Terry Prone Watch

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The ubiquitous Terry Prone is, in the opinion of this blogger, quite frankly something of a menace in Irish public life.   Readers of this blog post are invited to share examples of Prone’s outrageous spinning for all things Fianna Fail and right wing. 

Having devoted much of her PR career to trying to put something resembling panache into Fianna Fail’s high rollers (a desperate, desperate job to be sure) she seems nowadays to be bending herself to spinning the economic crisis.  It might not matter so much if tv panel show producers and newspaper editors could get the idea into their heads that it’s possible to broadcast a programme or print a newspaper without there having to be something said or written by Terry Prone in them. 

When it comes to the dark arts of spin-doctoring there is no better woman for the job.  An article of Frank Connolly’s about TP once referred to her as ‘The High Priestess of Spin’.  Examples of her wily working ways abound but as good a place as any to begin the job of shining a spotlight on Terry Prone would be with the upset one of her recent Irish Examiner columns has cased to people with cancer.  The article basically recommended to cancer patients that they ought to face up to the fact they are going to die, that optimisim in the face of the disease was misplaced and that they might as well forego all the treatments and medications.  Wouldn’t Mary Harney and all her private health care chums be delighted if these ideas took off? 

From Prone’s own point of view, the column was undoubtedly a PR disaster visited on herself – a slipping of the ‘bubbly’, ‘chatty’, ‘chirrupy, self confident’ mask she usually wears to disguise the rather nasty meaness of her objectives. On this occasion, however,  there they were in plain view for all the world to see.  This much appears to have been acknowledged because the column is no longer available in the Examiner’s archives and cannot be found on Google – not even on Prone’s own website. 

 The following comment on the letter (see link above) by Margaret Browne from Killeagh in Co Cork has been sent to the Examiner letters page but whether it will be published or not is anyone’s guess:

Dear Sir
 
I write in response Margaret Browne’s letter in today’s Examiner about the heartlessness of Terry Prone’s recent article on the subject of cancer. As a keen observer of Terry Prone’s columns, may I offer the following thought to Margaret Browne and others who may have been similarly offended?  For a long time I have had the conviction that the clue to reading Terry Prone is first of all to ask yourself what she is spinning this week, because if you look carefully, behind all the bon mots, bonhomie and funny stories, she is always spinning something.   On this occasion I believe she was advocating the idea that, rather than having expectations of cancer care services ‘ordinary people’ could regard themselves as better human beings if they quietly laid down and died. This is not the first time she has attempted this theme.  Not very long ago, also in her column in the Examiner,  Terry Prone decried the patients and others who phone Joe Duffy to describe their experiences of the health service  – and ridiculed Mr Duffy, his listeners and his programme for enabling such public expressions of despair and concern.  All this, you see, at a time when the government and Mary Harney in particular are coming under fire for the parlous state of the health service, into which billions of taxpayers’ euro have been poured to the benefit of private business ‘investors’ – with no concomitant improvement in the quality of service.  If anything things are getting worse.  As a PR professional, Ms Prone has earned a handsome living advising Fianna Fail governments on how to sell unpopular policies and equally unpopular politicians.  If she has not quite managed the feat of persuading us that these pigs ears have been made into silk purses, then she must resort to the other side of public relations: shaping the attitudes of the population at large.  In this last respect, Terry Prone is a tireless and subtle warrior for the neo-conservative, irresponsible and uncaring policies that have destroyed the country.  The plight of cancer patients is a powerful phenomenon and one which has regularly brought successive health ministers into disrepute for doing everything and anything bar the needful to improve standards of care.  It is into the heart of this particular scourge of health policy, I believe, that Terry Prone is aiming her spears.  We should keep an eye out for them. 
Yours sincerely
Miriam Cotton               

Prone has been working overtime to sell the idea that the best people don’t complain or go public about anything.  She would like, it seems, to narcotise the entire country into obedient submission in these times of threatened cuts, unemployment, strikes and civil disquiet.  Here she is again advocating the shy person as a much maligned but better example of the species and spinning their advantages over the more outspoken among us.   It must surely raise more than a few laughs to see Prone advertising herself as ‘a card-carrying member of the shy brigade’.   I’m confounded by these particular assertions:

This country is predjudiced against shy people. It wants everybody to be open, upbeat, part of a group, awash in self-esteem and bubbling with chatty, chirrupy self confidence.

I don’t think I’ve ever seen anything less true said of Irish people.  The fact is we are typically and lamentably reluctant to assert ourselves – and more likely to be uncomfortable around people who do .  A point not lost on Brian Lenihan who was able to go abroad in recent weeks and boast that in any other country the fiscal measures he had just introduced would have led to rioting.  Terry Prone is ever on hand to play her part in making sure that things stay that way.

Miriam Cotton

Peter Murtagh at the Irish Times needs to heed his own advice

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Murtagh has a piece in today’s Irish Times in which he analyses the media reaction to Monica Leech’s libel victory against The Herald. He bemoans the failure of the losing side to take the point: that they had done wrong and really ought to apologise for it. Instead, he says, they are focusing on the amount of the award, unwilling to recognise that it is intended to send a signal to the media that people are angry at the casual way they target people with calculated indifference to the facts. Murtagh says:

“Many fellow citizens believe we in the media think we can say anything we like and get away with it. They think we target people unjustly, with little thought of the pain we inflict on them and their families. You know what? They are largely correct, but the brush is applied across all media, as though we are all the same.”

Well, quite so Peter. Now perhaps you would care to apply this perspective to your own treatment of the residents of Erris in County Mayo, several of whom you have targetted with some of the most vitriolic and ill-informed journalism ever seen in the pages of the Irish Times. The chief beneficiaries of your attacks are the gigantic oil and gas exploration company Royal Dutch Shell – a company with a violent and enviornmentally destructive track record – and the Fianna Fail party whose wretched mismanagement of the coutry’s energy resources is one of the major scandals of our time.

Further observations here about Peter Murtagh’s article (above) and of coverage of the Corrib Gas issue generally – as published in recent edition of Village magazine. 

Miriam Cotton

Stop Climate Chaos with a Motoring supplement

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By David Manning

“However overwhelmed or helpless we feel, one painless step that we could take would be to take part in the Stop Climate Chaos protest at noon on Sandymount Strand on Saturday, June 13th.

The Metro newspaper [owned by the Irish Times] is printing special red and blue covers for the event. Participants will use the covers to create images, such as a giant egg-timer, to symbolise time running out. It will be a message to politicians that people want action now. (http://www.stopclimatechaos. ie/)

Every era has its blind spots and sometimes they result in tragic injustices like industrial schools. However, our blind spot in relation to climate change is truly enormous.

