MediaView: Media Neo-Liberals take over - BY FRANK FARRELL

Stephen Collins

Come back Conor Brady, all is (almost) forgiven. Former Irish Times editor Brady, a Fine Gael supporter once nicknamed 'The Commissioner' because of his strong Garda background, was hardly progressive. He presided over a newspaper that was heavily influenced by the Workers Party/Democratic Left moles (the real agents of influence inside Irish society over the last 30 years) and it was the bible of the liberal middle class and intelligentsia.

However, Brady believed that his newspaper should allow a certain latitude to alternative views, however token. The paper was influenced by a soft-left outlook and while it remained predominantly anti-national, it fought an unspoken editorial war against opponents of the Peace Process in the Sunday Independent, the Progressive Democrats and elsewhere.

His successor, Geraldine Kennedy, seems intent on turning the paper into an Irish version of the Daily Telegraph. Kennedy's own background as a PD Dáil deputy says it all and she is reported as telling her journalists that the paper must reflect the rightward shift of today's readers. These are epitomised by the spoilt children of the financial services revolution, whose idea of deprivation is being unable to buy, just yet, that second property in the South of France.

Kennedy's recruitment of right-wing journalists is part of the transformation of the paper from the liberal paper of record into a more direct propaganda sheet written by transatlantic pundits, neo-liberals and straight right-wing reporters. The most notorious example of this was the recruitment by Kennedy of Mark Steyn, a US journalist and cheerleader of the American neo-cons. Although Steyn and the Irish Times have since parted company, last week saw the Times carry its first column by another US journalist Charles Krauthammer, another fan of Geore Bush who argues that the US should seek "universal domination".

The recently appointed economics editor, Mark Coleman, once formed a Fine Gael ginger group, the Christian Democratic Institute and his views on everything from God to Sinn Féin and 'the dead hand of the state' make Michael McDowell sound like Tony Benn.

The New Year has also seen former Sunday Tribune journalist, Stephen Collins, one of the most consistently right-wing Irish hacks of the last 20 years, join the paper. The Irish Times political corps, chief political correspondent, Mark Brennock, is regarded as being a little too soft on Labour and perhaps too balanced in the war against Fianna Fáil.

Collins along with another political correspondent, Mark Hennessy, who has thrown off any residual Fianna Fáil tendencies he once entertained when he campaigned for that party as a young man, will toughen up the paper's line in the war to install Fine Gael as the natural party of government in the next 18 months.

In recent weeks the Irish Times joined the media consensus on Irish Ferries as well as partnership talks, editorialising that the ships dispute proved that Irish wages were too high and that partnership talks had to restrain wages.

The paper also published a ludicrous analysis (by the ex-security editor of the BBC) of the British spy-ring at Stormont, which argued that Denis Donaldson was a British spy for 20 years but somehow, not when he allegedly accumulated documents from Stormont.

Some of the paper's senior editorial staff, who would regard themselves as retaining a left of centre world view, are being undermined or marginalised in this process.

Anti-republican columnist Fintan O'Toole, for example, was once a candidate for editor of the paper, but is now regarded as an extremist by Kennedy and her new world order journalists. The first obvious sign of the paper's transition came with the sacking of radio columnist Harry Brown over a year ago, something that Kennedy later snen how to exploit the more low-brow television medium?