Media Archives - Page 9 of 34

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Oldies get it wrong again

by Gerard Cunningham 6 July, 2018

You should stop reading right now. Pay no attention to pretty much every columnist of my generation. We got it wrong. Opinion polls are only as good as the people who interpret them, and we all filter our interpretations though our experience. I first voted in 1983, on the Eighth Amendment, which was approved by two-thirds of those who showed up to vote. Three years later, similar numbers turned out to reject a proposal to allow divorce in Ireland, and seemingly put an end to Garret FitzGerald’s grandly named Constitutional Crusade. It’s worth noting how referendums were back then. In the first 50 years of Bunreacht na hÉireann, we only got up to ten amendments. Since then, in large part thanks to Ray Crotty’s court challenge to the Single European Act, referendums have become almost an annual event, as much a part of the Irish calendar as the Munster Hurling Final or the Christmas Late Late Toy Show. There have been just under 50 referendum votes over the eighty years of the present Constitution. The X Case led to three further referendums on abortion in 1992. There were no good choices on offer, and the voters made the best of a bad deal, accepting votes to allow the right obtain information on abortion and to travel abroad, but rejecting an attempt to row back on the Supreme Court decision on suicide as a threat to life. A decade later, Bertie Ahern’s Fianna Fáil led government tried again, with the twenty-fifth amendment. Again, the government tried to reverse the suicide ruling from the X Case. Voters rejected it narrowly. In the interim, divorce had been introduced by the slimmest of margins in 1995. In each of these referendums, the same faces and voices popped up again and again, rehashing the same arguments. And weirdly, those voices were also raised in the regular referendums on the EU, as the Union expanded and evolved, requiring votes on new Treaties. But generals lose wars by preparing for the last battle they fought, and the tactics that worked in the 1980s have lost their edge. Despite the fear and damnation promised in 2015, Ireland said Yes to marriage equality in 2015. That should have been a warning klaxon that the country had changed. Yet three years later, the same tactics were deployed in the campaign to ‘Save the Eighth’. The old voices at Lolek Ltd, a private company trading under the registered business name “Iona Institute”, and the no longer quite so youthful Youth Defence, misread the country. Maybe the old guard thought that abortion was a harder sell for the reformers than marriage equality. The Repeal movement knew that the marriage campaign was won by thousands of coming-out stories, but conservatives thought that shame would keep women quiet. It didn’t work. Women told their stories, and the people listened. The quiet anger that had been bubbling since a few hundred people gathered quietly outside Leinster House the day after news broke of Savita Halappanavar’s death had not gone away. The No side misread their internal polls, and thought there was a soft Yes vote they could turn to a No. But while the electorate might differ over how abortion might work after the Eighth was gone, they were clear on one thing, the Eighth had to go. Soft support for abortion did not translate into soft support for Repeal. And so we come to this column, and all the columns like it. If generals make the mistake of fighting the last war, journalists make the mistake of reporting the last campaign. Journalists my age, who lived through the referendums in 2002, and 1995, and 1992, and even 1986 and 1983, remember when it was a hard slog. Against all of that, it was easy to write off marriage equality as a one-off fluke. But Ireland has changed. Michael Noonan was a government minister in 1983. Enda Kenny was elected in 1975. The Taoiseach who succeeded Enda wasn’t even born when he first entered the Dáil. Health minister Simon Harris wasn’t born when the Eighth amendment was passed. Invisibly, without the political correspondents and old heads noticing, a new generation took power. The Leinster House lobbies proved to be the greatest echo chamber of them all. Newspapers spoke about how online bot armies would sway votes and distort debate, while activists built “Repeal Shield” to silence abusive trolls (16,000 (mostly US-based) had been blocked at the time of going to press). Analysts derided a distributed movement without clear leaders, because they’ve been looking at astroturf for so long they’ve forgotten what genuine grassroots activism looks like. The grey-haired commentators are left wondering how they missed a revolution. The answer is simple. We got old. The kids have got this now. And I think the country is in good hands. Gerard Cunningham

