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The Irish Times Suppresses the Big Stories.

by admin 13 March, 2021 0 Comments

By Michael Smith. History The Irish Times title was revived in 1859 by a 22-year-old English army officer, Major Lawrence Knox, and run as a Protestant, Nationalist newspaper, reflecting Knox’s Home Rule politics. He stood unsuccessfully for Isaac Butt’s Home Government Association. By 1873 in the ownership of the department store Arnotts it was a proselytiser for Unionism in Ireland. It is no longer a Unionist paper but rather ‘liberal and progressive’. It operates under a not-for-profit trust, arranged by probably its best editor, Douglas Gageby, which commits it to progressive values but it is not a charity. The Irish Times has 630 employees, many sadly laid off currently because of Covid, and is edited by the low-profile Paul O’Neill, much of whose editorial thrust seems to be pro-business. Problems This article makes the case that it has become stale, complacent, closed, loose with facts, and that its political staff are defensive of the establishment, including for example of the current government. Itscollective instincts for promoting challenging investigations are tenuous – and always have been. It is suppressive. Suppressing the Stories Mother and Babies Homes In 1964 Michael Viney wrote in the Irish Times of a Mother and Baby Home, one of several he visited for a series on unmarried mothers. He recorded that it gave the impression of being “a fairly good class boardingschool for girls”. Recently he acknowledged: “I was perhaps totally misled by the appearance of the convent. None of this was tested by seeking out young mothers who had actually experienced the care of the homes”.He saw the mothers at work as “a benevolent conspiracy of unexpected thoroughness and ingenuity”. It was an egregious failure to see a scandal before his eyes. Suppression of the reality. I was born the following year. I cannot think of a single big investigation the Irish Times has itself spawned in my lifetime (perhaps there wasone about Brian Lenihan Sr in the 1990s?). Certainly its Wikipedia entry doesn’t mention any. I shall document a large number of storiesthat, on the contrary, it has suppressed. For the most part the Irish Times does not break stories; it fixes them. Haughey In 1970 the Irish Times was influential in spinning the false narrative that Charles Haughey had arranged the illicit importation of arms for the Provisional IRA without approval of the government or its head, Jack Lynch, and in liaison with the IRA. It then pursued decades of vilification of the man whose crime was in fact corruption not ultra-nationalism on which he was – for good or bad depending on your outlook – flexible. It was left to Magill magazine in 1980 and recent books, which the Irish Times has dismissed or ignored, to push the truth. Corruption On corruption the newspaper wasn’t as forceful. In his 2005 memoir ‘Up with the Times’, former editor, Conor Brady, acknowledges that “One ofthe questions most frequently asked of Irish journalists when they talk about their work is ‘Why did you not tell us about Haughey over allthose years?”. He says the truth lies somewhere between three propositions – “the libel laws… the culture of secrecy in Irish public life…theentire political-administrative-business establishment”. Brady is a reflective journalist and he at least constructively bemoaned that “there is little tradition of self-examination or self-inquiry inIrish journalism. I do not believe any media organisation has a formal audit system to measure its performance, other than readership and circulation figures”. Sixteen years on, his own former newspaper has certainly notinternalised this criticism. He was circumspect about the journalistic failures: “At the end of my editorship the Dublin Castle tribunals had uncovered much that revealed at least three distinct strands of corruption that had run through Irish public life for 20 years. The reality is that the Irish media had succeeded in learning very little of substance about any of these over this time”. Let’s take Brady’s outline of the three areas in which the Times essentially failed, as our starting point, and examine each: donations to Haughey, Ansbacher and planning corruption. Donations to Haughey Brady describes how when he was appointed editor in 1986 he set about compiling files and records on Haughey – to no avail. There mustbe a suspicion he wasn’t hungry enough for scandal. He says the only insight he got was in 1981 when, as editor of the Sunday Tribune,someone anonymously sent him copies of Haughey’s AIB Dame St bank statements showing an overdraft of around £200,000. He concluded that Haughey was “entitled to the privacy of his bank account unless there wasevidence of some wrongdoing. I held off publication”. He made some abortive enquiries of the bank itself. He says “it took three sworn tribunals, invested with the powers of the High Court, six judges, 20 senior counsel, approximately 40 other lawyers and any number of court-authorised officials, working over five years, to find out what we now know aboutHaughey”. It didn’t take a forensic cavalry to pursue the initial lead which might well have precipitated Haughey’s downfall. Brady plaintively tries to get himself and the media off the hook: “a few will probably argue that the Haughey story was, in effect told by the media, time and again, but that few people wanted to know the truth”. Brady is too wishfully kind to himself and the media generally. In effect the story just wasn’t told. Ansbacher When the report of the Moriarty tribunal into Ansbacher was released in July 2002 it showed around 200 of the country’s most respected public figures had availed of the opportunity created by Des Traynor, Charles Haughey’s financial adviser/bagman and the head of Guinness and Mahon Bank and CRH, to cheat on their taxes and to transfer wealth, generated inIreland, to supposedly secure and invisible accounts in the Cayman Islands. Some years earlier, in 1998, the Department of Trade under Mary Harney appointed an authorised officer, Gerard Ryan, to look into Ansbacher. His dossier established a wideranging establishment conspiracy to ensurewell-known holders of illegal bank accounts