If even a fraction of the Doomsday scenarios predicted by climate scientists come true, our children will be asking us questions within in a far shorter time span about why we failed to take action on climate change.” [Breda O’Brien, the Irish Times]

Perhaps I’m being too cynical, but…

Dear Breda,

Do you think it would acceptable if participants at the Stop Climate Chaos protest used the cover of the IT travel section instead?

Best wishes,

David [6/6/09]

Joe Higgins humours the Irish Times

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“It’s the piquant notion that a man once described as “a failed person . . . with a failed ideology” is miraculously back on top while Bertie Ahern, the one who characterised him thus, is the one forced to examine himself and his ideology.”

Williams’ Corrib Hatchet Job

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Paul Williams’ recent TV3 ‘exposé’ on the Corrib gas project can now be found on YouTube. While advertised as a balanced investigation into the media narrative of a two sided battle, even the Irish Independent was sceptical:

“instead of providing an exposé he contented himself with innuendo and abuse, some of it so vehement that the viewer almost felt sympathy for the die-hard fanatics and professional agitators who’ve latched on to this bitter campaign.”

It’s in six parts, below is the first, the rest are equally bad:

Irish media failing over Rossport

Comment

The media are taking the side of Goliath in this David v Goliath issue, without verifying their facts. By Miriam Cotton

A version of this article appears in this month’s issue of Village Magazine (June 2009).

“I hate to criticise a multinational, because generally speaking I am a great fan of multinationals (they being the basis of our present prosperity) but I have to say that Shell has been scandalously remiss in not employing someone to bump off a few of these fellows.” [Kevin Myers, Irish Independent, Friday 3rd August 2007]

In April 2006, life-long native of Erris, Co Mayo, Willie Corduff was honoured to go to California to accept the coveted Goldman Environmental Prize – awarded to him for his efforts to protect his community from environmental and other threats it faces from the proposed Shell/ Statoil/ Marathon Consortium’s Corrib Gas project. The Goldman is awarded annually to just six people from around the world. Here was a big story, a source of national pride, with international significance and full of human and social interest. Yet there was only a relatively low-key murmur about it in the Irish national media.

Three years later almost to the day Corduff found himself attacked and viciously beaten by a number of men in balaclavas.

By the early hours of April 23rd, 2009, Corduff had spent much of the previous day trying to prevent the erection (with dubious permission) of fencing for a Shell compound above Glengad Beach in Broadhaven Bay, by sitting under a Shell works truck thus rendering it inoperative. The sandy beach cliff at Glengad is home to a much-loved population of sand martins but it is also the proposed landfall site for the 92km, globally unprecedented, pipeline of highly volatile raw gas – from seven well heads out in the Corrib field. Having hit the landfall at Glengad, Shell say the pressure will, if the project goes ahead, be reduced from the extremely high 345 bar pressure to 144 bar via a “reduction valve” and then travel a further 9 kilometres inland, criss-crossing the exquisitely beautiful Broadhaven Bay, to a proposed refinery at Ballinaboy.

Continue reading Irish media failing over Rossport →

Don’t shoot the messenger – Part 2

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Political and business leaders, regulators and economists all fell down on this job, as can now be seen in retrospect. Since these are principal decision-makers and wielders of power they set and frame the terms on which the media report their activities.” [Paul Gillespie, Why so many failed to see the crisis coming, Irish Times]

Over the last year or so we have been in contact with a number of journalists from Ireland’s broadsheets, seeking their views on the media / property relationship. We asked why the issue has been ignored and suggested that the topic deserved open discussion – that perhaps it pointed towards a deeper issue of compromise between funding and journalism. Surprisingly, and without exception, journalists agreed that this was indeed an unhealthy relationship.

Although we have agreed not to make these conversations public, we thought it was worth sharing some of these media insider thoughts with you. Though the authority is somewhat lost given the anonymous nature of these quotes, they are nonetheless valuable insights and admissions.

Reacting to our point that “the Irish media is deeply complicit in the financial crisis, by virtue of its self-evident vested interest in the speculative bubble,” one journalist had this to say:

“These are compelling points…Your media criticism is particularly valid…The media was complicit: I cannot defend it. We bought into the myth too, and the ad revenues were not the only reason, although I am sure they were a factor.”

another responded:

“I [have] made the very point about the media’s, and particularly the Irish Times’, role in this cheerleading. But no one ran with that particular ball. Why? Because the Times was about to plough its cash into guess what – my home.ie!”

and another:

“There is for sure (or there can be) an uncomfortable relationship between advertisers and journalists but in here, there’s a Berlin Wall between editorial and commercial.”

Commenting on one of the deluge of articles about opportunities for overseas property buyers, one journalist explained their predicament:

“All in all, I accept that we, like almost every other media outlet, have given acres and acres over the years to property and, for want of a better expression, ‘boom talk’, but for the most part, we’re just the messenger…Where I think there are difficulties for media is in the question of by reporting matters to what extent, if any, is one promoting the subject being reported? I don’t know the answer to that one – it’s the journalists’ chicken and egg question; the best I can say is that one should report matters soberly and not sensationalise them… but we’ll never get it wholly right.”

And another responded on the failure to identify the warning signs:

“I don’t think people were either unaware or unwilling to comment. In the professional circles of economics and finance these issues were from ’07 on anyhow well aired, analysed and discussed. However, one of the characteristics of any bubble is that we all, to a greater or lesser extent, get caught up in same. Now, the job of newspapers is ultimately to sell newspapers – if you cry stinking fish stinking fish then few will purchase…So, was I wrong then? Yes, in retrospect. As new information comes I adapt my views.”

These candid accounts are so rarely revealed in print. Few reading their daily paper will be exposed to admissions that newspapers are there to sell, primarily, and to inform, secondarily.

There is also a worrying acknowledgement that journalists don’t even aspire to be the ‘Fourth Estate’, check and balance of power, that they often portray themselves as – “For the most part, we’re just the messenger.” A messenger for whom and for what? Those with the power to influence? Those with money, political clout and business connections? What is the media then, other than an extension of that power?

Paul Gillespie, quoted above, answers these questions, explaining that political and business leaders “frame the terms on which the media report their activities.” The journalist’s hands are tied before they even put pen to paper.

Putting your hands up

Despite this depressing conclusion, there are journalists with a willingness to discuss this issue, journalists who reject the pressure to act as “corporate stenographers.” Eamon Dunphy is one such journalist.