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Difference and Repetition

by Cormac Deane 24 May, 2018

There is only one ghost scene in ‘Phantom Thread’, Paul Thomas Anderson’s latest film, which is a little surprising, given the title. (The spoilers start right here, I’m afraid.) The hero, played by Daniel Day Lewis, glimpses his long-dead mother as he lies in a fever induced by a poisonous mushroom secretly administered by his ‘girlfriend’. I use inverted commas because the term is altogether too demotic for the rarefied world of this elegant film about elegant people, but really at this stage she has no proper status in the egomaniacal edifice that is his house/life/ work/reputation. And it is this indeterminate status that she overcomes by the poisoning, because, the moment he can get out of bed again, he asks her to marry him. But back to the mother. We know who she is because we have seen her in a photograph earlier in the film. During his first date with the poisoner-to-be Alma (played by Vicky Krieps), Day Lewis’s character, Reynolds, explains that the wedding dress that his mother is wearing in the picture was made by him as a teenager, when she got married for the second time. It was the first dress he ever made. The husband, whoever he was, is nowhere to be seen. It’s an affecting scene, as it helps us understand that Reynolds’s occupation as a dressmaker for the high-society set in 1950s London is rooted in his powerful connection to his dead mother. The scene also positions Alma as the person who understands what his mother means to him, in other words, the person who under- stands him tout court. So when the mother’s spirit appears to him in his poison-induced fever dream, it is appropriate that she has been raised by Alma and her own weird hunger for love. It is appropriate because Alma ultimately proves herself to be the only person who can insert herself into this over-charged bond between unhappy son and dead mother, and in the process help him live a life for the living. The poison brings Reynolds closer to his mother and to Alma. This helps explain the strangest part of the film, which is when Reynolds realises that Alma is planning to give him poison again, and voluntarily eats it. His normal being is in a prison house for which he has lost the key, and the only release available to him is provided by her. Back to the photograph of the mother. It’s an antiquated, formal portrait of a woman in a constricting, formal dress, squarely facing the camera, her mouth clamped shut and without the slightest hint of joy on her features. When the mother appears as a ghost, she is exactly the same as in the photograph. She does not speak or move in any way. It’s as if the thing that is haunting Reynolds is not the flesh and blood mother, but the picture itself,. The moment that this ghost version of the mother appears is worth dwelling on. Given that this is a ghost scene, and that it’s 2018, we might expect some kind of special effect, some computer-generated move that would merge the spirit realm with the feverish state of mind of the character on screen who sees the ghost. But Anderson eschews the trick shot. Instead, the actress simply stands there, seen by one character (the bed-ridden Reynolds) and unseen by the other (Alma), who moves around the room. We cut to the face of Reynolds, but when we see what he sees again, the mother is gone and Alma is there instead. It’s as simple as that. The effect of it all is to emphasise the weird ghostliness of cinema itself, where images of the living and images of the dead are equally substantial, equally insubstantial. All cinema is a kind of trick shot, making us believe that we are seeing something that is not there. Anderson exploits this oddness to show us that this mother is neither living nor dead, but an undead presence with the same weight as all the other characters. The refusal to use any normally ghostly effects (mistiness, echoing sounds, uncertain lighting, etc.) makes it hard for us to decide whether Reynolds believes he is seeing a ghost, or he sees his real mother, or he actually sees a ghost, or he sees an actual ghost. The lack of trickery keeps all the options open and makes it more possible to believe in this ghost than the standard cinematic tricks achieve. We know, of course, that he does not actually see a ghost, because nobody actually sees ghosts. If we could actually see them, they would not be ghosts. They would belong to a more solid category. And yet, the category of ghosts is there, in all of its illogic. The story goes that Daniel Day Lewis gave up his theatrical career after playing Hamlet at the National Theatre in London in 1989. He said back then that the ghost of his father, the poet Cecil Day Lewis, appeared to him on stage, staring at him. He later somewhat retracted this version of events, saying instead that he was speaking more metaphorically than literally. It’s an unclarifying distinction, however, when it comes to ghosts, as ‘Phantom Thread’ makes clear (not to mention ‘Hamlet’). The character of Hamlet is, after all, haunted by his father, or “thy father’s spirit” (is there a difference?), from the opening moments of the drama. Being the method actor that Daniel Day Lewis is, it should come as no surprise that the loss of his own father should inform his on-stage experience. And so it fits the actor’s personal myth that now he is ending his screen career with a film in which he sees the ghost of his mother. For an actor who so deeply invests himself in his roles, brushes with death feel perhaps rather too much like the real thing. What will become of Daniel Day Lewis now? Actors before him have announced retirements,