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Embargo

by Gerard Cunningham 7 July, 2018 0 Comments

The lacklustre prose might have tipped you off that all of the above items are from press releases, and so lack the sharpness good newspaper prose should have after subediting. But it’s not just PR-speak that distinguishes these news items. Each one was subject to a news embargo. News embargoes are not unknown in Ireland, and are usually honoured. Sometimes, they are even lifesaving. A few years ago, to pick one example, the Garda press office issued an alert to journalists about an “incident” where a man had barricaded himself inside a house. The brief notice asked journalists to respect a blackout in reporting the incident until it was resolved. Sometimes, based on their assessment of a crisis situation, Garda authorities will ask journalists to cover an event as much as possible, for example as a way of communicating directly with someone who may be listening to a radio. And sometimes, they ask for silence, to avoid inflaming a situation. The barricading incident was resolved without tragedy, and the stand-off was then reported by the press. There’s no way to tell if the embargo helped or not, but it was observed by every journalist who learned about the case. There’s no legal basis for a press-embargo system. It’s just something that evolved over the years. One of the compromises entailed is implied by press releases labelled “check against delivery”. The text of a speech, usually from a Minister or party leader, is leaked in advance to journalists to help them over the pressure of impending deadlines, but on the understanding that the journalist will listen to the speech in case the minister changes what he says at the last minute. Often of course, what the minister says in an off-the-cuff or unrehearsed remark departing from the script is the most newsworthy event of the night. Such a system made sense when print was the dominant news medium, and it took up to eight hours to get a news report from one end of the country to another. When a government or news website can upload the same speech in seconds, and then promote it through social media directly to citizens, the embargo makes less sense. On the (to be honest, not that frequent) occasions when the script contains urgent and newsworthy information, there is no reason why the planned script a Minister is going to deliver should not be reported. And if the actual delivery changes, then that too is news to report. A press embargo should be rare, and only invoked in the public interest. The barricading incident described earlier is an illustration. But instead, it is abused more often than respected. Some embargoed stories, such as an increase or reduction in homeless numbers, are of immediate interest. Many, quite frankly, are not. In addition to numerous speeches by ministers and TDs, among the recent embargo requests I’ve received were the launch of a new website and app by a government agency, tractor testing regulations, the opening of a courthouse, and a speech about the cost of Garda overtime. All worthy and worth reporting in the public interest, but few of immediate interest to the public, and certainly not meriting the spurious importance attached by the word “embargo”. Most of the embargoes in my inbox expire either at midnight, or at 4.30PM. In other words, they are blatant attempts to influence news coverage, hoping to feature prominently on morning newspaper front pages, Morning Ireland, or evening drivetime news broadcasts. What should be a rare occurrence, urging media restraint in the public interest, has instead become a way for press officers to manipulate news cycles. It is time for journalists to ignore embargoes. Gerard Cunningham

