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How the politicians beat the media
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One interesting aspect in the wash up to the Republic’s election was a minor furore over alleged anti government bias in the Irish media’s coverage. It was sparked by Bertie Ahern’s comments on the Friday count night, that journalists had had a job to do “in return for good pay and expenses”, implying that undue editorial direction had caused them to not simply to consistently underestimate Fianna Fail’s potential in the election, but to question him relentlessly in the early part of the election about what were in the context of the time fairly minor breach of personal probity in the early 1990s. The controversy reached ignition point when Eoghan Harris walked out on a two hander with Fintan O’Toole on Today FM.
Harris, as he notes here, was furious at the oppositional stance the majority of the Irish media had taken to the taoiseach throughout the campaign, and named just four commentators who had expressed any support for him in the Irish press.
Much of his apparent anger was directed at Vincent Browne, one of the few senior Irish journalists who have attempted a serious analysis of the media in Ireland. However, it is Browne’s consistent analysis that ownership is key to what he sees as the Irish media’s core anti left bias. In particular, he consistently offers Independent News Media’s Tony O’Reilly as Ireland’s media manipulator in chief. On election night, Browne’s most damning piece of evidence that there was a compact between the government and INM, was a meeting between Fianna Fail’s outgoing Minister of Finance, Brian Cowan and O’Reilly himself.
It’s not a new accusation. Indeed it is so routinely made in left leaning circles to the point that it is widely repeated as though it were unchanging, empirical fact. Other big publishers are constantly under similar suspicion. Rupert Murdoch’s alleged manipulation of both journalists and politicians is currently the subject of hot gossip in the US, where his primary media business assets are now based.
Yet, Harris provides persuasive evidence (here, here, here, here) that if there was a deal, it certainly didn’t trickle down to the journalists at the Irish Independent, and he cites several stories that reflect, if anything, an anti government bias in their overall election coverage. Or, at the very least, he demonstrates that when it came to throwing heavy punches, it appears not to have pulled them.
It is always somewhat unnerving when government ministers begin handing out lectures to the media. Ahern’s lecture hardly figures alongside the arrest of journalists in the developing world or the closing of television stations in Venezuela, but it is nevertheless important to continue to keep a taut line between the role of politics and the media in a representative democracy.
Perhaps what this election has proved is that for all the much feted power of the media, when it comes to elections, it is politicians, their policies and the healthiness (or otherwise) of their connection to the base that matters, regardless of what journalists think of them.
I remember someone over on the Twitter side of the IE operation on election night predicting that the Indo would turn on Bertie very quickly post-election and have Cowen as the new darling. I think that’s a very astute prediction. Note also that it was the latter who actually attended the meeting with O’Reilly. The media attitude to politics is very complex and I don’t claim to understand it all but part of it is a creep of celebrity/personality culture into political coverage and I think for some of the hacks there is a boredom factor with Bertie. It’s been 10 years, the fame dynasty now extends down to grandchildren, and maybe they wanted a new narrative. So Bertie going down in flames seemed like an exciting story to pursue — perhaps more a personal bias than a political one. Now they have Bertie back and one can already sense them starting their clocks a la Tony Blair for when he’ll go. Note Fintan O’Toole’s column today.
Yep, that’s quite true P O’Neill. Certainly I didn’t think the Indo was uniformly in favour of FF although their commentariat did in the last week or so shift towards FF…
I dont think any journalists predicted that the green party would negotiate with ff in this manner -not alone was it an unrealistic thought but the greens were spoken of as some sort of eccentrics who had just arrived from mars.
No one in the media seemed to know they had policies on all subjects like many other parties this makes you wonder how their annual conference is covered -were they all in the boozer -the journos i mean !
Well. It’s not something I blogged about at the time, but I did pick up a certain seriousness within FF in their attitude towards the Greens during the campaign (I know, it’s easy to say this far after the fact). I just wasn’t in a position to worry it down into a substantial post.
For what it is worth the FF/PD/Green coalition we are looking at now was available at a generous 8/1 just three days before the election. Even the hard core didn’t rate it. What blinded me more than anything else, I think, was the confident predictions by SF that they would double their tally.
I would say though that even now people are still not seeing the viability of the Green/FF alliance, less because they don’t believe the Greens have serious policy, but that the ‘cute hoorism’ of Fianna Fail would not allow them be bound by those serious Green policies.