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Keeping up with the changing times

by Séamus Martin 7 April, 2018

Those journalists of my vintage who have seen ‘The Post’ on the big screen were struck by memories of the ‘good old days’ of journalism and for once the term ‘good old days’ actually rings true. There were great performances from Meryl Streep as Katharine Graham the paper’s owner and publisher, Tom Hanks as the editor Ben Bradlee but what struck me most forcefully was how things have changed in the newspaper business since The Washington Post and the New York Times published the Pentagon Papers in 1971. ‘The Post’’s newsroom in the movie would be familiar to journalists of my age but I wonder how many of those whose by-lines appear today would have recognised it. There were clunky machines called typewriters on the desks. Reporters battered the typewriter keys to produce their articles. The occasional expletive thundering above the rat-tat-tat of the typewriters gave the impression of being on a battlefield. The resultant reams of paper went to sub-editors (copy editors in the US) to be edited and then entered the special world of highly-unionised printers. Next came the clatter of the linotype machines where the articles were cast into slugs of metal before being assembled into page forms. There was a foundry, there were big paper-cutting machines and finally from the news-room the comforting roar of the presses could be heard to confirm that the first edition was on its way. Now there are no typewriters and no copy-paper. There are no linotype machines and no foundries. The comfortable roar of the presses is not heard in the newsroom because the presses are now sited at the edge of the city. Today’s newsrooms are quiet and far more reminiscent of Banks than Battlefields but despite the outward calmness certain battles continued after the change from hot-metal to electronic publishing. In my early days in The Irish Press, Independent Newspapers and The Sunday Tribune I was barely aware of these as I was learning my trade as a reporter and, at one stage, as a sub-editor. The battles took place between two sides of management: the Commercial Side, known as ‘The Suits’ and the Editorial Side known as ‘The Hacks’. The Suits did everything they could to influence the newspaper’s content and The Hacks did everything they could to stop them. In ‘The Post’ the clear winners at the end of the day were The Hacks. The managing director, the board members, the businessmen, the accountants, the lawyers and the other Suits all tried to use everything in their power to stop publication of the Pentagon Papers. In the end the decision fell to Katharine Graham the owner and publisher. She was no Suit. Although the movie does not mention it she was trained and had worked as a journalist. She decided to publish the Pentagon Papers. As I rose through the ranks in The Irish Times I became more and more aware of the battle between the Hacks and the Suits and eventually became a soldier in the struggle. The set-up in the The Irish Times in my time was different from that of The Washington Post in the movie. There was no owner and no publisher. The paper was controlled by a Trust similar to that which runs the Guardian but closer still to that of US Newspaper The Tampa Bay Times which is owned by the non-profit organisation The Poynter Institute for Media Studies. There was a strong commercial man in the form of the chairman of the board Major Thomas Bleakely McDowell, an Edwardian-style gentleman with sculpted hair and a waxed moustache. He had his foibles but he stayed well clear of interference in editorial matters. He was not technically a Suit although he wore one of pinstriped bespoke elegance and authority. He was simply The Major. There was a strong man on the editorial side too. Robert John Douglas Gageby was known by all as Mr Gageby to his face and The Editor in general conversation. To describe him as a Hack would have been to diminish his true stature but there was no doubt as to whose side he was on. When a big story broke and space was too tight to do it justice he had been known to pull advertisements from the paper to make room. Two of my experiences with him come to mind. When I became what is known nowadays as Features Editor (News Focus Editor was the official title) I was approached by two journalists, Maev Ann Wren and John Stanley, who wanted to run a series of articles illustrating the true nature of the real-estate business. I decided it should be published in the knowledge that the Suits would raise hell since property advertising was a major, if not the major, source of the paper’s advertising income. After the first article of the series appeared I happened to be in the Editor’s office when the Managing Director arrived to complain. He was sent away with a flea in his ear. The other occasion was when a businessman threatened to stop advertising because of articles I had written on the issue of sporting contacts with apartheid South Africa. The businessman asked for a meeting with The Editor. The meeting took place and when it ended I received a phone call from Mr Gageby asking to meet him across the road which was a euphemism for the nearest pub. My worries on the subject were assuaged with the following words: “People advertise in the Irish Times because it’s good business to do so”. Any businessmen who would remove their advertising because they didn’t like someone’s articles would, he said, simply cut off their noses to spite their face. My articles opposing contacts with apartheid South Africa continued to be published and the businessman’s advertisements continued to appear. When Douglas Gageby retired as editor his place was taken by Conor Brady, the first person from the Irish Roman Catholic tradition to become Editor of the Irish Times since it was founded in 1859. Brady and I did not