Dunphy certainly has his blind spots, a propensity to defend the ownership of the Irish Independent for one. Even to compare Tony O’Reilly’s stewardship with the investigative spirit of the Washington Post during the Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward era (the journalists behind the Watergate story). A hallucinatory vision that prompted this response from Vincent Browne:

“Ludicrously, he compared O’Reilly to Catherine (sic) Graham of the Washington Post, who stood by Woodward and Bernstein during the Watergate scandal. Does Dunphy know about what happened to Joe MacAnthony?”

Of course Dunphy could not know about Joe MacAnthony (interviewed by MediaBite in 2008) and hold the same regard for today’s Irish Independent, the two thoughts cannot exist together. Nevertheless, Dunphy has chosen to take on the most powerful lobby the media is forced to go up against, the media itself.

Speaking on Newstalk’s ‘Lunchtime with Eamon Keane‘ with Irish Times Assistant Editor Fintan O’Toole in April this year, Dunphy reacted to the recent emergency budget and, to the shock of host, reflected on a decade of failure in Irish journalism.

In a lesson on media openness to self examination, and even when tabled alongside Fintan O’Toole, one of Ireland’s few respected left wing media commentators, he comes up against the standard reaction – diversion:

[EK – Eamon Keane, ED – Eamon Dunphy, FO’T – Fintan O’Toole]

“EK: Eamon, what was your initial reaction to the budget?

ED: …the biggest story in the budget is undoubtedly the National Asset Management Agency (NAMA). This idea of taking over bad debts and delivering responsibility to the taxpayer. We don’t yet know how this will work out, but it could potentially double the national debt, which is a problem for our children and our grandchildren.

It is not just developers, its the whole of the Irish establishment that created this. The spivery, the cronyism, in the media, not just the developers and bankers…

EK: How do you mean ‘in the media’?

ED: The media were a huge part of this conspiracy to seduce, lure or terrify the Irish people into borrowing the amount they did. Principally for property, but not just for property.

While the finger pointing has to begin with those who are most responsible – the government, Brian Cowen present Taoiseach and Minister for Finance for four years, where he threw petrol on this fire. If he didn’t know what David McWilliams, Richard Curran and an awful lot of other economists knew then he shouldn’t have had that job. The Department of Finance, the Central Bank, the Regulator – who failed to regulate the banks, they are principally responsible.

But, there were others. The builders and the developers of course. And also the media, who are either cheerleaders for politicians or who are conspiring through property supplements and motoring sections, among other things, to conceal from people the reality – that you have to live prudently and that you have to have a certain modesty about your life.

EK: Eamon, I’m glad to welcome Fintan O’Toole Assistant Editor at the Irish Times to join us. Fintan, would agree with Eamon’s assessment?

FO’T: Broadly I would, yes. The key issue, when you get over the initial shock of budget, that you are faced with is that all of this pain and it is real pain for people is just in the margins, the big story is the bank bailout.

The context you have to put it in is to say, look you are taking all this pain in order to limit the growth of the national debt and at the same time we’re doubling the national debt by taking all these bad debts completely into the public realm. The ordinary person in Ireland is effectively taking on the debts of Sean Dunne, Bernard MacNamara and all of the property developers and bankers who with absolute recklessness and greed lent these people money, including to buy properties which are not even in Ireland. A huge amount of this money borrowed was to buy property in the UK, half of London is owned by these people. Property in Bulgaria, in Hungary.

It is very difficult for people to get there heads around this fact – that they are taking this pain, but at the same time someone is telling them “by the way, all that pain you are taking is all only a tiny part of the real story, which is that the people who caused this have to be bailed out and you, the person who is already suffering because they are paying ridiculously inflated mortgage because they were suckered into buying houses which were probably worth half of what they paid for them, people who were on forty year mortgages, you now have to stump up for the bankers.”

People aren’t stupid, they realise we are in an absolutely appalling crisis and that have to take pain to get out of it, but we needed two things. One, we needed not to be told that [we need to reduce the national debt and] at the same time the national debt doesn’t matter because we can double it at the stroke of a pen. And two, we needed some articulation of how the country will look in three years time. If you go through this sequence of pain after pain, what kind of society might we get out of it?

I was shocked that there wasn’t even a gesture, an attempt, to put some kind of context on these events. To say, the system that we have operated and driven into the ground is over, here’s what we are putting in its place. Nothing, not a single gesture to say we can have a decent sustainable society which provides some sort of basic security for the majority of the population.

EK: Fintan, something Eamon said there struck me – maybe I’ve colluded? What he said in terms of the media, I’m interested to hear what you think about this. We had property features on radio programmes, we had newspapers doing property supplements and motoring supplements. There was a general collusion. So it is perhaps simplistic to just blame the government, the financial regulator and the central bank. We all colluded in this, including media organisations.

FO’T: I’m slightly worried about ‘we all’ and the term ‘media’, media is a plural term. Within all media organisations there is a plurality. Eamon is right to point to the fact that undoubtedly the advertising industry, of which the media is essentially an arm, as every organ of the media is completely dependent on advertising, and as we are of course finding out now there isn’t any…

EK: Unless you have a license fee, you are somewhat buttressed…

FO’T: But even RTE can’t function without ads. So there is no part of the Irish media which is outside that circle. Everyone was in the business of advertising, and advertising is in the business of selling optimism and is in the business of selling debt – selling you things you can’t afford to buy.

So Eamon is absolutely right in the sense that the entire media was part of that process. I think it fair to say however that part of this story is that a large number of people in the media have been saying for 8 or 9 years now, not just last year and the year before, really going back to the turn of the century, and not just as a matter of opinion, but saying in a very reasoned way – that looking at examples from around the world – this process is unsustainable, it is going to crash.

I know some people in the media came under enormous pressure, for instance when the Irish Times printed Morgan Kelly’s (Professor of Economics at University College Dublin) very stark piece about 2 years ago, the property crash is his subject, saying that based on research from around the world Irish property prices are going to fall by 40-50%. When then happens is that the property industry goes…

EK: I just want to let Eamon Dunphy back in…

ED: Fintan, where that warning should have been published should have been in the property supplement of the Irish Times. Journalism is really about serving the community and the reader. Where that particular, and I’m not blaming the Irish Times solely, the Irish Independent had a supplement and so did all the Sunday’s, but really if the Irish Times was cognisant of this fact and it had this contributor, Morgan Kelly, then he should have been published in the property supplement. This is where we all went wrong.

Why is it that now people can stand back and point fingers without looking at themselves. I think this is a case for all Irish media, not just at the Irish Times. Though its fair to say it had the most lavish and inflationary property supplement, despite the fact it is supposed to be the paper of record in the country, a campaigning newspaper. The question is who was this serving? Principally, in this area of property values? It was serving the developers the builders and ultimately the tax revenue of the government. I don’t see any hands up there, I think we should all put our hands up.”

