A Dereliction of Duty?

In my post on The Irish Times Gives Award to Itself Dav of mediabite.org, kindly left a link to a very interesting and wide-ranging interview that mediabite had with Fintan O’Toole this year. In relation to the post on the Property Developers series in the Irish Times its very informative on the symbiotic relationship between advertisers and the media and how that may effect the editorial decisions made by newspapers – for example, deciding on emphasising some points of view over others. O’Toole also addresses the main point about the Property Developer series that I was trying to highlight. Its not that Frank McDonald’s profiles are uncritical. I think it would be impossible to go through each of the developer’s careers without pointing out the fact that some developments are down right ugly or that the developers themselves have been responsible for poor health and safety on sites, which may have caused the death of workers. These are often things that McDonald has reported on in the past himself. And as O’Toole mentions in the interview, McDonald is the leading expert in the area, so who better to write about them.

It’s just that he mentions these criticisms, which he doesn’t suggest come from him – only that they are in the public domain – without contextualizing them. They are provided like a list of ‘events’ in the property developer’s career, mere bumps in the road that the developer, through guts and guile manages to overcome – a kind of ‘ah he’s a canny old bastard, isn’t he?’. The context that is missing of course is actually referred to in the point Fintan O’Toole makes just before the part that Dav quoted:

“Also vastly more important is building land, if you go right back to 1967 and the Kenny report, there has to be control on building land or you will never solve the housing problems in Ireland. That was repeated in I think 2002 by a joint Oireachtas committee on the constitution, which stated we had to put controls in place on building land because we have a situation where we have a very small number of property developers controlling the entire housing market in the greater Dublin area. This is a fundamental issue and not a single political party is raising it as a major election issue. There is a kind of a symbiotic relationship here, whereby the politicians don’t raise it as an issue, the media then don’t put it up as an issue to be addressed, and it forms a closed circle. The politicians say no one is talking about this, so it’s not important, the media don’t mention it because it is not on the political agenda and so on. So you get a very closed world, it’s not a conspiracy; it’s the way this kind of discourse works. The issues that are of primary importance to the kinds of people that are crucial to the advertisers are the issues that are going to work their way to the top of the political agenda.”

But it seems to me that there was a dereliction of duty on the part of the Irish Times not to mention this while profiling the developers in question, whether or not they are a largely centre-right pro-business paper to begin with. Unless of course it was raised and I missed it – I’m perfectly willing to be corrected on this point. But I think there is a bigger issue at stake here and there is more to it than the Irish Times protecting its advertising revenue to avoid financial freefall (O’Toole also pointed out that the paper is aware that it has to attract advertisers eager to reach a readership with money to spend on housing in the first place).

How can a paper be considered a paper of record, and an accurate source of information, if it does not discuss, when dealing specifically with property development, how the economy as a whole is largely reliant on the wealth generated by the construction industry and how these individuals are a significant vested interested who have close relationships with those in power?

And the economies over reliance on construction should be big news.

As Keith of Random Walk regularly points out there is something wrong when 23% of the economy is dependant on growth in an industry that is unsustainable.

“The forecasts for job losses in construction from commentators are consistently about 20,000 over the next year. If 416,000 people are employed directly or indirectly in the industry, and house completions are due to drop by anywhere between one third and a half, how do we arrive at a figure of only 20,000 job losses?”

It should also be worth mentioning the long term dangers for the economy as a whole when investment in Irish and overseas property dwarfs that of investment in venture capital.

“Venture capital investment in Irish companies in 2006 amounted to just €192 million invested in 52 enterprises compared with Irish investors putting €11 billion in commercial property – €3 billion of this was spent on domestic deals.”

Even David McWilliams has been saying it. As Michael Taft said when he gives McWilliams modest praise for his analysis of what is wrong with the Irish economy:

“Mr. McWilliams thesis is simple: we don’t, as a nation, make and sell things. Multi-nationals do it for us. We, as a nation, don’t invest in enterprise; we throw our money into property. We, as a nation, don’t plan or shape our economy; it’s done for us – by forces outside our control. We are maxed-out, overdrawn and involved in a lot of financial juggling to make ends meet. What we think is real is not. What we think is sustainable is certainly not. And what we think is the good life is merely a faded ad in a Sunday magazine supplement. Nothing new you might say. Well, that’s the point.”

Michael then goes on to say that:

“The fact that political parties are not addressing it – while people in pubs and dinner parties, on the sidelines of under-12 GAA matches, even the pit bulls on Dublin local authority estates, are all talking about it – is one more indication of the surreal detachment that the political establishment has from Planet Ireland.”

So it seems curious to me, given all the caveats that Fintan O’Toole allows for The Irish Times, that is should choose to ignore one of the biggest fault lines in the Irish economy even though it has taken the opportunity to profile those who have so spectacularly benefited from that over reliance (but perhaps I’m being naive).

It is ironic too that at the moment the Irish Times is involved so deeply in the Mahon Tribunal by refusing to reveal the source of information from the tribunal about Bertie’s dealings with property developers. I wonder though, are they protecting the sources of information to allow their reader to get information that is required for a free and fair democracy to function. Or are they like Judith Miller, the New York Times reporter who put false information provided by the US Government straight into her stories, effectively an organ of propaganda for the business elite. Probably not. They were just after a good story when it was presented to them. However, it’s worth remembering that by revealing the information from the leak, they helped to undermine the authority of a body that is paid for by the taxpayer to discover if politicians have acted in a corrupt way. That is, it is an instrument of our democracy rather than our government.

To go back to the Fintan O’Toole quote provided by Dav:

“I’m not saying there is an absolute mechanical relationship between certain interests and what appears, but I am saying that the relationship exists. People need to understand this, it is not a council of despair – well you know there is nothing you can do about this. A critical understanding of how the media works is one in which people understand the kind of relationships that are involved and how to read and see that it is not necessarily an objective and accurate reflection of everything that is important to Irish society.”

Well, that’s all right then.