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Irish is beyond weaponisation

by Pádraig Ó Mathúna 6 April, 2018

Some years ago, I read about an anonymous former participant of the blanket protest who recalled a visit from an RTÉ Irish language reporter. He remarked upon her “terrible elitist attitude toward the language” and, in particular, her claim that the brand of Irish which developed in the H-Blocks made her shudder. He quickly retorted, “When you hear the Gaelic in here you’re hearing it as a living language. It’s spoken and evolving in a natural environment. Your Gaelic is put in a glass cage as a showpiece. We have a living language. Yours is an artificial thing. For you it’s an academic achievement, while for us it’s something that lives, and that comes from our day-to-day situation”. I was reminded of this short anecdote at the beginning of the week as I, for lack of a better term, shuddered reading Ruth Dudley Edwards’ take on the politicisation of the language in the Belfast Telegraph. The inherent elitism of that unnamed RTÉ reporter from the late 1970s wafted over the words of Edwards’ column like the curried yoghurt that her headline warned us against. Yet, unlike that reporter, Edwards’ apparent lack of proficiency in Irish embraced a number of head-scratching assertions and historical blunders. Taking the liberty to speak for all Irish speakers with “southern ears”, she quipped about the ugly, harsh sound of the Ulster dialect in comparison to the more melodic sounds of Connacht or Munster. As an Irish speaker, I don’t think I’ve ever come across such rubbish from anyone who actually speaks the language regularly, no matter their location. The bulk of her ire however, tellingly appears to be reserved for Gerry Adams, whose Irish she says, “isn’t good enough to do a substantial interview”. She further points out his linguistic deficiencies by asserting that “Even Leo Varadkar, who learned it only recently, speaks it better”. Now, no disrespect to Leo Varadkar, because whatever his level of Irish may be, he has made a laudable effort recently to bring about an awareness of the language as an inclusive rather than exclusive medium. That being said, anyone with even a passing interest in the language is aware that Adams can, and indeed has, done a number of interviews in Irish-language media over the years, and is well able to hold his own. By comparison, Varadkar has given few if any off-the-cuff “substantial interviews” in Irish. To this point, a quick online search turns up a video from a 2012 session in the Dáil, in which Adams and former Taoiseach Enda Kenny engage in a back and forth completely in Irish. In the clip which lasts nearly ten minutes, Kenny commends Adams for his introduction of Irish into the debate, before lightheartedly noting that, while he agreed with his choice of language, he wasn’t so sure about his opinion on the matter at hand. This scene presents a stark contrast to Edwards’ unfounded claims that Kenny’s superior level of Irish had all but