Eamon Keane’s shock at the suggestion he might have “colluded” in inflating the property bubble is telling (it is worth listening to the exchange to hear just how surprised Keane is to hear Dunphy’s remarks). Only someone who has been living under a large rock for the last 10 years could reasonably deny Stewart Lee’s summation of media priorities: “Before all this happened all that was on television all day was programmes about how to buy a house, do up a house or sell a house for more than you payed for it, or do all three simultaneously.” Yet even an experienced journalist such as Keane, presenting the “freshest, wittiest and most challenging programming on the Irish airwaves,” is oblivious to the issue.

Fintan O’Toole’s defense is as predictable as it is infuriating. He admits without reservation that “the entire media was part of that process – selling you things you can’t afford to buy” and yet cites Morgan Kelly’s warning in 2006 as evidence that the media supports a “plurality” of views, failing to mention that much of the negative response to Kelly’s piece came from the media itself.

And despite Dunphy’s appeal, there is little evidence to suggest the media will ‘hold its hands up’, without that is, a concerted effort by readers to force them to.

As one prominent journalist told us:

“I agree with the generality of your criticism – of course we (the media) need to be held to account and people like yourself (ie readers) are the best ones to do it.”

To read Part 1 of ‘Don’t shoot the messenger’ click here.

Don’t Shoot the Messenger – Part 1

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According to Vincent Browne the establishment of the National Asset Management Agency (NAMA) represents “potentially the single largest transfer of wealth ever to take place at once.”

The agency, established to “oversee the transfer of the dodgy loans held by the banks, loans amounting to €90 billion,” will take on billions of Euro in debt owed by developers, essentially making the public liable for the private sector’s ‘commercial risk’. A risk which has been realised in the ghost estates mercilessly documented by Eamonn Crudden in his short film ‘Wallets Full of Blood: Houses On The Moon‘.

Properties sold as investment opportunities and, often secondarily, as ‘a place to call home’ will now not only become the crash landing of negative equity, but also the burden of additional tax. Taxes that will not be spent on public services, but set aside for the state financed bailout of a rich minority.

As quoted in ‘Houses on the Moon’, “What was built to keep people safe, is gonna trap them inside.”

Scapegoat the poor

By establishing NAMA, the government identified the primary cause of our economic difficulties. Not public sector inefficiencies; not uncompetitive wages; not excessive social welfare payments; not even reliance on low corporate tax rates. But reckless lending, by reckless financial institutions, to reckless developers, spurred on by a reckless government and all under the watch of a reckless establishment press.

So how does this inconvenient fact fit into the recessionary narrative? Not very comfortably it would seem.

In the weeks and months since the banking crisis was exposed “the economic debate [has morphed] from an obsession with debts and deficits into a full-blown assault on the public realm that has more in common with Thatcherism than it does with mere fiscal prudence.”

For instance, The Irish Times’ Stephen Collins recently warned that “[t]ackling the public service pay bill and the social welfare bill can hardly be avoided.” Dan O’Brien of the Economist Intelligence Unit also told of the need to address “the elephant in the room” in the Irish public finances,” declaring that a “reduction in the minimum wage from €8.65 was “an open and shut case.”” While Sarah Carey fretted about the potential impact of bank nationalisation, whereby the inefficiencies of the public sector might exacerbate the incompetence of the banking sector! “I accept that there are talented people in the public sector, but the inertia of government is more than they can usually bear. Worse, it’s contagious. Turn bank employees into public servants and I guarantee the malaise will seep in.”

A sentiment summed up in ‘Shock Doctrine-esque’ clarity by an Irish Times’ Editorial writer: “Serious reform of the public sector – too long shirked by all political parties – was never more necessary. An economy in crisis presents a political opportunity to achieve that reform.”

Michael Taft explains this narrative as “merely a logical working out of basic right-wing premises. It started with calls for public expenditure controls, then moved on to the ‘bloated’ public sector and ‘overpaid’ public sector workers, proceeding to private sector wage cuts – and so on until it cascaded into a full blown attack on the public realm, making those on the lowest incomes scapegoats for the failed policies of past right-wing governments.”

Good and Bad criticism

As we discussed in ‘The Media and the Banking Bailout‘, the major problem facing the media is that it has been one of the leading proponents of the system which led us here. Newspapers disguised the true nature of the bubble economy, devoting ever more pages to property – the indestructible pillar of capitalism, now crumbling around us.

This interdependence between property and media industries has recently resulted in severe pay cuts for journalists and editors alike. Independent News and Media’s Irish operations’ revenues “fell 6 per cent to €377.3 million due to a “significant fall-off in advertising”.” The Irish Times’ Managing Director, and presumably the brainchild behind the purchase of MyHome.ie, Maeve Donovan explains that “the decline in property and recruitment advertising has been particularly marked.”

A clear recognition of the media’s financial reliance on the property industry, yet it has not prompted a corresponding look at the potential journalistic compromises caused by this dependence.

This reluctance to address a clear conflict of interest is at least partly due to the media’s resistance to certain types of criticism.

Take for instance, David Bloch’s recent piece in the Irish Times. Mr. Bloch, chief executive of Brightwater, a firm of recruitment specialists, accuses the Irish media of acting as a “bad news brigade,” stoking pessimistic sentiment and thus worsening the economic situation. He writes:

“The world is in a dreadful state, no doubt. Ireland’s pillars of prosperity have been eroded by many factors. The construction boom is over and will take two to five years to recover fully. The banking sector is in trouble globally, but there are certainly green shoots of recovery all around the world.”

Bloch’s criticism is certainly outwardly negative, but it also suggests some underlying broadly positive attributes. It suggests the media is uncovering and highlighting ‘bad news’ stories, such as banking irregularities, political mismangement and job losses, at the expense of ‘good news’ stories, such as feint signs that unemployment growth is slowing – the former reflecting negatively on business and politics, the later reflecting positively. This type of criticism therefore, reinforces the idea that the media acts as it claims – as a check and balance. This could then be dubbed ‘good’ criticism.

Quite oppositely, when criticism appears to expose subservience to right wing establishment ideology journalists are far less willing to entertain it. For example, the Irish Times’ Sarah Carey was recently challenged by Michael Taft and Donagh Brennan of the Irish Left Review to substantiate her claim that the Irish welfare system offered “the most generous social welfare payments in the EU” (the inference being that welfare payments needed to be cut), a claim also made by a number of others.