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Difference and Repetition

by Cormac Deane 24 May, 2018 0 Comments

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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From Naughten to Neachtain: nothin’ worth notin’

by Frank Connolly 13 May, 2018 0 Comments

It is not a question of whether, but how many, more people will become embroiled in the developing row between Independent News and Media and the Office of the Director of Public Enforcement (ODCE). The battle should more accurately be described as one between the biggest shareholder in INM, Denis O’Brien, his appointed chairman to the company and confidant, Leslie Buckley, and Ian Drennan the director of the ODCE who is seeking to appoint High Court inspectors to examine aspects of the media corporations’ governance. In the latest twist to the saga the Minister for Communications, Climate Action and the Environment, Denis Naughten was almost forced to fall on his sword after it emerged that he gave commercially sensitive information to lobbyist, Eoghan O Neachtain, indicating a probable referral of the attempted media purchase of Celtic Media Group by INM to the Broadcasting Authority of Ireland (BAI). Heneghan PR for whom O’Neachtain works, was acting for INM when the lobbyist made the call to Naughten in November 2016, and company boss, Nigel Heneghan, promptly informed his client Leslie Buckley about the news that a referral to the BAI was likely. Buckley immediately passed it on to O’Brien, who controls 29.9% of INM, but apparently did not extend the same courtesy to other board members at the time. When asked about a possible referral by him of the Celtic Media purchase proposal to the BAI by Independent TD Catherine Murphy and Brian Stanley of Sinn Féin three weeks after the phone call with the lobbyist, Naughten had refused to confirm his likely course of action to the Dáil. In the normal course of events, in a normal democracy, a minister passing on such market-sensitive information to a company, or in this case to its largest shareholder, would precipitate a thorough investigation and probably a ministerial head on a plate. Not so in this case. Incredibly, the independent minister insisted that he was only expressing a ‘personal opinion’ to O’Neachtain, whom he said he knows socially from Connacht rugby circles. He confirmed that he had taken no notes of the call. He also said that he met Buckley at an event organised by INM in May 2017 just a month before INM cancelled the acquisition of Celtic Media and just before the minister was to determine whether the deal should proceed. He told the Dáil that he was “trying to recall the detail of that but I do not recall him (Buckley) raising with me at that stage” the issues pertaining to the Celtic Media purchase. In his affidavit to the High Court, heavily leaked, Drennan has suggested that the minister’s action may have breached corporate governance rules insofar as commercially sensitive information was provided to just one shareholder of INM in advance of the likely referral of the Celtic Media purchase to the BAI. By fully supporting the minister, Leo Varadkar may well find himself the focus of criticism further down the road by the corporate watchdog for pre-empting an investigation by the High Court inspectors he is seeking to have appointed to investigate a string of alleged serious, including criminal, behaviour in INM. Varadkar has until now managed to avoid any entanglement in the uncomfortable and controversial relationship between O’Brien and Fine Gael, going back to the mid-1990s when the businessman won the hugely lucrative second mobile phone licence with the assistance of then communications minister, Michael Lowry. The party managed to clear its debt within a few years and although its main fundraiser, Lowry, was forced out in the wake of the Moriarty tribunal investigation, the links between O’Brien and senior party figures, including former leader Enda Kenny and current EU commissioner, Phil Hogan, has long persisted. The main opposition parties have concentrated on this potential exposure of the Taoiseach to the ongoing dispute between the INM and the ODCE, which is investigating an alleged data breach by the company affecting senior staff, journalists, lawyers and others as well as issues over the, since abandoned, attempt by Buckley to get INM to buy Newstalk, the radio station controlled by O’Brien. According to a protected disclosure by former INM chief executive, Robert Pitt, Buckley tried to get the board to pay substantially more for Newstalk than he and his advisors thought it was worth. O’Neachtain, of course, is a former press officer for Fianna Fáil and once toiled day and night to defend Bertie Ahern as he sought to explain his inexplicable financial arrangements to the Mahon Tribunal during the period he was a finance minister, without a bank account. No doubt he knows where other Fianna Fáil skeletons are buried and indeed must be aware of a thing orf two about Fine Gael having advised Enda Kenny during his term at Taoiseach. But Fianna Fáil is also holding fire because it does not want to provoke a general election which would edge closer if Naughten were forced out of cabinet and government, potentially weakening the wafer-thin voting balance in the current Dáil. Besides, following the next election the party may need the support of independents like Naughten. Sinn Féin is reluctant to do anything which could jeopardise the stability of government in advance of the referendum to repeal the 8th amendment in late May. Frank Connolly