snuffed out Adams’ attempts at its use since his move to the Dáil in 2011. Furthermore, she makes an erroneous claim that Kenny and his colleagues in “the south” interpret the use of Irish as a “discourteous” attempt to “put non-Irish- speakers at a disadvantage”, which eventually resulted in Adams reserving his use of Irish for the Sinn Féin “faithful”. Though, again, this assessment doesn’t stack up factually. Surely Edwards recalls the 2015 instance in which Kenny, not Adams, was accused by TD Mick Wallace of intentionally embarrassing him by refusing to speak English during a session for Leaders’ Questions ? Kenny defiantly answered the claim of the bewildered Wallace by reminding his colleague that “this is our national language”, before reiterating that he should make use of the available translation headset if he can’t comprehend it. Yet, I suppose this example was less “discourteous” or “aggressive” because it was delivered in what she deems the “musical” sounds of Kenny’s Connacht dialect. Turning her focus to the Irish-language community more generally, Edwards went on to discuss the fact that in the Northern context, those who spent time in prison tend to have a solid working knowledge of the language. In many cases, this is true, especially for those who were on the blanket protest. Although, one thing should be made clear. Their embrace of the language was not a result of the “generosity of the Prison Service” as Ms Edwards states, but rather in spite of the abuses and inhumane treatment endured by many on a daily basis. Though perhaps her most curious claim is that in terms of Irish, “those we might call the civilians tend to have the least”. If this is the case, are the 6,000 students currently enrolled in Irish-Language-medium schools in Northern Ireland not counted among those that we “might call civilians”? Regardless, Edwards’ framing of the language along the antiquated lines of decades gone by is a gross oversimplification of the Irish-speaking community today. In the last week of February, for example, a diverse cast ranging from drag queen Ru Paul to actor John Connors showed their support for the language. But hey, maybe this quirky duo too has ‘sashayed’ its way into the IRA leadership, and is now involved in some elaborate new republican language scheme. On a hopeful note, Edwards commended Linda Ervine’s ongoing work in teaching Irish to east Belfast loyalists, remarking that this will hopefully lead to their “taking ownership” of the language. While Ervine’s efforts should undoubtedly be commended, it is time that we move past this sort of rhetoric to describe them. The language, now, belongs to no one. Contrary to what Noel Whelan said in a recent Irish Times article, it is simply incapable of being ‘weaponised’. It’s the old and native language of this island and it cannot belong to anyone more than anyone else. Has it been politicised in the past ? Absolutely. Since the time of the Fenians and the Young Irelanders before them, the language has been present in