Carey was unable to establish a verifiable source for her “most generous” claim, simply deferring to information she had been passed by her ‘contact’ in the Department of Finance. The OECD data Taft and Brennan cited on the other hand contradicted Carey’s claim. In fact “a single person claiming social welfare in Ireland received payments that were 29 percent below the average of other EU-15 countries…Even poorer countries such as Portugal and Spain make higher payments.” Yet Carey refused to accept the error and more importantly failed to make a correction of equal prominence.

This conservative meme also prompted an Irish Times poll with the none-to-subtle question “Do you think Ireland’s social welfare system is too generous?” and following a report by David Grubb of the OECD (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development), in which he laid out recommendations for an employment “activation programme” and suggested that the government should “tighten and modernise benefits administration,“ readers were treated to some sensationalist headlines.

The Irish Independent announced “Dole is too generous, says top jobs expert.“ While the Irish Examiner told of the need to “get tough on welfare recipients.”

In fact, Grubb refers to social welfare policy strictly within the confines of its implications for employment activation: “The commitment to maintain social welfare rates at a higher level (in comparison to 2000 levels) is another reason that Ireland now needs to develop stronger activation measures…because international comparisons suggest that countries where net benefit replacement rates are high spend far more on both active and passive labour market programmes.”

The sacred journalistic notion of ‘balance’ came in the form of a 200 odd word press release from Cori (Conference of Religious in Ireland) – “Generous Irish welfare a ‘myth'” – unfortunately resulting in yet another headline tying the word ‘generous’ to ‘welfare’.

The property problem

“Money has lost its value, property has lost its value, Woolsworths gift vouchers have lost their value…Before all this happened all that was on television all day was programmes about how to buy a house, do up a house or sell a house for more than you payed for it, or do all three simultaneously…and in between these programmes about how to buy a house, or do up a house, or sell a house for more than you paid for it, were adverts telling you how to get money to do this, money that wasn’t really yours, by taking out a loan or by suing someone for something that was obviously your fault.” [Stewart Lee, Stewart Lee’s Comedy Vehicle, BBC2]

The issue of property is a thorn in the media’s side. A dirty secret omitted from debate. Stewart Lee, quoted above, is one of the few that have attempted to address the issue. But as a stand-up comedian, his analysis is unlikely to be subjected to further scrutiny in mainstream discourse. Satire is a forum for debate that the establishment is understandably unwilling to enter into.

Having said that, rare instances of unintentional satire do appear, such as the Irish Independent’s ‘5 Mins With‘ interview with disgraced Chairman of Anglo Irish Bank, Sean Fitzpatrick in 2006. In 2008 it was revealed that Fitzpatrick had hidden €87m in secret loans over a period of eight years, yet the most probing question he was asked by the Irish Independent was: “If you had a spare million?” To which Fitzpatrick replied: “I’d do something for the homeless; provide day-time facilities.”

The failure to report accurately and investigate thoroughly during the bubble years raises very serious questions about the media’s ability to act as a ‘check and balance’. The continuing failure to acknowledge this issue undermines its authority to comment on the solution to the current crisis.

Even on the rare occasions that commentators raise the subject, it is invariably met with a deafening silence.

For instance, UCD’s Colm McCarthy broached the subject on RTE’s Prime Time late last year in interview with Donagh Diamond, acknowledging several times that the media were key stakeholders in the property bubble. Back in the studio however, Richard Curran, Shane Ross and Mark Little all suffered the exact same selective memory loss, unanimously failing to address this core part of Diamond’s investigation.

More recently Prime Time dipped its toes into this relationship with a report by Derek Brawn, a former property insider, having worked as head of research for Savills (Hamilton Osborne King). Unfortunately, the report was introduced by Miriam O’Callaghan as follows: “Derek Brawn gives a very personal perspective on the boom, the bust and what it all means for you.” RTE clearly distancing itself from the “very personal perspective” at the outset.

Brawn attempted to answer the question “Who really inflated the property bubble?” Citing some of the boom’s unreal price increases, he made clear how fraudulent the price explosion was. He reminded viewers of the €14m offer made on a Landsdowne Road house in 2005, for a house bought for €0.5m in 1994. A 35% increase in value each year. If that growth were to have continued, he explained, the house could have been worth €5.8bn in 2025.

Brawn identified the major culprits of the bubble industry as follows:

“The three main culprits [of the property bubble] were builders, banks and politicians…But there were another group of people who added fuel to the fire in the run up on property prices, namely the estate agents and newspaper property pundits. They collaborated with the big developers, especially where it came to advertising. Property advertising in Ireland accounts for up to half of newspaper ad revenue.”

He went on to charge that even after the bubble began to collapse, the culprits continued their campaign:

“Home values in Ireland have fallen by a fifth since the market peaked in 2007, but the estate agents and the newsprint media focus incessantly on aspirational or asking prices. Lately they have been guilty of exaggerating the price drops in order to fool the public that we are now close to the bottom.

Even today two years into the recession we are still being subjected to black propaganda or misleading counter intelligence. The property pages are full advertisements claiming it is now cheaper to buy than rent, as monthly mortgages have fallen. Wrong, as long as house prices have further to fall, it pays to wait.”

We don’t need an insider to spot this “black propaganda,” the evidence litters our newspapers. Yet Brawn is almost alone in commenting on it. Several weeks later, following a dearth of follow up commentary, Brawn was invited on to the Late Late Show to battle it out with property expert David Cantwell of Hooke and MacDonald. And again, despite appearing on the country’s most watched programme, he was almost universally ignored by his peers in the media (Kathleen Barrington did make passing reference in the Sunday Business Post).

A notable exception to this silence is Paul Gillespie, writing in the Irish Times about a speech by Lionel Barber, editor of the Financial Times, who “asked what responsibility journalists in the financial media have for not foreseeing [the crisis],” Gillespie notes:

“If media are to live up to the self-proclaimed role as critics and accountants of power rather than its mere corporate stenographers they must accept some blame for such a lack of foresight. Barber says the financial crisis started as a highly technical and opaque story about credit markets that took months to go mainstream. Reporters working there found it hard to interest their superiors, who controlled space devoted to stories of rising property prices and economic growth and some of whom did not want to antagonise advertisers.”

But this is not a view shared publicly by journalists. Brawn and Gillespie are most definitely exceptions to the rule.

To read Part 2 of ‘Don’t Shoot the Messenger’ click here.

Harney and Husband

Comment

Brian Geoghegan’s role as chairman of MKC posed conflicts of interests for Mary Harney

By Miriam Cotton and Frank Connolly

This article appears in this month’s issue of the Village Magazine (April 2009).