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Village’s October 2018 edition

by Village 27 April, 2018 0 Comments

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Make sure of the facts

by Frankie Gaffney 5 April, 2018 0 Comments

There are two dominant interpretations of what’s come to be known as “call-out culture”. Many see it as an effective way of holding people, particularly public figures, to account for objectionable deeds and utterances that their status might otherwise have allowed them get away with. Social media has certainly played a massive role in an accelleration of accountability that is changing the way big organisations function. For the powers-that-be many styles of “cover-up” are simply no longer possible. One individual can go viral with their story in a matter of minutes. However, many others see call-out culture as trial by mob, a return to a medieval mentality, or puritanism in another guise – particularly when applied to individuals rather than institutions. Either way, I think – I hope – everyone can agree people shouldn’t be held to account for things they haven’t actually said or done. Yet over the past year it seems there is a disturbing new trend in the now conglomerated battlegrounds of media and social media. The values of call out culture – the idea that people should be made atone for perceived offence through group-shaming – are no longer a phenomenon of those periphery cultures largely concerned with traditional arenas of cultural theory: questions of gender, minorities, and identity. In 2017, call out culture went mainstream in a big way. I’m not referring to the Hollywood purge, which did aim to address gendered issues, and seems to have been long-overdue. The culture of the call-out – its language, style, mentality – started to intrude into new domains. The standard of offence became radically expanded, and the concept of proportionality (let the punishment fit the crime) went out the window. The most depressingly ridiculous example of this has to be the career ending decision of Barry McElduff to make a short video in a local shop, pretending not to be able to find a loaf of bread which was in fact balanced on his head. The video was posted the night before the, to be fair – fairly inauspicious – date of the 42nd anniversary of the Kingsmills massacre. Kingsmills was one of the most despicable atrocities of The Troubles. A group of workers had been travelling on a bus home from a factory when they were stopped by what was ostensibly a British Army patrol. In one of the most poignant gestures of the Troubles, when the gunmen asked the single Catholic worker to identify himself, his Protestant co-workers tried to prevent him stepping forward, as they believed it to be a loyalist gang targetting Catholics. He identified himself nonetheless, but was spared. It was the 10 Protestant workers who were machine-gunned to death. Another man survived despite having been shot 18 times. After the the video was “called-out” on Twitter, condemnation of Kingsmills seemed immediately to become coterminous with condemnation of McElduff. Defence of McElduff was taken to be defence of the massacre. This is a fixture of this style of thinking – any query as to whether or not the accusation is accurate is taken as defence of the deed that has been alleged. Those who queried the likelihood the then MLA was performing some piece of bizarre Daliesque sectarian performance art, were met with rebuttals reasserting how wicked a deed the massacre was, and that it was no laughing matter. Surely true, but irrelevant to ascertaining whether or not McElduff was actually referencing Kingsmills when he put the loaf on his head. I watched in dismay as a number figures across the political spectrum – some of whom I’ve long admired – rushed to condemn McElduff, refusing to countenance the notion that this was an unfortunate coincidence. His own then ordained leader-to-be, Mary Lou-McDonald proved of the same mind-set as she condemned McElduff’s tweet as “crass”, “stupid”, and “unforgivable”. She of course had not condemned the numerous social media posts prior to this in which McElduff had balanced other comestibles on his head, although there were many – it seems to have been a running pantomime gag for the politician. When someone points me to the sectarian atrocity he was referencing when he took a photo with a Snickers balanced on his scalp, then I’ll believe there was ill-intent. It was instead his young daughter who was left to try and defend her father against the social media onslaught, explaining the photo was taken in the shop she worked in, the family always ate Kingsmills bread, etc etc, to absolutely no avail. Fixed thinking is another aspect of this praxis – no amount of evidence will exhonerate the accused, any defence offered is taken as further evidence of their guilt. What mattered to McDonald was not the facts of the matter, or loyalty to someone who dedicated their life to a political party she joined in the late 1990s, what mattered was assuaging the mob. And this has become the prime directive for many powerful people, not only in politics, but in the media and corporate world. This is regrettable, as another recurring theme is that the outrage is often so loud it entirely obfuscates the circumstances of the original incident. In another example, John Connors drew ire after tweeting that he personally wouldn’t call the police on someone for “robbing bread”. This was then completely conflated with events later that same day, when a stolen digger was used to smash and try to steal the safe from a Lidl which had earlier been looted of food and drink. No amount of clarification could convince many of the call-out crew that Connnors was not trying to downplay or justify an event that hadn’t even happened when he originally tweeted. Thankfully Connors is comparatively invulnerable to these tactics, unlike McElduff his career is not subject to the vicissitudes of political sensitivities. Lest anyone accuse me of being partisan, here’s an example of precisely the same style put to use in the opposite direction. When former Taoiseach Liam Cosgrave died, RTE presenter Sean O’Rourke retold

