effort has gone into development of a narrative in the Irish media that goes something like this: we all lost the run of ourselves a bit but now we’re getting back on track because we’ve shown restraint and embraced austerity. So there was cursing and gnashing of teeth in Irish newsrooms when Joe Higgins sprang a last-minute invitation to the media to attend the Committee of Inquiry into the Banking Crisis. Higgins said that media organisations had questions to answer for their role in reporting on the property market. “They have to answer, like other major organisations and influential organisations in society, in regard to how the property bubble developed and what their role was in relation to reporting and how they reported on, for example, the price of a home going up by the equivalent of the average industrial wage for ten years up to 2006”, said Higgins. Making a similar point is Julien Mercille, the UCD lecturer who has found rich pickings in the relatively barren field of media analysis surrounding the property bubble. In the New Political Economy journal, Mercille wrote that the housing bubble was largely sustained by mainstream media, due to their links with corporate and political elites, a shared neoliberal viewpoint, pressure from advertisers and a reliance on ‘experts’ (read so-called) from elite institutions. Writing in the Sunday Independent, Dan O’Brien claimed that politicians should not be able to hold media to account. Yet it’s not just about the reporting or advertising pressure. At issue is the cross-ownership of news businesses and property businesses. The Irish Times still owns myhome.ie. Ironically, however competitor property websites such as daft.ie have themselves evolved into news and entertainment news with ownership of dailyedge.ie and thejournal.ie. Exasperated  Irish Times enthusiasts have often accused thejournal.ie of piggybacking its news stories on Irish Times’ research but now it is devouring the old lady’s bread and butter also. The cross-ownership of property interests and news sites doesn’t augur well for the citizen but concentration  is the future. It’s been a long time coming. When Ben Bagdikian wrote ‘The Media Monopoly’ in 1983, its controversial thesis was that the 50 corporations controlling 90% of American media outlets would eventually shrink to five or six. Bagdikian’s claims were considered laughable, but have proven uncannily accurate. Six corporations now control that same 90% share. Bagdikian has just issued his seventh edition of the book and added ‘New’ to the title. The ownership of 90% of the media by six organisations is alarming enough, but what other businesses do those organisations control? At a September session of the Broadcasting Authority of Ireland, Irish NUJ secretary Seamus Dooley called on the Minister for Communications Alex White to set up a commission on the future of media in Ireland. An article in the Guardian by Roy Greenslade who frequently beats Irish media to stories about Irish media scandal, noted Dooley’s call for a commission that would address issues including the control of Irish media by a small group of powerful forces. Greenslade suggested that Dooley “surely had in mind the dominance of the media company Communicorp, which is run by Ireland’s richest man, Denis O’Brien”. O’Brien’s Communicorp group has stakes in Independent News and Media, and controls Newstalk and TodayFM, along with swathes of regional newspapers. In an interview in the Sunday Business Post at the end of September, O’Brien told Niall O’Dowd that Ireland could end up with “only one or two newspapers”. Management teams refusing to co-operate were “cows on the line”, he said. “At the end of the day there has to be pollination between online, radio, and TV and newspapers”. O’Brien told O’Dowd that a Canadian media businessman “fell off the chair laughing” when he heard about Ireland’s media restrictions and described the situation as “Stone Age stuff”. As this page has previously noted, the concentration of media is only one issue. There’s also the concentrated pool of guests on mainstream programmes. Why are there so many PR people on news programmes? There’s been a profound change in the last decade in the composition of the opposing teams of journalism and PR. A Pew Research study in the US found that in 2003, there were 3.2 public-relations professionals for every reporter. By 2014, that number had grown to 4.6 to every reporter. The study also found a widening gap in pay in favour of PR people, who now earn 50% more than journalists. Each of the issues is important in itself, but in combination they suggest significant shifts in the news business: a concentration of ownership contributing to a lack of diversity and competition; the shift of advertising towards digital, the rise of branded news and native advertising delivered outside of news channels; and the increase in press releases masquerading as news because of a drop in newsroom staff to question press releases. There are solutions, of course, of the caveat emptor variety. The crisis of confidence in home-grown analysis is symptomised by the thrilled reaction to the September 22 editorial in the Financial Times declaring that Ireland was “showing struggling Europe the way ahead”. The editorial noted the “swingeing cuts” imposed on our “bloated public service” and added that “wage restraint and a flexible English-speaking workforce” had made it a choice destination for international companies such as Apple. Not only that, but the success of NAMA had “cleared the way for lending to start again”. Former chief economist at the Irish Congress of Trade Unions Paul Sweeney wrote to the FT noting that although “we Irish love praise from foreigners”, the editorial contained factual errors. Sweeney disputed that our “bloated public sector” was to blame for the crisis, pointing instead at banks and property speculators and claiming that wages had remained stable. Meanwhile, the FT’s claims of a restart in lending in Ireland sent puzzled banking officials back to their books to check and see if their reports over the past several