There is a chance, of course that these negotiations could break down and come to nothing. But I’m of the view that much of the Green agenda remains intact after the rucks of the election, whereas Pat Rabbitte himself has admitted that his analysis was wrong.
In short, I reckon there are substantial synergies for both parties: Greens to be given their head in government, and FF to borrow the Greens positive ‘green’ values as they work their way through a substantially FF government.
The Independent/Sindo stable’s bullying and threatening of the Government until Government policy turned more to their liking hardly constituted an anti-FF bias in the lead-up to the election. It was a cynical campaign and it wasn’t aimed at putting the Opposition in power.
It was a conversation between the Indo and FF and its characterisation by Harris after the event as proof of that the Independent/Sindo achieve some kind of balance and objectivity across their commentators and reporters is utterly spurious.
In fact, Harris’s insane hissy fit at Finters was to the effect that other papers’ opposition to FF was disgraceful and disgusting but then pointed to opposition to FF in the Sindo as proof of its independence and objective decency.
Reading Harris isn’t an especially useful way to find out what’s going on in politics or the media given how dense with spin and agenda (and cat-lady hysteria) his diatribes are.
Cop,
I don’t read Harris for his news value, but for the same reason I read Fintan and Vincent: ie for their polemic. It seems to me that, however he got there, he has nevertheless nailed a gap in their thinking.
I have no idea what O’Reilly has been up to behind the scenes. What I do know is that the left is convinced he’s up to something. It’s like a vague itch that everyone wants to scratch, but no one knows, nor seems to care, where it is.
Harris is right when he says the Irish Indo is not rabidly right wing. The Tribune, though it is not exactly fulfilling the leftist promise of Vincent’s original vision, it’s not exactly the quintessence of wingnutery either.
Sarah Carey, Richard Delevan and Paddy Prenderville were on Tubridy’s show a few months ago. Ryan let Paddy speak for a good two and half minutes about the foibles of the Indo group. All of it vague, and to do with his own feelings about O’Reilly, smoke filled rooms and shady deals. All of it entirely devoid of detail.
The line I remember from Delevan was that this casting of a ubiquitous shadow of bias over the actual work of the journos was (and in fact is) deeply patronising to those journalists working within the organisation that actually do their jobs.
The blogosphere in the states has done a good job in incentivising good journalism. Simon’s Paper Round project is an excellent project that runs out of that understanding that attention to detail is the key to good analysis.
But you cannot sustainably push a line of polemic when the empirical facts are calling out against it.
PS, he also owns the English Indy. For what is supposed to be man supportive of the US Republicans, it seems to be remarkably independent of its owners political values.
“Harris is right when he says the Irish Indo is not rabidly right wing.”
Is Harris talking about the Sindo, the Indo or both? The Sindo is overwhelmingly right wing, Gene Kerrigan being the sole voice of dissent. The Indo has some decent reporting but its commentators tend to veer towards the right, with His Myersness not so much veering as crashing headlong in that direction on a daily basis.
He argues that there was no unanimity about Bertie on the Sindo, or indeed that it is not biased. But he offers a number of stories (here, here, here, here) which indicates there has been a trashing of the whole group to fit a pre-set narrative.
I should add that I am not trying to defend O’Reilly or Harris here. Just noting that their critics are coming up short on the substance of their argument. I also believe it is genuinely important to talk about such things as what makes good journalism, and what doesn’t.
But just pulling the proprietorial trigger every time just ain’t doing it for me.
Brendan O’Connor, Emer O’Kelly, Eilis O’Hanlon, Eoghan Harris, Ann Harris VS Gene Kerrigan. And let’s not forget the wonderful Mary Ellen Synon of yesteryear, as well as the routine veneration of celebrities and businesspeople. Being right wing doesn’t preclude having a go at Bertie from time to time, especially if your newspaper/lobby group is after something.
Didn’t mention Tony O’Reilly once.
Not sure we’re reading off the same page Niall. It is undoubtedly right wing. But Harris is arguing that what can be said about the Sindo is not true of the Indo. Yet Vincent has been arguing it is a bug that ‘infects’ the whole group. Enter Tony O…
The Indo’s flagship columnist Kevin Myers is ‘rabidly’ right wing, but on a whole the Indo has more balance and some good factual news reporting.
I’m not a regular reader of the Evening Herald or Daily Star but they’re definitely not left wing.