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Capitalisteracy

by Harry Browne 4 April, 2018 0 Comments

Ireland has a dreadful, inequitable, dangerously failing healthcare system. The State’s answer is the likes of healthy Ireland, which runs a public campaign that, in essence, throws the responsibility for health on to individuals – who seemingly just need help from an initiative to ‘empower and motivate them’. February saw the launching conference – hosted by the Broadcasting Authority of Ireland (BAI) at Facebook Ireland HQ – of a new network, Media Literacy Ireland (disclosure: I’m in it). From the conference stage there was lots of talk about empowerment and not much talk exploring from whom it might be necessary to take power away. There was even a speaker from healthy Ireland, lest the analogy be missed. Don’t be surprised, then, to encounter an Irish campaign in the next year or two imploring you to the media equivalent of ‘eat your vegetables, get some exercise, don’t smoke cigarettes’. Something along the lines of ‘read the Irish Times, trust in Miriam, don’t tweet fake news’. Or maybe not. Media Literacy Ireland potentially has some of the hallmarks of industry-friendly campaigns like Drink Aware and Gamble Aware, plus the involvement of a regulator, the BAI, which might like a campaign that implicitly justifies light-touch regulation abetted by ‘greater public awareness’. On the other hand – and credit to its organisers for this – Media Literacy Ireland has come into being as a genuine network of interested researchers, activists, community-media practitioners and others. And most of us in it are not disposed to frame the problem with Irish media as one of public credulousness, to be addressed by offering tips for spotting ‘extremism’ online. Regular readers will know my view: that media (like healthcare) have a capitalism problem, and that everything from fake news to clickbait to inadequate investigative resources to Denis O’Brien ows from that basic source. But you don’t have to agree with me and name the underlying problem as capitalism to understand that there are structural causes for crises such as the one that erupted recently over Government ‘advertorial’. “I believe the Government is attempting to exploit the difficulties many local and regional titles are facing to promote their party interests”, said no less a media critic than Fianna Fáil’s Timmy Dooley, the party’s spokesman on communications. (How sweetly old-fashioned that word ‘communications’ can sound as it grapples with the changing world.) Media literacy, if it is to be of any use, has to do more than implore us to look for the little ‘special feature’ tag on the top of a piece of paid corporate or government puffery, then to regard the ‘journalism’ below with due scepticism. It must mean understanding ‘the difficulties’ for all journalism that operates in the current market, especially one in which technological change has accelerated existing trends toward blurred lines, and in which advertisers have alternatives to local and regional newspapers when it comes to reaching eyeballs. If the most poignant aspect of that brief, quickly snowed-under ‘Ireland 2040’ crisis was the image of the Taoiseach issuing guidelines for labelling advertorial content – guidelines of which the most callow intern in a local newsroom should surely already be aware – we shouldn’t lose sight of the fact that media have been operating at the edges of such guidelines for decades, for the benefit of advertisers looking to buy a little ersatz editorial credibility. How can this fail to be a lesson about how fragile, at best, any such credibility has become ? As the media may or may not have told you, global research shows trust in media is in tatters – media are less trusted than governments, NGOs, businesses – and Irish people are at the mistrustful end of the distribution. In this context, media literacy can hardly consist of legacy media saying ‘trust us, not them’. What can be done ? (Yes, short of getting rid of capitalism.) Anyone who has worked in a newsroom knows what a frightening prospect it would be to try to earn the public’s trust with transparency and accountability about our editorial practices. On a daily basis, contingent and incomplete information is transformed into definitive statements of ringing certitude. That’s one sausage factory we don’t want you to see inside, especially since the work often consists of sticking our label on someone else’s meat. The irony is that the technology often over-simplistically blamed for creating the journalism crisis has long offered tools for remarkable transparency, tools that most journalists have chosen to use only in limited ways. What if hyperlinks in journalists’ stories led not to dull pages of cross-references or to Wikipedia, but rather to images of documents and notebook pages, audio of interviews, pictures of the journalist in the field ? It can be done and has been done, but the experiments in transparency of the early web – notably the extraordinary 1996 investigative series by the aptly named Gary Webb in the San Jose Mercury news, about the CIA’s involvement in the cocaine trade – have rarely been repeated, let alone built upon. Such transparency would foster media literacy without the onus being placed on the audience. Whether it would foster trust is, of course, a matter of what audiences thought of the practices revealed by transparency. Interactivity and social media mean we have some tools whereby that reaction could be tested and gauged. Dublin Institute of Technology, thankfully, is prepared to put its money where my media-literacy mouth is: it’s funding a project that will will use the Liberty, a student- produced ‘hyperlocal’ newspaper and website for Dublin’s Liberties area, to innovate in the area of journalistic transparency. We’ll employ social media as a forum for sharing ‘the story behind the story’, with tweets, Facebook updates, Youtube videos and Instagram posts that unveil aspects of the production of journalism, from notebook pages to editing history, from who-was-interviewed to who-refused. A doctoral-level researcher will be responsible for implementation, monitoring, community engagement and evaluation of this project, which should help readers to understand better the process of news construction, and help journalists-in-training become accustomed to