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    Shuffling the hack

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    By Gerard Cunningham Autumn elevated Ian Kehoe to editorship at the Sunday Business Post, while his predecessor Cliff Taylor shifted back to his alma mater the, now stressed, Irish Times as managing editor where his return will no doubt bolster that paper’s institutional memory, battered by the impact of successive redundancy waves over the last decade. Pat Leahy, the Post’s deputy editor, stepped down from his caretaking temporary elevation to the editorship. He and the Irish Independent’s Eamon Delaney are said to have been among the disappointed candidates. Kehoe’s investigative background – in the Business Post and on RTé’s ‘Prime Time’ – augurs well for a more hard-edged, newsy newspaper with perhaps less deference to the business establishment. Kehoe faces a struggle at the Sunday Business Post. The weakest of the weekend titles since the demise of the Tribune, the Post’s circulation is in freefall, though it can siphon some comfort from the fact that the valuable and ascendant ABC1 social demographic remains strongly represented among those who remain. Over the summer INM’s ebullient head of news Ian Mallon replaced Clare Grady, the first woman to edit the Irish Independent, as interim editor. Grady’s resignation came after those of Natalie Nougayrède, Le Monde’s first woman editor-in-chief and director, and Jill Abramson the first woman executive editor of the New York Times. Grady’s announcement, after only one year in the job, was followed by the INM NUJ chapel expressing its “disappointment” at the news, and calling for an “open and transparent” process of appointing her successor. A second NUJ motion on the same day noted “the deterioration in morale within INM titles and the oppressive management culture” which it claimed was “undermining the health and welfare of workers throughout the company”. The motion reminded senior management of their obligation to “ensure that all employees are allowed to work without intimidation or fear of bullying”. The Employment Appeals Tribunal will shortly hear a claim of unfair dismissal from journalist Gemma O’Doherty dismissed because her position became redundant by INM after she revealed that former Garda Commissioner Martin Callinan had penalty points quashed while apparently driving his own car to a security meeting.  Meanwhile the editorial operations of the Sunday World and the Herald have been merged, and another round of cross-title cost-cutting looms following the departure as CEO of the already profoundly snipping Vincent Crowley. Clearly there are troubling morale issues in Talbot House. The reasons for Grady’s departure were unclear, though there were some suggestions it was because of her failure to halt circulation declines. Considering how every broadsheet newspaper in Ireland is bleeding circulation, it seems particularly unfair to blame Grady for the rise of the internet. Those in the  running to succeed Grady include Dearbhail McDonald, the Irish Independent’s legal editor and Ger Colleran, twice former editor of the Irish Star now edited by Des Gibson, managing editor at the paper. Both are articulate and charismatic. Meanwhile the roaring and feisty editorship of Anne Harris at the relatively buoyant Sunday Independent may be coming to an end, to the potential glee of INM’s biggest shareholder Denis O’Brien who though he says he does not exercise control over the group did have enough influence to wrangle some embarrassing apologies out of the Sindo over the summer after it asserted the contrary. The overall newspaper market continues to contract, shrinking by seven percent in the year to June 2014. Worse, the newspaper market has been decoupled from general economic growth since 2009. As if the Great Recession wasn’t enough, it coincided with a tipping point as readers abandon print for digital and, while some titles are doing well online, internet advertising rates are nowhere near as lucrative as print. The Post’s paywall experiment is labouring while other titles are free online, and it’s difficult to see how a general publication can offer a unique product readers will pay for. Inspiration may come from the uniquely definitive Economist and Financial Times newspapers, which admittedly benefit from worldwide readerships. In Ireland, the Farmers Journal manages to offer a compelling mix of timely business news and features which sectoral readers are prepared to pay for. It is helped by the fact the general media have a poor understanding of agribusiness, where the major stories happen outside Dublin and are sometimes filtered through a patronising  Dublin lens as with the Ploughing Championships welly-wearing urbanista ingenues. It’s difficult to see a good exit strategy for Paul Cooke and Post Publications, the apparent forces behind the title. However, there is one cheeky possibility the Post could avail of to give itself a boost. Unlike the Irish Times and the Independent titles, it barely avails of bulks, the free copies given away in hotels, coffee shops and colleges to boost readership figures. Bulks account for 12% of both Irish Times (9,140) and Irish Independent (14,083) Audit Bureau of Circulation (ABC) figures according to the last audit. During the same period, the Post figure for bulks was only 994 copies. A few more bulk copies could be a valuable advertising and promotional tool. •

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    political guests

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    political g uests. Tubridy also has his daily slot on 2FM, though he never seems quite as comfortable with celebrity culture as O’Connor

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    The Irish Times and abortion.