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Gambling sells itself as normal and fun

by Norah Campbell & Ciaran Williams 15 January, 2018

My brother told me about a stag weekend he went to recently. The bus that was taking them to Galway hosted an online game where they bet on virtual horses. On arrival, the fellas announced that they had organised a poker night for the husband-to-be. The next day they went to the races. ‘Wow’, you might think, ‘gambling is a popular entertainment for young men today’. But how did gambling go from a furtive preoccupation of the older man to an apparently cheeky, funny, harmless entertainment for the young man? Gambling has a long and varied history, but it was not until the early 1900s that it became a mass activity, with the development of licensed high-street betting shops. These then expanded from individual family bookmakers into some of the commercial high-street chains of the modern betting industry. Telephone betting began in the early 1990s and in 2001 the Irish bookmaker Paddy Power was the first to move into Internet betting, before becoming first mover on the Apple App Store in 2010. In the past decade, neurological marketing research, consumer profiling, single-click betting, geo-tracking mobile technology, virtual reality, and real-time ‘in-play betting’ have led to a seamless, intensively immersive and pervasive market. Through this technology-driven marketing approach, gambling companies have achieved three objectives. First, they have fundamentally changed the public image of gambling by a marketing process known as normalisation. Second, they have diversified the range of ways in which people can gamble, expanding access to gambling touchpoints, increasing the range of what can be gambled on, and reducing the obstacles to gambling – a process we call the gamblification of life. And finally, they have waged an undeclared public relations war to ensure that successive governments don’t interfere with the soft-touch regulatory environment in which they thrive. What has it led to? An estimated 40,000 people have a gambling addiction in the Republic of Ireland. Recently, the Economist magazine calculated the per capita gambling losses by country: Ireland ranks third in the world, and first when it comes to online losses (graph below). 80% of Irish people who bet on sports events have at least one online account. Ireland has grown leading international and internationalizing gambling brands such as Paddy Power, Boylesports and most recently Quinnbet, Sean Quinn’s online gambling company launched in August 2017. In an experiment broadcast by BBC ‘Panorama’ last year, MRI imaging revealed that an addict’s brain exhibits the same neurological state whether it is anticipating a spinning roulette wheel, placing a bet, or in fact winning. This suggests that gamblers are addicted not as much to the end goal of winning as to the thrill of being involved in a betting experience. This neurological evidence for gambling allows two things to happen that are advantageous to the industry: it gives better insight into how reward centres in the brain are stimulated, and it offers clues as to how to naturalise addiction and thus limit discussion of the role that marketing plays in creating gamblers. In our research on the gambling market in Ireland, it was striking that marketing managers in the industry would repeatedly talk about gambling addiction as a neurological dysfunction, specifically in the brain’s mesolimbic reward system, that about 10% of the population are predisposed to. Portraying the other 90% of gamblers as ‘problem-free’ is therefore a useful tactic in denying that gambling may be a condition that is caused, and even fostered, by the industry. The new vulnerability So who is the ‘problem gambler’? From a psychological perspective, there are two recognisable characteristics. First, the gambler has diminished control over the time or the money they spend, and second, their gambling results in negative consequences for them and/or for someone close to them. Contrary to our traditional view of gambling as older, working-class men in bookmakers, the majority of problem gamblers are young men, aged 18-24. Surprisingly perhaps, a higher level of academic education correlates with an increased risk of problem gambling. And perhaps unsurprisingly, 1 in 5 problem gamblers attempt suicide. And, contrary to policy rhetoric that seeks to solve problems by pointing out that people merely ‘need to know the dangers’, evidence points to a very high level of addiction within the industry – proof that those with the most knowledge of the market are not immune to it. To compound matters, problem gamblers within the male demographic are least likely to admit they have a problem, and their behaviour is often not recognised by themselves or by others as problematic, but rather as normal young male behaviour. This cocktail of factors makes it especially difficult to reveal the scale of the problem that this market creates. Funning Risk Gambling brands position gambling as a harmless activity. This normalises its pervasiveness, frequency and intensity. Often, animations are used to appeal to young consumers, the tone is jocular, and there is never a reference to losing. The injunction to have fun is an especially important positioning tool that resonates with young men who are seen as more acceptable when they are jokey, laddish, and in good humour – an injunction which increasingly spills into other domains – we must be fun at work, we must be a fun dad, and so on. Alongside the fun archetype, the second most used archetype is that of the hipster, with major gambling brands encouraging the perception that gambling is a James Bondesque talent or skill which can be learned and developed, rather than a game of chance where the odds are stacked against you. Of course advertising is a way of enticing existing gamblers to gamble more, but it’s also a mechanism to educate the next generation of gamblers in brand awareness and preference: gamblers develop problem behaviour most often during adolescence, when they are most exposed to televised sport. Advertising frequently demonstrates not only the fun of betting, but how to bet, as in the Bet365 advertisement shown here. Sponsorship is another mechanism of normalisation, particularly in sport. For