The curious professional relationship between health minister Mary Harney and her husband, Brian Geoghegan, has raised quite a few eyebrows among friends, critics and colleagues over many years.  Their paths have crossed in many ways not least during Harney’s most recent terms as Minister for Enterprise, Trade and Employment and since 2003 as Minister for Health.  Geoghegan’s former position as Director of Economic Affairs for the employers’ group, IBEC, meant regular, sometimes daily, contact with the enterprise and trade department while his more recent role as chairman of public relations consultants MKC Communications (previously MRPA Kinman) involved intensive negotiations with the health department on various matters.

It is well known that Harney appointed Geoghegan chairman of FAS during her term in Enterprise just months before they married in 2001, and that they travelled together on a number of official trips which were recently the subject some embarrassing scrutiny by the Oireachtas committee on public accounts and the media.

While many were amused, and distracted, by the cost of Harney’s hair-do during the FAS trip to Florida, the more serious questions surrounding the benefit of such trips to the Irish taxpayer and of similar junkets with her husband in her capacity as health minister have remained largely unaddressed.  Last year, a trip by Harney, her husband, and several officials to the US on the government jet cost no less than €190,000 and took in visits to four cities and controversially the US Superbowl.  Due to this trip, which was described as a ‘dental and cancer fact finding trip’ she missed an important Dail debate on the health services.  A total of €3,380 was spent on food and drink and €11,000 on hotel bills during the Stateside excursion.

There is an even more serious matter concerning the involvement of Harney and Geoghegan with the private medical health sector.  Very few have considered whether there has been a long running conflict of interest arising from the various roles she and her husband have played in the rush to privatisation of the health services.  Certainly, the overlap in the personal and professional activities of the Minister and her husband up to his recent retirement as chairman of MKC Communications warrants a good deal more public scrutiny than they have had to date.

In this regard it is worth revisiting a press release issued by IBEC on 18th June 2003:

‘IBEC Welcomes Health Service Reform Programme;

The business and employers organisation, IBEC, has today welcomed the publication of the Government’s Health Service Reform Programme.

The Programme is a serious effort to address issues of accountability and value for money in the health service.  The two reports on which the Reform Programme is based confirm the need for much greater clarity, accountability and efficiency in the management of this major area of public service delivery, said Brian Geoghegan, Director Economic Affairs, IBEC.  Managers in the health service and hospitals need to be given the power to manage.  It is a positive development that organisational structures are being streamlined and unnecessary layers of bureaucracy stripped away.

Health accounts for a quarter of all public spending.  Ireland needs a 21st centruy health service that is delivered in a cost effective, efficient and accountable manner, said Geoghegan.  The Reform Programme is a genuine attempt to achieve this goal and should be implemented in a speedy and determined manner by the appointment of a high level leadership team with responsibility to follow through on these Government decisions.  The Government must stand firm in the implementation of this important Reform Programme and withstand the inevitable pressure from many vested interestes, concluded Geoghegan.’

Clearly, Geoghegan did not mean to imply that he might have a vested interest in the matter himself.  Within a year, Mary Harney resigned unexpectedly as leader of the Progressive Democrats and took up her post as Minister for Health.

In January 2006, Brian Geoghegan resigned from IBEC and took up a position as Chairman of MRPA Kinman.  According to the company, which re-branded as MKC Communications in mid 2008 and from which Geoghegan resigned as chairman in October last, it is a consultancy firm that prides itself on its access to government for lobbying purposes.  It is led by former PD spokesman, Ray Gordon, and former party press officer and policy director Stephen O’ Byrnes.  It counts among its government and commercial clients the Health Information and Quality Authority, a body which was set up by Minister Harney to implement the sort of reforms which Brian Geoghegan was anxious to see – and which his wife is now responsible for implementing.

HIQA might be described as exactly the sort of ‘team’ or quango that Geoghegan had called for – and in due course his own firm was benefiting financially from its establishement.  Moreover, MKC has been the point of contact on behalf of HIQA for many of the agency’s reform activities so that interested stakeholders have had to apply not to HIQA itself for information about what is happening, but to MKC Account Executives.

Further questions about MKC were exposed by Kieran Allen, Senior Lecturer in Sociology at UCD.  In his book ‘The Corporate Take-Over of Ireland’, he has written about the influence they were able to bring to bear on persuading Harney to ditch some urgently needed legislation, painstakingly put together for the purpose of tackling the enormous problem of young people and alcohol abuse in ireland.  Allen puts it like this:

“The sharpest move that the drinks industry made was to hire MRPA Kinman Communitations as its lobbying agency.  MRPA Kinman boasts that ‘it has unrivalled experience’ of lobbying as two of the firms partners ‘worked at the coalface with one of the leading political parties’.  With this team on board, the drinks industry certainly had access to the corridors of power…by the start of October 2005, it became clear that the government had capitulated and had withdrawn the Alcohol Products Bill.  In its place a special code of practice was accepted – just as the drinks industry had requested.  Junior health Minister Sean Power, who happens to be a publican, claimed that the industry were told about the draft law and were asked their opinions.  As they agreed to implement an improved voluntary code drawn up under the aegis of the Department of Health, it was decided to ‘delay’ the introduction of the Bill.

‘The Department approached representatives from the relevant industries – not the other way around’, he said.

The cynicism of this statement was, however, revealed when the journalist Fintan  O’Toole, showed that the new voluntary code for advertising alcohol in cinemas was written by none other than Carlton Screen Advertising.  O’ Toole wrote that the
‘The Department of Health were so subservient to industry that they even used the same grammatical errors as the original version supplied by the company!’..The drinks industry had won – game, set and match”, Allen concludes.

In recent years, Harney has been to the fore in promoting private health care and the co-location of private hospitals on public lands; and is currently rolling out the National Plan for Radiation Oncology which also involves the private-sector construction of new radiation units on the grounds of public hospitals.  While there may be questions about the viability of the controversial co-located hospital scheme in the current economic climate, the proposed new radiation units at Beaumont and St James in Dublin and at Cork and Galway University hospitals are a guaranteed money spinner for the private developers involved.

They will replace the current radiation treatment cetnre at St Luke’s in Dublin and every patient needing the service will have no choice but to attend one of the p[rivately-built units, with their treatment funded by the taxpayer.

Meanwhile, Harney has been busy opening other private radiation units at the Beacon Clinic in Dublin, in Galway and in Waterford.  Each of these openings is organised and facilitated by the PR consultancies in which some of her former colleagues and friends are also involved.  It is believed that the objection of very senior figures in the health service to the private corporate role in the construction and operation of these radiation units were overruled by the minister.