I don’t think there’s a pan-Independent Group conspiracy with O’Reilly pulling the strings but the influential people in each of the papers have right-wing leanings, if not necessarily ‘agendas’.
Didn’t mean to suggest you thought Harris was a paragon of factual reporting; was just taking the opportunity to gratuitously insult him.
O’Reilly’s ownership of the UK Independent is certainly a head-scratcher, but its independent editorial voice doesn’t illumine the Irish situtation where the editorial-owner relationship is much more intimate. It’s also notable that the Irish operation is what pays for everything else which makes it more likely that ownership control will be exercised here.
The ownership issue wasn’t one I especially addressed though, and anyway it’s very complicated. However, it is wrong to say the Independent and Sindo aren’t right wing papers – they have very strong editorial lines or at any rate a modus operandi that leads to not particularly useful journalism being done.
And I think what makes it possible to continue to be polemical in the face of the facts is the abrogation by those papers in particular of the duty to report the factual matrix behind any particular set-to. For example, the Bertie Ahern v the Tribunal issue was reported as a confusing “two sides to every story” scenario, whereas the journalists could simply have found out who was telling the truth by checking the exchange rates on the day.
The reporting style is equivocal whereas opinion isn’t, when it should be the other way around if the papers are to perform their duty to inform. That’s the constitutional quid pro quo re the Fourth Estate and the press should take care to protect it for all our sakes.
The ownership issue is interesting from another perspective though. If the Sindo was owned by its readers, I’m not sure the editorial line would be different. As the organ of choice of Celtic Tiger Ireland, it has an interest in concealing economic and political realities which might dent consumer confidence and the short-term gains people have started to take for granted. But the planning system has allowed developers to create housing stock in desolate parts of Roscommon while facilitating the building up of land banks around Dublin, where houses were really needed. As the value of the Roscommon houses is reduced to the realistic level of €0, the inflation in the Dublin market due to the artificial constriction of supply will lead to a blow in confidence which will lead to Dublin assets being undervalued. Everyone is desperately trying to put off this evil day, especially given the interest rate rises, and the press is conspicuously colluding with them. Which is the essence of being right-wing and populist in an Irish context.
Mick, it seems that Harris is using those stories in the indo retrospectively as evidence that the paper is capable of criticizing the government, while ignoring the fact that the main reason that line was taken is that it fits perfectly with the indo ethos of sensation.
If there was a pre-fit stance taken by the Irish media I’m not sure it was ideologically driven or one dictated by the overreach of its mega rich proprietor.
Rather the news of a potential FF meltdown was a sensational story considering the party’s electoral dominance since Dev strode confidently into the Dail flanked by the other Soldiers of Destiny and said, right, we’ll have this forever more, thank you very much.
The indo’s unequivocal relationship with its readers, and it equivocal one with the truth, is well established over the years. When telling stories that relate to the news of the day, they choose to paint the picture in a way that will grab the reader’s attention, while at the same time avoiding any controversial conclusions. It’s then left to the commentators to do the ‘analysis’ and to pander to what they imagine are the prejudices of the readership.
O’Reilly does indeed have many secret dealings with the government, as he has many business dealings in the State, which is an indication of where the real power lies in this representative democracy. But O’Reilly doesn’t need to control the editorial line of the Irish Independent, just as it’s not in his interests, from a business perspective, to control the London Independent one. As long as the papers continue to sell, he’s happy.
I thought Ahern’s election night swipe at the media – I suppose he was tired and a bit drunk but I still felt he was discrediting the majority of honest journalists the perceived sins of their colleagues – anyway I thought it was a strong hint that the next FF govt, if it ever comes to pass, will push harder than ever for a press council and reform of privacy laws. I haven’t seen any media commentator pick up on this – so maybe I’m missing the point – but I thought Ahern really sounded like he wanted to Put Manners On A Few People.
Maybe if he gave clear answers to questions there wouldn’t be so much room to ‘interpret’ what he says. And perhaps it’s not quite good enough to answer questions about his finances in a statement to a newspaper. And maybe people will see that newspaper group as sympathetic to the government for allowing him to do so. They could have refused and asked for an interview instead.
It was notable, too, if we are to give some thought to the idea that the Indo is pro-FF, that Sam Smyth, on election night, did not pick up on Bertie’s explicit assault on the integrity of Smyth’s profession. The same Sam Smyth used by former minister for justice Michael McDowell to leak confidential govt papers.