In the second of our interviews with independent commentators on the Irish media, I asked Simon McGarr and Fergal Crehan of the Tuppenceworth blog and fellow blogger Copernicus of Midnight Court about their Paper Round project. The exercise was to dedicate a weekend to reading Ireland’s newspapers in order to sift their contents and see if newspapers cover the topics of the day adequately. The results were damning, with the over all result indicating that Irish newspapers rarely publish what could be called proper journalism. Instead, the majority of copy is little more than ‘reprinted press releases and stories handed to them by vested interests’, according to Simon McGarr. The Paper Round was conducted in November 2006, and the raw notes of the findings, which are published in a wiki, can be found here.

The list of newspaper examined in one weekend were:

• The Irish Times

• The Evening Herald

• The Daily (Irish) Mail

• The Irish Independent

• Sunday Independent

• The Irish Examiner

• The Sunday Tribune

• The Sunday Times

• The Irish Daily Star Sunday

• Sunday World

Simon McGarr

What inspired you to do the paper round?

My wife was visiting her parents for the weekend, so I thought it would be a comfortable and pleasant way to spend the weekend to sit in a plush hotel lobby and read the papers. Then, because I thought it might be interesting to have somebody to talk to while I was doing it, I put a call out on the tuppenceworth blog. And because an invitation to watch me read the papers seemed, even to me, a little unalluring, I suggested doing a bit of analysis on the content and quality of what we read.

That’s the superficial answer. What prompted that kind of thinking, however, was the peripheral experiences of trying to get the media to pay attention to the passage of Data Retention legislation earlier in the year. All the papers (with the honourable exception of Karlin Lillington in the Irish Times) had decided that the introduction of mass surveillance of the population was a non-story. They certainly didn’t want to hear about the doings of our MEPs in the parliamentary debates or votes.

It seemed that this reflected the fact that the journalists and editors didn’t recognise as news anything that came from an unfamiliar (perhaps a more accurate word would be unapproved) source. So I thought looking at the sources for the news that was published might show how wide or narrow that field of approved sources might be.
What were the general findings?

Awful. Really. Most newspapers in our three-day sample filled most of their pages with little more than reprinted press releases and stories handed to them by vested interests. It was only when you went looking for genuine journalism that you realised how little of it the papers offered.

Is journalism compatible with commercial interests?

This is hard to answer because we didn’t get a chance to assess a journalism-filled newspaper for commercial success. I’d feel that more pertinent a question is whether lack of imagination and laziness (or contempt for your readers or overwork, depending on your preferred point of view) are compatible with long-term commercial survival in a rapidly changing media market.

What do you think of the new Press Council and the changes in the Defamation Law?

We didn’t address either of these areas and I think that I’d be better off referring you to Eoin O’Dell and Daithi McSithigh for their informed opinions.

Will the PC and Defamation Law improve and increase the amount of real, socially valuable journalism being done?

No.

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Fergal Crehan
What inspired you to do the paper round?

I found that stories relating to matters that I happened to know a little about (legal stories mostly) were at considerable variance to what I knew to be true. In some cases, they were actually the opposite of the truth. So I began to wonder what other things they were getting wrong.

What were the general findings?

The main one wasn’t something I’d expected: That very little of what appears in any newspaper is actual journalism, in the sense of facts unearthed through research or investigation. Most of what appears in a paper is handed to the journalist via a spokesman, press conference, or press release. A well-stocked RSS reader could provide you with most of the same news, and with about the same amount of analysis. I expected some poor fact-checking and shoddy journalism, but not this, which is an absence of any journalism at all.

Newspapers and broadcasters regularly try to suggest that they are fulfilling their normative, democratic function of providing citizens with unbiased news and analysis. However, is this compatible with their commercial interests, and if not, what is the result?

I think the two are probably incompatible to a degree-we’ll never get our ideal newspaper, because it wouldn’t sell. Still, I think there is much more room in the market for public service journalism. Irish papers are not at the limit of what they can do before they start turning punters off. The notion that papers are just dying to perform a democratic function but are being held back by the market is not one I’d endorse. The problem is one of will.

Do you think that there is more to this, in that this complacency actually serves them well? Or is it simply that they are a powerful political entity in their own right (especially considering the grip of IN&M on Irish media) and there is no one to challenge them?

I never blame on malice what can be more plausibly attributed to incompetence. Yes, the lack of penetrating and questioning journalism can only benefit the political worldview championed by IN&M, but that doesn’t mean that Tony O’Reilly is consciously pulling the levers or sending memos to Barry Egan to write another screed of self-abasing celebrity fluff, the better to distract people from more important matters. There is no need for a vast right-wing conspiracy to explain the dearth of real journalism. The failing is very much that of the reporters and editors, though I’ll grant you that the tone does ultimately come from above.

Long-term, the complacency serves them ill. If they don’t start adding value to the press release stories, people will just stop buying. Why should I pay for a Times when it gives me nothing I won’t find elsewhere for free? Papers in Ireland are still acting as if we need them to keep up with general tide of common-knowledge events that we refer to as “the news”, but for decades now we’ve been getting that kind of news from broadcast media and, increasingly, online. What the papers should be doing is giving us something more. I’d like that something more to be, for example, assigning talented journalists to in-depth stories which aren’t always immediately identifiable as particularly newsy, as happens in the US. Unfortunately, the Irish papers seem to have decided that giving the reader “more” is supplements and glossy sections and so forth. I think that strategy will ultimately fail too, as people who want a glossy magazine will just go and buy Heat, which is a magazine with a life of its own.