MKC and similar private lobbyists have arguably mroe influence on such matters than the elected representatives of poltiical groupings that have a much better-grounded mandate than the PDs – especially since their drubbing at the last election.

Surely taxpayers should be told the full extent to which various consultancies have benefited commercially and the nature and extent of their influence on health and other policy?  When all of this is considered against a background of massively increased spending on these reforms and on private consultants, private hopsitals and others employed to put them into effect, the continuing service-failures and their serious impacts on patients call the Minister’s priorities into question.  We are certainly a long way from the reduced bureaucracy, improved accountability, value for money and resistance to vested interests that was so urgently called for by Mr Geoghegan in 2003.

Drowning the good guys and gals

Comment

Analysis of MediaBite interview with Harry Browne

This analysis of our interview with Harry Browne is not a critique of his journalism but rather of the coercive effect on him of the professional, corporate media environment as it seemed evident during the interview. We contend all mainstream journalists are unavoidably affected by this phenomenon – even those who are conscious of it.

These are hardly original observations but they are worth restating for the purpose of exploring the case in point. Professional journalism is a commodity, a product that we buy. We should regard it as we would detergent on a supermarket shelf, recognising the various brand qualities but always aware that it is fundamentally the same sort of profit-orientated, business and advertiser- pleasing product – with a few mildly abrasive bio-granules tolerated in the mixture (the good guy journalists) so that news will come out of the wash with an illusion of whiter-than-whiteness. It’s not a substitute for establishing a normal, collective and truly factual understanding of our world. Sometimes it’s quite good at giving the impression that it is – occasionally it even manages to do it.

Avoidance is the key

That all of the above is true is easily proved by observing the fate of the best journalists. Those who try hard to resist the essential untruth of most corporate journalism, as Harry Browne does, seldom enjoy the extent of the recognition they deserve within the Irish mainstream no matter how good they are. The Irish journalists Joe MacAnthony and Frank Connolly can tell us all about that. It may seem provocative to say so, but there is no one now working in Irish journalism at a senior level who does not make seriously unworthy compromises with his or her journalism – routinely. The challenge is for a single one of them to prove this is not true – or that it is even possible for it to be otherwise. Kevin Myers might possibly be the single exception to prove the rule having cornered the market in uncompromising obnoxiousness – an observation I imagine he would be proud to own. For everyone else ‘avoidance’, to use an expression of Harry Browne’s, is the key to survival.

Browne is honest enough in his interview with us to acknowledge having avoided a more direct response to some of the questions asked of him – though it would be good for the public record to know what he might have said had he not felt constrained. This avoidance is incongruous in his case, given the more forthright quality of much of his actual journalism. But the interview is instructive – the conflict for any conscientious journalist is so evident in his responses. I find it hard to believe that he truly means all of what he has to say about Geraldine Kennedy, editor of the Irish Times for instance. Or alternatively that he has not left out a lot of criticisms that he would make off-the-record. We can only guess whether that is one of the questions that he was inclined to go around, but is he really ‘loathe to agree’ that the paper has been unquestionably favourable to business interests if at the same time he concedes it is his ‘impression’ that that is so? Does that word ‘unquestionably’ really pose such a challenge to his sense of correctness? Would Harry Browne really prefer Geraldine Kennedy for editor over Fintan O’Toole as he seems to imply – are her leadership abilities truly more significant to him than their differing editorial perspectives?

Likewise with his colleague Cliff Taylor at The Sunday Business Post who has written to say that it is ‘nonsense to talk of taxing the rich’. That’s just what Cliff does, Browne says, in effect – that’s Cliff’s thing.  Browne doesn’t address the substantive point: how any journalist writing in the middle of this economic crisis can be so comfortable about publishing a statement like that? It’s because Cliff knows, whatever his readers might think, the corporate media will love him for it. He could never offend big business interests so deeply and so casually as he does so many of his potential readers with such an arrogant remark.

Browne says that Gene Kerrigan’s column in The Sunday Independent goes some way to balancing out the poison of the rest of the paper but that seems a bit like wishful thinking. Readers and viewers are mostly over reliant on journalists like Kerrigan. Whatever honesty they dare – or are allowed – to bring to bear on their journalism is spread too thin. However good a journalist he is, Kerrigan is a woefully inadequate fig leaf with which to disguise the overwhelming intellectual and moral nakedness of The Sunday Independent. Fintan O’Toole, Lorna Siggins, Michael Jansen and Lara Marlowe have to do similar service for the Irish Times. Vincent Browne and Tom McGurk, likewise for the Sunday Business Post. The net effect of having them at all is the opposite of what is claimed: their journalism mostly only goes to validate everything else that is said – because the media hangs much of its claim to ‘balance’ on what is in fact extremely unbalanced coverage taken in the round. All of these journalists are massively outnumbered by more compliant and even servile journalists on all sides but the quality of the latter’s journalism is made to look better than it is by the fact of the Kerrigans and the Marlowes in the same paper. It’s a moot point whether there are any good guys at all in news reporting at RTE – radio or television. Life expectancy for them there, at any rate, is a good deal shorter than elsewhere. It also has to be acknowledged that most of these journalists are happily convinced of the rigour and professionalism with which they do their work – and confounded by ideas and observations like these.

‘Celebrities’, ‘Dilettantes’ and ‘Citizen Journalists’

Since recording this interview with Harry Browne he has said that he regretted, as a lecturer, being as positive as he was at the time about the impact of citizen journalists on the mainstream media meaning, I understand, those who submit unpaid pieces to news outlets. He was concerned with the effect on the availability of work for newly qualified students of journalism, for example. I interpret his comments to mean that the ‘dilettantes’, ‘celebrity bloggers’ and citizen journalists who write voluntarily are encouraging a climate in which editors can exploit journalists who have been through the professional training system by having them write for nothing too – and calling it ‘work experience’. Browne also said that some citizen journalists / dilettantes are only motivated by a desire to see their names in print. I asked if he would like to qualify what he had said in the interview in the light of these remarks but he declined, though re-emphasising the points above. For someone who daily logged himself into the Irish Times system under an ID which was a variation on the spelling of Chomsky’s name, the thrust of some of his comments are surprising – beyond his valid concern about exploitation of young journalists who choose to apply for work in the mainstream media.

