Ireland's political and cultural magazine
The story of an election is much more than a few headlines, but the Irish Times front pages mercifully, if languidly, devoid of the kind of blatantly partisan positioning seen elsewhere, provide in hindsight a neat narrative of the campaign, with the slow realisation that Fine Gael was in trouble, the lack of a clear alternative […]
Twenty years ago, Letterkenny gardai sent a request to Garda HQ looking for selected phone records in the county. The request was part of the Donegal Garda inquiry into the death of cattle dealer Ritchie Barron, which was botched and complaints about which, from an extended family, the McBreartys, led to the Morris tribunal. Morris […]
Irish news-radio programming shows a strong anti-tabloid bias in selecting contributors, according to an examination of survey data from the three main broadcasters earlier this year. Journalists interviewed by the stations’ news programmes and participating on panels came overwhelmingly from the Irish Times and Irish Independent during the survey periods, with none at all from […]
A few years ago, as print media watched their subscription and circulation plummet, digital advocates were fond of reciting the adage of internet guru, Clay Shirky, that “no medium can survive the indifference of 25-year-olds”. The advocates had a simple solution. Readers didn’t care about paper and ink, they wanted content, so move the content […]
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 […]
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 […]
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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 […]