What do you think of the new Press Council and the changes in the Defamation Law?

Any loosening of the defamation law is a good thing. But again, I don’t think they’re the reason for the dearth of investigative public interest journalism.

Considering that the Irish media has not been responsible for breaking the stories behind the most significant scandals of recent years, do you think that the establishment of the Press Council and the changes in the Defamation law are likely to qualitatively change the Irish media and to expand the amount of real investigative journalism that they do?

See above. A new defamation law will not make editors and journalists any more energetic or curious, but I suppose if it removes an excuse for these failures it may do some good.

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Copernicus

What inspired you to do the paper round?

Simon. It was his idea, but obviously it chimed with my own interests politically and culturally. Given the nature of my work (civil service) at the time, it represented a good way to take part in a bit of social activism while staying apolitical.

What were the general findings?

That the newsprint media have lost their way. There must always have been a tension between the need to make money and the constitutional function of the fourth estate, but that tension seems not to be on the minds of the current editors and owners-their God is mammon.

Newspapers and broadcasters regularly try to suggest that they are fulfilling their normative, democratic function of providing citizens with the information they needed, presented in an unbiased way, in order for them to be informed as citizens living in a properly functioning democracy. However, is this compatible with their commercial interests, and if not what is the result?

I read a brilliant insight on (I think) A Tiny Revolution which explains the above most succinctly. People are under the impression that the product of a newsprint organisation is the newspaper it puts out and sells to the public. Hence, you state above that its function is to provide the public with information and that the paper’s customer is the person who buys the paper to get that information. That is, after all, the constitutional position and the reason constitutional privileges in respect of defamation law are afforded to the press.

However, the real product of a newsprint organisation (or any private media organisation) is its audience. Access to this audience is sold to advertisers who are the real customers of the media organisation. So the function of a media organisation isn’t to provide information to citizens, it’s to build an audience with its content and to sell access to that audience to its advertisers. Even “trusts” like the Guardian and The Irish Times have fallen foul of this commercial imperative. Medialab is a fine document of the Guardian’s failings.

As the culture of consumerism has grown, the balance of who the papers serve has tilted massively in favour of advertisers. For instance, you can see in America especially-but also here-the massive reductions one gets on the cover price of a publication if one subscribes. In America, subscribers practically get the paper for free, which reflects the fact that it is the advertiser to whom access to the subscriber is sold that is paying the publication’s way. A subscriber is far more valuable as a commodity than even a regular non-subscribing reader. He or she represents guaranteed eyeballs and access to such a subscriber is more expensive to the real customer, the advertiser.

What do you think of the new Press Council and the changes in the Defamation Law?

Not much. The Defamation Bill is basically designed to codify the law as it already exists following the Reynolds decision and jurisprudence on Article 10 of the European Convention on Human Rights. The real issue for me is that the media are given certain privileges which allow them to compromise people’s right to a good name on the basis that the media serve the democratic function of providing the people with the information they need in order to elect the appropriate members of parliament (You can see how little media content is directed at this goal by the way, even though that is the constitutional raison d’etre of the media).

If you take the Sunday Independent as the most egregious example, it sees its function not to provide the public with objective facts on which to base decisions in the ballot box but to actually manipulate the public perception of events so that they will elect the government INM wishes to see in place. Why, then, should that organisation be granted constitutional privileges in defamation law? IN&M is not honouring the quid pro quo of the Constitution.

I think this is going to become a major issue over time because if the media are no better than, say, bloggers, in terms of providing objective-as opposed to spuriously “balanced” or “unbiased”-content, then pressure will mount to the point where the defamation privilege will either have to be revoked or extended to everybody who wishes to publish on matters of public interest, no matter how “biased” or “unprofessional”. It is a huge issue in the context of the almost complete amnesia in this country regarding the meaning and purpose of a democratic republic.

This is a far more significant issue, I think, than left-right, class politics. A republic is a conversation among millions of citizens, each with their own morality, interests, philosophies, jobs, etc. In that case, there should be fora for objective discussion and in which competing interests, biases and tensions can be played out and resolved (I don’t believe in revolutions or utopias). This was supposed to be the function of the press, hence the constitutional protection of the Fourth Estate. This isn’t the function the modern media sees for itself. Hence, the press is in danger of subverting democracy, even though employees of media organisations would genuinely see themselves as democracy’s servants.

Considering that the Irish media has not been responsible for breaking the stories behind the most significant scandals of recent years, do you think that the establishment of the Press Council and the changes in the Defamation law are likely to qualitatively change the Irish media and to expand the amount of real investigative journalism that they do?

No, for all of the above reasons. The law isn’t being changed per se. The media have a different objective (wooing advertisers) than we have been led to believe. The Ahern sterling transactions are a classic example of why the papers won’t change.

As the law stands, the papers could have accused the Taoiseach of whatever they liked and he would have had no remedy before the courts. But they didn’t even pursue the most cursory investigation to establish if the scenario was as he said or as the tribunal said. This was not an issue of opinion but of fact. A five-minute phone call to an FX trader would have established the exchange rate on the day in question and publication of the result would not have incurred liability for defamation. Instead, the competing versions of the story were presented uncritically as if such a presentation satisfied the rules of objectivity and forestalled any accusation of bias. But, of course, only one version was correct and it could hardly be “biased” to point out which.

That wasn’t done because the papers didn’t want to alienate their audience and be left with nothing to sell to the advertisers. They no longer want to inform opinion, only follow it.