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Seeya print

by Ken Phelan 6 October, 2016 0 Comments

The recent Audit Bureau of Circulation (ABC) figures for newspaper sales for January-June 2016 show an alarming decrease for nearly all Irish newspaper titles, with the demise of the industry itself now, for many, inevitable. Of the national newspapers, The Irish Times dropped 5.5 percent compared to the first half of last year, The Irish Independent is down 6.4 percent, The Irish Examiner 6.7 percent and The Evening Herald 8.4 percent in the same period. Most daily tabloids are down, apart from the Irish Sun, which saw a rise of 4.6 percent year on year. The Sunday Independent dropped 6.7 percent year, The Sunday Business Post 3.5 percent, The Sunday Times 6.4 percent and The Sunday World 8.9 percent. The Irish Mail on Sunday fell by 7.2 percent while the Irish Sun on Sunday recorded the only rise in circulation at +9 percent. Overall, the circulation of daily print titles was 5.7 percent lower and of the Sundays 6.3 percent lower. Globally, the threat to newspapers is epidemic. In May 2016, the 121-year-old Tampa Bay Tribune, Florida, ceased publication; in March, the London Independent and Independent on Sunday ceased their print publications and November 2015 saw Russia’s only independent English-speaking title The Moscow Times end its daily edition in favour of a weekly format. In 2013, The Washington Post was sold to Amazon.com founder and chief executive Jeffrey P Bezos for $250m. In September 2010, the Chairman and Publisher of The New York Times announced to an International Newsroom Summit that: “We will stop printing the New York Times sometime in the future, date TBD”. The Guardian, whose web edition is the world’s second most popular English-language newspaper website – after the Daily Mail online, has shed 200 jobs and clocked up losses of £69m for the last financial year with falls in both print and digital revenue leading to an £8m fall in total turnover to £209.5m. Digital revenues were £81.9m, down almost £2m from the preceding year as Facebook and Google ate up the bulk of the money it had made from mobile advertising. Based on current trends, commentators have predicted that only the Sunday and weekend newspapers will survive in a culture immersed in Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat and Youtube and with the proliferation of citizen journalism offering free ‘news’ content. What New Media offer is ‘free’ news as it happens from an infinite number of sources around the globe; in the age of New Media, traditional values of accuracy, accountability and professionalism are at risk from unverifiable facts, unconfirmed sources and the constant need for instant news; and gossip. With daily newspapers, today’s news is essentially yesterday’s, or this morning’s at best. Newspapers have made a concerted effort to shift content towards analysis and commentary, but this hasn’t been enough. What the recent ABC gures don’t reveal is where these disenfranchised readers are migrating. The loss of newspaper revenue may be partly attributable to growing internet usage and online culture, but this does not necessarily mean those same readers are now reading news online. A decline of 10,000 readers for a national newspaper does not equate to an additional 10,000 people reading or accessing news online. Youtube, Facebook, Twitter and other social media account for most internet usage, so perhaps not all migrated readers/users will be regular perusers of the Guardian online edition. A ‘cornerstone of democracy’ for over 400 years is now in danger of imploding. Attempts by newspapers to embrace New Media by offering pay walls for access to online content have so far been largely unsuccessful (though the Guardiannow boasts 50,000 ‘subscribers’); cynics point to the obvious – there is simply too much ‘free’ news to be harnessed online. Print Media’s only hope is to reinvent their current business model and somehow embrace their biggest rivals. What that does for journalism is another story. Ken Phelan

