Unthinking self-apologists - Village Magazine

April 2015 49

MEDIA Banking Inquiry

F one thing was apparent from

the parade of senior newspaper

executives and editors before the

Oireachtas banking inquiry and the

subsequent opinion pieces, it is that

newspaper-folk are far less upset at

missing the bubble that at the idea that

they did so because of anything the

advertising department said.

Take Geraldine Kennedy as an exam-

ple. “The same editorial standards

applied in the property supplements as

elsewhere in the newspaper”, she told the

committee. “Advertisers did not write

editorial copy”, she added, addressing

a strawman no one had raised.

But perhaps her ﬁnest moment came

when she rejected the idea that Irish

Times editorial policy was subject to

political pressures. “I wasn’t bullied by

Charlie Haughey when in my 20s so I

wasn’t going to be bullied by lesser pol-

iticians in my 50s”, she said. Whether

this indicates that Charlie was a great

leader, or merely that his successors are

minnows will be left to the historians.

In her defence Kennedy was able to

point out that her paper had carried the

prophetic December 2006 article by

Morgan Kelly. Likewise, Irish Independ-

ent editor Ger O’Regan was able to point

to his decision to hire David McWilliams

as evidence of his good faith. What per-

centage of these prescient newspapers’

newsprint went to these sages was not

revealed.

McWilliams, for his part, told the

inquiry a month earlier that while he

was subjected to “personal and nasty

attacks” and “slapped down” by fellow

economists and senior bankers for his

analysis, he was never “muzzled” by his

editors, and was free to write what he

wanted.

But while editors let McWilliams get

on with it, Julien Mercille, whose appear-

ance before the inquiry set the tone for

the questioning of the editors and media

executives, has since been the subject of

several critical articles. The most coher-

ent of these came from Dan O’Brien, who

questioned Mercille’s research meth-

odology (and his “hard left” ideology).

Others were less focused. Ger O’Regan

launched a rambling broadside in the

Sunday Independent, starting oﬀ by

quoting Donald Rumsfeld’s “unknown

unknowns” and imagining commit-

tee member Joe Higgins as an Albanian

“commissar for economics”, before

ending with a dismissal of the “obscure

academic” Mercille as a “self-appointed

guru”.

Leaving aside how many pro-boom or

doom-warning articles were published

or broadcast, the media module did pro-

duce a few interesting statistics.

At its peak, property advertising

accounted for 17% of revenue at the

Irish Times, 14% at the Independent,

and 7% at the Irish Examiner. By con-

trast, property advertising accounted

for a mere 0.9% of RTÉ revenues.

In his research, Mercille identi-

ﬁed three strands which compromise

editorial independence and effec-

tive journalism: advertising revenues,

sourcing of stories, and close ties with

corporate and government interests.

The low level of reliance on property

advertising by RTÉ could therefore sug-

gest that whatever the problems were,

they weren’t due to advertising pres-

sures. Mercille is as critical of RTÉ and

its ‘Prime Time’ specials on the property

markets as he is of the newspapers.

However, while RTÉ didn’t profit

directly from property advertising to

the same extent as print, it did produce

content which fuelled the boom, accord-

ing to DIT journalism lecturer Harry

Browne, who highlighted “property

porn” TV programmes and print lifestyle

features which “encouraged readers to

constantly think about going higher and

higher up the ladder. To think about how

to get that bigger house; to think about

how to decorate their apartment in Bul-

garia, that sort of thing”.

Meanwhile, uncritical reliance on

sources was explicitly identified by

Examiner editor Tim Vaughan. “If we

were guilty of anything, and I believe we

were, it is that we believed and accepted

that institutions, such as the ﬁnancial

regulatory authorities, were doing their

jobs and doing them competently with

due diligence and with appropriate

compliance policies, and with proper

political and departmental oversight”,

he said.

“We are reliant on agents of the State

to be competent, professional, open,

honest and reliable in what they do and

say, and then we report on that”.

Geraldine Kennedy echoed a similar

sentiment. “The media, as always, was

reliant on reporting the views of

the specialists, be they government,

the Central Bank, the regulator, or the

profession of economists”, she said.

“Journalists were less well-placed than

others to make an accurate assess-

ment”. Whether such views stand up to

any scrutiny in terms of the role of the

media in a democracy is doubtful.

Of Mercille’s three strands then,

advertising might not be the villain it is

often presumed. Editors do guard their

independence jealously in the face of

commercial pressures, after all. That

leaves the interlinked issues of story-

sourcing and the close ties between

media, government and corporate

interests.

In a small country like Ireland, those

may not even be compromises that edi-

tors are consciously aware of. •

The media module of the Banking Inquiry highlighted the media’s bias and

continuing unreﬂectiveness. By Gerard Cunningham

Unthinking self-apologists

Editors seem

unaware of

issues of

story-sourcing

and the close

ties between

media,

government

and corporate

interests

“