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Media

Required Viewing

by Cormac Deane 9 January, 2018

The last day of November this year marked the seventieth anniversary of the death of Ernst Lubitsch, whose greatest works, such as ‘Ninotchka’, ‘To Be or Not to Be’, ‘The Shop Around the Corner’ and ‘Heaven Can Wait’, are now widely unknown. Lubitsch himself, who started his career in silent movies in his native Germany and ended it as one of Hollywood’s most prestigious producer-director-writers, is certainly now an obscurity. But the list of stars who benefited from the once-famous ‘Lubitsch touch’ contains many familiar names: Greta Garbo, Betty Grable, Mary Pickford, Marlene Dietrich, Jack Benny, Maurice Chevalier. That list deserves a little consideration, as it tells us something about the nature of celebrity. Regardless of the age of the reader, it is reasonable to think that most of the names there are familiar, and yet it is also reasonable to assume that very little specific is known about any of them. At best, most readers will have a fair idea of what Dietrich or Garbo looked like, but does anyone watch films with these actors in them, anymore? The first centenary of cinema was celebrated around 1995, but in fact for the first 20 years or so, almost all moving pictures were non-fiction recordings of street life that were viewed as much as a funfair attraction as anything else. So really what we regard now as cinema, that hugely transformative, mass cultural development, has only just turned 100. In its short existence, it pumped out thousands of films that were consumed as intimately shared experiences, that drew millions of people into a vast simultaneous sensorium, the like of which was only dimly prefigured by mass newspapers and radio. Because of this technological wonder, people from across the world were able to swoon for the same actor, who appeared to every single one of them in the same way. The star system was born, pre-eminently in Hollywood, but also in other national cinemas. That system carried on more or less intact right through cinema’s first 50 years or so, when there was relative scarcity of screen experiences for most people. So for quite some time, viewers had to passively wait until a new film appeared, which they could then dutifully go and see. The widespread adoption of television in the 1960s and 1970s began to change things somewhat, but it was not until the spread of video in the early 1980s that viewers began to have any control over what they could watch. Once the back catalogues started to come out in all the various formats that have cascaded since those developments, we left the era of scarcity behind. There was a brief period, perhaps 1980-2000, of what may be called an era of plenty. And now we are in the era of glut. This goes some way towards explaining why those old Lubitsch films don’t get watched anymore. The dizzying array of offerings and hundreds of hours of content mean that there are very few simultaneously experienced screen moments anymore. They do still happen in the cinema itself, assuming nobody in the theatre has watched a ripped version in advance. And sports broadcasting still provides some shared moments, though of course recordable television has made it increasingly common for fans to save a match for viewing at their convenience, while trying to avoid the social media simultaneity of their friends reacting to the live results. In short, there are no longer very many shared touchstones of screen culture, such as those Lubitsch films, which once would have been justifiably called ‘classics’ and now are in an uncertain zone between ‘obscure’ and ‘cult’. The tense of the verbs that we use to talk about media have undergone a corresponding shift. No longer do children in the schoolyard or colleagues at work ask ‘Did you see Top of the Pops last night?’ Now we ask ‘Are you watching ‘Game of Thrones’?’, or ‘What season are you on now?’, or ‘Have you started watching ‘The Deuce’ yet?’. Viewing audiences, which for a brief 50 years or so were in a fixed lockstep of fandom, are now atomised and independent. The realisation that we were all consuming precisely the same thing at precisely the same time was a great engine of social and artistic change. That weirdness of simultaneous experience is key to understanding Joyce’s ‘Ulysses’, for example. And it’s worth noting that the era of that book – set in 1904 and published in 1922 – spans those early years when the cinema as mass entertainment found its feet (with no help from Joyce’s own entrepreneurial efforts at the short-lived Volta cinema on Mary Street, now occupied by Penney’s). The risk that somebody would ‘ruin the ending’ of a film we had not seen was always present, most especially in the domestic television-viewing space. What used to happen far more often was that several generations would watch the same thing together, with the older ones having seen it before. This retreading of the viewing tyres for the older viewer transformed the favoured films (James Bond, ‘The Wizard of Oz’, ‘Some Like it Hot’) into a ritualistic, and sometimes wearisome and despised, experience. But the palpable tension of different sets of viewers engaged in the same thing, with the emotional energy in the room passing as much among the different kinds of viewers as between the screen and the viewers, are mostly things of the past now. The newer phrase is ‘spoiler alert’, and we hear it all the time because of the way that no two people experience the same media timeline, with the exception maybe of X-Factor style phastamagorias, although viewers spend much of their time checking their phones for what viewers elsewhere think about the show on their phones. With more screens in the average home than people, there is no pressure or compulsion to watch the same things, and films that require a modicum of commitment to get into them, aka black and white movies, are neglected by