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Election Times

by Gerard Cunningham 1 March, 2016 0 Comments

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 emerging, and of course, “events, dear boy”. While its columnists and editorials may have declaimed preferences in the run-up to the general election, the Irish Times‘ front page generally affected a more neutral stance, certainly by comparison with the anti-Sinn Féin headlines which dominated the Irish Independent and its Sunday sister during the February campaign. The ‘newspaper of reference’ (formerly “of “record”) began the month in ‘phoney war’ mode, leading on Monday 1 February with coalition plans to “target home buyers and parents in poll pledges”. On the Tuesday, with still no election date declared, the story was “Taoiseach prepares Fine Gael ministers for election”. Perhaps ominously, on both days the below- the-fold story concerned the revelations regarding “Grace” a young woman with intellectual disabilities abused while in HSE care in a foster home. The story would feature again several times during the month and, by the end of the campaign, would threaten to inculpate Michael Noonan. Wednesday’s paper finally brought the official election notice, leading with Fine Gael ministers outlining their election promises, but the shine was short lived. Thursday, and the first election poll, brought “disappointing news for Coalition parties”. Much of the remainder of the campaign was spent trying to push back against those low poll numbers, which stubbornly refused to rise. By the first weekend, Fine Gael had announced a “tax U-turn to hit voters earning €100K” (the top 10% of all earners, though Irish Times readers would be better paid than the average). The election narrative was dominated at first by Fine Gael (at least on the front page) but it changed dramatically in the second week. The murderous Regency Hotel rampage called attention to cuts in Garda numbers and resources and Fine Gael, which prides itself as a law and order party, found itself on the back foot. At one point Sinn Féin’s Mary Lou McDonald attacked the government for being soft on crime during an RTÉ radio debate. By the end of the week, the lead story that Garda “may be issued with new weapons” helped to restore marginally Frances Fitzgerald’s battered image, but you know you (we?) are in trouble when Sinn Féin are attacking you from the right on crime. Meanwhile, bubbling below the fold, the news was no better. Lowry, Drumm and Luas strikes festered, and the Times awarded the first TV debate to Micheál Martin. Week Three began with Labour striking out to create a separate identity, promising “an abortion vote in any new deal” – definitely a plus for liberal Irish Times readers. Smaller parties got their first acknowledgement the following day, as the lead reported they did best in the previous night’s debate. For the rest of the week, it was almost as if the Irish Times tired of the “boring” election campaign, with more conventional “newsy” lead stories on an HSE inquiry into baby deaths, welfare benefits for migrants, and Brexit. Week Four began with the writing on the wall, summarised in a single Monday headline “Martin and FF rise in polls as Coalition stagnate”. Tuesday the paper reported Kenny and Martin had “equal backing in race for Taoiseach”, and the final TV debate failed to resolve anything for this hard-to-please newspaper as “leaders fail to land killer punch”, before Kenny’s “last-ditch call for vote in favour of stability.” Below the fold on the same day, the first mention of Sinn Féin in a front-page headline volunteered no favours: “Canvasser for Adams owns hay shed where ‘Slab’ Murphy cash was found”. ‘Slab’ was also the subject of one of the few passionate editorial columns (now perhaps self-deprecatingly titled “the Irish Times view”). Others quite reasonably despaired of the “short election, short of vision”. But while front pages covered national trends, debates and polls, and columnists inside the paper from Una Mullally (who, surprisingly for someone with a political agenda, gave up interest) to Breda O’Brien (vote for people of conscience, if you know what I mean) via Fintan O’Toole (who in the end detected an unlikely victory for social democracy) and Noel Whelan (who again somehow spotted the Fianna Fáil revolution implausibly early) ventilated partisan viewpoints, perhaps the most concise reportage on what happened on election day was by religious affairs correspondent Patsy McGarry, who on the day of the count reported from the north inner city, less than ten minutes from Tara St in a neighbourhood where few read the Irish Times, and fewer would share its editorial concerns: one, a hooded man, was picking up rubbish and putting it in a black plastic bag.“I didn’t vote. I don’t have a voting card. I was abroad for five years. It’s not important at all”. Gerard Cunningham