The reasons for saying these things go back to first principles. The public account of events and of communities are not the property of any person or group, no matter how much some might like to ring fence them for a paid career in a profit-making enterprise – and persuade us that they are thereby better motivated and placed to do it for us. It’s incredible that it appears necessary to remind journalists of this but we, individually and collectively, own the telling of the events of our lives and our experience and views of events in the world in general. We are as qualified as any journalist to do this by virtue of membership of the human race – whenever and wherever we believe it necessary. Where we chose to organize for the purpose of reporting things ourselves, our voices are as legitimate and expert as any journalist’s – right across the social spectrum and regardless of educational background. We should not allow ourselves to be infantilised by schools of journalism, corporate journalists or their journalism, however they see things themselves.

The present reality of news reporting is a far cry from that, of course. A thing printed in a newspaper, no matter how much ‘agency’ people are relied upon to have in order to decipher its worth or truth, carries weight and authority beyond what it deserves most of the time. The ‘balance’ trick (above) works better than Browne would seem to think. That said, many of us feel no particular reverence or respect for what journalists say beyond what we would feel about any other human being offering a view or a report of events. And that’s exactly as it should be – even when journalists are as talented at writing as Browne is.

As to people who only want to see their names in print, it’s not clear what the difference between a citizen or a paid journalist is where that is concerned. If vanity is the issue for some, arguably it’s rather more of a problem when people are paid to indulge it. At any rate the outpouring of vanity evident daily in the corporate media is something we have to wade through wearily to get to the small spaces where we can avoid it. And it has to be said too, where vanity is concerned, as a profession, journalists are notoriously defensive about criticism while frequently excoriating others (usually soft targets) with impunity – protected by their editors a lot of the time from seeing any equivalent responses to them. Even those responses that do appear are less prominent, frequently censored and much shorter. Not much of the vaunted journalistic ‘balance’ there, then.

And if we are searching for examples of dilettantism it is surely the dabblers in faux truth hiding their cowardice behind absurdly contrived notions of professionalism to whom we must look for the best examples. For instance, the journalistic ritual of achieving ‘balance’ and ‘fairness’ are so self-interestedly applied more often than not that they manage to render truth and facts into virtually meaningless versions of themselves for all the worth they have in their professionally eviscerated form: thus a criminal and murderous war becomes ‘a military adventure’ and even a ‘mistake’; corruption and fraud become ‘an appearance of impropriety’;  greed-driven privatisation becomes ‘reform’; the slashing of desperately needed services for sick and disabled people becomes ‘efficiency’. It’s an ocean of euphemism the consequence of which is, for the journalists responsible, that they never upset anyone powerful.

Readers can also be completely unaware of the highly subjective ‘objectivity’ of what they are reading – Harry Browne had an exchange with the Irish Times about their reporting of a recent debate held at Trinity College, ‘Nobel winner defends Israel’s actions’.

Despite the fact that there were other participants in the debate, the report focuses exclusively on the contribution of just one of them, the staunchly pro Israeli Professor Steven Weinberg. Ronan McGreevy described the others present as an ‘audience’. Weinberg’s justifications for Israel’s violence in Palestine are taken at face value. Not one word of anyone else’s contribution is reported. People who had indicated that they wanted to ask questions or make a point of order are described as ‘those of a different view’ and of having ‘several times interrupted’ the professor. Browne wrote to the Irish Times in response.

But his letter was altered. Browne says “the IT took my inverted commas off “disorderly”, which I think made it somewhat offensive to the woman in question, who was genuinely charming, and disorderly only in the absurd technical sense I was trying to capture in my depiction of the debate. I was surprised the letter was published — I suspect only the Prof’s own letter made the appearance of mine possible.”

The multiple failures of the corporate media

If anyone is inclined to think all of this is exaggeration, it might help to itemise some of the media’s continuing and determined failures: the media knows who is corrupt in politics and why – it will not thoroughly investigate or report it; it knew the property bubble was corrupt long before the current crisis, but it would not investigate or report it; it knew parts of the banking system was corrupt long before it collapsed and even now it is failing properly to investigate and report it; it knows that climate change is a potentially devastating threat and it is failing to report it – particularly in relation to any of the causes that implicate major corporate interests; it knows many businessmen are corrupt and why but it will not investigate or report about them; it knows the abject failures and corruption of public administration and governance but it will not thoroughly investigate or report them. If any news journalist doesn’t know any of these things, it can only be for choosing to peg their nose in the stink so as not to have to deal with it.
Is there an alternative?

Open-publishing, internet-based citizen journalism is without fear or favour to editors, advertisers, newspaper owners or professional colleagues – funded by donations from its users and contributors to cover only its basic costs. Nobody is paid to write there. The journalism there is also vulnerable to instant and equally public challenge from anyone with information or motive to do so. Fools are suffered very un-gladly – any vanity in evidence will be rounded on in short order. Gerry Ryan wouldn’t last, oh, five minutes.

In the case of Indymedia Ireland, one of the most successful and popular of the hundreds of Independent Media Centre newswires like it around the world, the editors have no input on what news items will be published until they are already on the site, in public view. What editing they do is to ensure anything published is within the law and basic guidelines for publishing – and all their decisions are publicly recorded with reasons given – for the whole world to see. There is no transparency, accountability or editorial freedom to equal that of Indymedia in the mainstream media where we are kept completely in the dark about what has been edited out of the account. There are many other examples but The Real News Network – based in Toronto – deserves a mention too. Funded by subscription from viewers and independent of advertising revenue RNN has made a serious foray into broadcast journalism providing a desperately needed alternative perspective on the dominant themes of the advertiser and owner-constrained journalism of the mainstream networks.

This interview with Harry Browne is depressing in this context: despite the fact that he has often been a pretty fearless journalist himself and has paid the price of it at the Irish Times, it’s clear that even he – as one of the best journalists we have in Ireland – cannot withstand the immense pressure from within the profession to conform, not to critique the journalism of colleagues or papers that he has worked with or for, too closely. Browne has said that he is inclined to be cautious in the context of an interview like this for reasons that would not be apparent. I may have put an interpretation on his responses that doesn’t do him justice. Nevertheless, I still think that even in allowing for what he says there is strong evidence of the coercive, subtly intimidating effect of the corporate media environment in his caution and evasion in places.

So where does the truthful telling of the public account stand in all of this? For the vast majority of journalists who, unlike Harry Browne, scarcely even question the values and conventions of their profession, framing the story in acceptable and unchallenging terms and not upsetting powerful people too much will trump it more often than not – while the conventions of their ‘professionalism’ are the very things that encourage them to believe they are doing the opposite. As the editors of Medialens in the UK wrote in a recent media alert ‘freedom of expression into corporate journalism does not go‘. The good guys and gals almost all drown there sooner or later. Harry Browne is doing his damndest to tread water and keep air in his lungs.