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Media

Old Lady weds De Paper

by Gerard Cunningham 9 January, 2018

A s early as last February, the Irish Times reported that Landmark was in talks with Independent News & Media (INM) over a possible takeover, as the company struggled to service its €21m debt. At the time, INM was undergoing a competition review of its plans to purchase Celtic Media. The Competition and Consumer Protection Commission (CCPC) had authorised the planned deal in November 2016, but because the merger involved media companies, it also faced a review by the Broadcasting Authority of Ireland (BAI). However, INM and Celtic Media called off the deal in June days before Communications Minister Denis Naughten was due to give his determination on the BAI’s merger report. Perhaps dissuaded by the lengthy competition review process, INM had already declared that it was not interested in the Examiner in April. Landmark Media emerged from the ashes of the Thomas Crosbie Holdings receivership in 2013, and in addition to the Irish Examiner owns eight regional newspapers as well as shares in radio stations Beat 102 103, WLR FM and RED FM; and several websites, including the recently acquired Benchwarmers, a sports-news website. The Irish Times emerged as a possible bidder for the Examiner in March, as reported in the Sunday Business Post. By July, there were more reports of interest from Trinity Mirror, provincial publisher Iconic Newspapers and Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp, although the Irish Times was “in pole position”. The group appeared to be in a race against time, even closing down the Echo titles and appointing a provisional liquidator in June, and winding up the Irish Examiner Pension Scheme in August. Even so, negotiations dragged on, with suggestions at times that Landmark Media was for sale as a job lot; and at other times that it would be broken up, with the remaining provincial titles going to Iconic and Rupert Murdoch’s recently acquired Wireless Group expanding its footprint by taking the local radio stations. By September, the sale of the Irish Examiner to the Irish Times had been agreed in principle, but with several million euro in outstanding bank loans, there was clearly a lot of work still remaining. Iconic was reported to be taking the regional titles. It was not until the start of December that the deal was finally announced. All other buyers having dropped out, the Irish Times was taking over all of Landmark Media, with the exception of the Echo papers in liquidation. So what happens next? The Irish Times deal seems likely to pass muster with the CCPC and BAI (it will certainly have an easier time doing so than if the buyer had been a 900lb gorilla like Rupert Murdoch or Denis O’Brien) but, even so, the competition reviews are estimated to take until at least Easter. With Iconic apparently having dropped out, the chance to recoup some of the investment by selling regional titles to a company with expertise in running them may be gone for now, and getting the sale of radio stations to the likeliest buyers (the gorillas) still seems difficult given the regulatory hurdles. The Irish Times has previously said it intends to operate the companies in the group as a going concern. So, has the Trust shot itself in the foot in a bid to stop its rivals getting hold of the Examiner? Perhaps not. Properly managed, the Irish Examiner even in its current perilous state with sales below 30,000 copies daily, still commands a loyal following in Munster, particularly in Cork. Production synergies, where contributors and production staff work for both newspapers, are notoriously difficult to achieve in practice, but if done well, and if reports of a rumoured bankdebt write-off are accurate, the paper could stabilise. The Irish Times has already proven it can sell subscriptions – both online and in print – in Dublin. That same expertise applied in the home of De Paper could right the ship. Preserving the character that makes the Examiner’s journalism stand out may prove more difficult. No matter how much new owners pledge to preserve editorial integrity and independence, ownership matters, even if only because of the decisions owners take about who to put in charge. That question is particularly pertinent with the Examiner, which has been without a full time editor-in-chief since Tim Vaughan stepped down last year. Allan Prosser is filling the gap as acting editor. The Irish Times is very often the Paper of Official Records, while in recent years the Examiner, perhaps insulated from the usual pressures on news reportage in the capital due to its location in the second city, has championed stories which challenge official versions of Ireland, from Michael Clifford’s dogged coverage of the Maurice McCabe saga to Conall Ó Fátharta’s work on the abuses uncovered at Mother and Baby homes, from Tuam to Bessborough. This ethos would be missed.