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    By Ruth Cullen The Irish Times was once seen as the paper of record. But its coverage in some social areas like abortion shows it to be more engaged in agendism than journalism, less a paper of record than a paper of advocacy. Cynics, of course, would say with AJ Liebling, “freedom of the press belongs only to those who own one” but they can’t have it both ways – a prominent message from the editor on the Irish Times’ website declares the centrality of its ethos of accuracy. Village has documented elsewhere the systemic failures of the Irish Times even to correct errors once they are pointed out to it. The great Guardian editor CP Scott noted that “opinion is free, facts are sacred”. Drawing this distinction, and only applying opinions once the facts that drive them are definitively proved, is the great tradition for serious newspapers. The problem for the fragile Irish Times in the information era is that being treated seriously requires consistent presentation of both sides fairly. Any failure to do this leaves a track record of taking sides and opting not to present fairly the side with which it disagrees. The newspaper’s bias can be measured in two ways; on the one hand, by what it covers and the way it covers it, and, on the other hand, by what it covers up. Take the coverage of the tragic death of Savita Halappanavar. The Irish Times unabashedly led a rush to judgment in which Savita’s death was conscripted as dramatic proof that the Government must bring in abortion legislation at once. It was a rush to judgement because the facts of the case were not known at that time, but it opted not to let the absence of facts stand in the way of using the tragedy to push for abortion. In making this choice it accepted as collateral damage the significant long-lasting harm which its emotive, later to be discredited, charges would inflict on Ireland’s international reputation as a recognised world-leader in safeguarding the lives of pregnant women, and indeed in treating them properly and with dignity. Nor did the emergence of the facts prompt a correction of the record by what used to claim to be the paper of record. Even when the details in the HSE Report, the evidence given at the Inquest, and the 13 missed opportunities identified in the HIQA Report, established beyond doubt that Savita’s death was due to lapses in the management of sepsis, the Irish Times opted not to correct its misleading slant but continued to use her death to push its ‘right-on’ abortion narrative. In his editorial review of 2013, Irish Times Editor Kevin O’Sullivan puffed up Kitty Holland’s role in breaking and driving the ‘story’ but omitted any mention of the contradiction between the Irish Times’ ‘take’ and the evidence of flawed sepsis mismanagement. Holland even won the accolade of journalist of the year for her efforts, perhaps betraying systemic dysfunctionality in the newspaper industry. On Friday, 23rd August 2013, with the legislation safely in the bag, the Irish Times’ front page lead story headline ran, “First abortion carried out under new legislation”. The triumphalist subtext was – now that we have legalised abortion, look, already a woman’s life has been saved! The following day, however, it had to start a crawl-back as it emerged the story was incorrect. Mind you, it made the retraction a bit less embarrassing by sliding the admission of the cock-up down to the fifth paragraph, but in the end it had to publish the following correction: “The hospital has pointed out that the case described in the article did not happen”. There was a bottom of the barrel quality to the obstinate clinging of the Irish Times to its pro-abortion spin on Savita’s death in the face of the mounting evidence that the real cause of her death was deficient sepsis management. The same desperation to show that it had been right all along produced this rush to claim that a woman’s life had been saved by an abortion under the new law it had campaigned so hard to bring in. Kitty Holland has again taken a lead role in covering and interpreting the recent case of Ms Y. The Irish Times had no difficulty publishing an interview with the vulnerable woman at the centre of this case but showed a strange reluctance to follow the progress of the second human being involved, the baby, who thankfully survived. The coverage was premised on the view that abortion is a medical treatment for suicidal feelings, implying that had the case been dealt with earlier the abortion would somehow have been appropriate. The narrative was that many opportunities were missed to provide the woman with best medical care, but what they mean by best medical care is abortion. However, the psychiatrists’ evidence at the Oireachtas hearings on abortion showed that there is no medical basis for this view. The list of curious incidents in which the Irish media did not bark on medical problems arising from abortions stretches back decades. Take the C Case involving a minor in State care brought to the UK for an abortion. The Irish Times inflicted on its readers several weeks of one-sided coverage pushing the case for her abortion. But, some time later when she went public to speak of the harm and hurt she had suffered from the abortion, and her profound regret at having undergone it, the fearless voice of the Irish Times was surprisingly silent. Or the tragic case of  a woman from Ireland who died in 2012 in a London taxi immediately after an abortion in a Marie Stopes clinic. Here was a story about the life and health of a woman in pregnancy where the poor woman actually lost her life because of an abortion. Why did this merit only a fleeting mention in the Irish Times? Why was there no hue and cry, no outrage, no Irish Times

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