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14 December 2006 Edition

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Media View

Times digs up Haughey yet again

BY JOHN O’BRIEN

Pity the poor Irish Times.  Even though Charlie Haughey is dead and on what the Irish call ‘slí na fírinne’ (way of truth), the ‘paper of record’ can’t let him rest in peace.  Once again this week, Tara Street led with a hopeful report by Tribunal challenger Colm Keena to the effect that the Moriarty Tribunal is poised to condemn Haughey for a payment-for-passport deal, for arranging a meeting for Ben Dunne with the Revenue Commissioners and for not cooperating with the Tribunal.
Let the heavens shake, as the ancients used to say.
However, down South, the Irish Examiner reported that the “Report was set to clear Haughey of wrongdoing”, though Jim Morahan does say that the Tribunal will make an adverse finding about Haughey’s use of the balance left over from the Brian Lenihan liver fund.
Time will tell, but they can’t both be right.  Obviously different prejudices were at work in the two stories.  And that’s a point worth remembering when we want to know whether or not the media are telling us the truth.
On a professional level there is a question mark, of course, about the Times leading with the Haughey ‘story’ anyway.  Was it really that newsworthy, or did it just fan the flames of bitterness that burn ever bright in Madam’s breast?
It reminds me of the return of the monarchy to England after the Cromwellian period, when the monarchists insisted on digging up Cromwell’s body so that he could be hanged, drawn and quartered.  The thought of doing the same to Haughey makes the Times’s editor and staff lick their collective lips.
But take a look, too, at the front pages last Monday of the three major Southern newspapers. The Times led with Haughey, followed by the age of consent controversy, and concluded with a report of concern over breast cancer screening.
All of these stories reflect adversely, in one way or another, on Fianna Fáil.
The Examiner by contrast led with Pat Rabbitte refusing “to rule out pact with FF”.  This story has important implications for the state’s political future, but the Times – which is opposed to any Labour-Fianna Fáil deal – buried it at the bottom of page eight inside.
The Independent ignored on its front page both the Tribunal (which it didn’t cover at all) and Rabbitte (who was relegated to the inside, though at the top of the page).  Instead, the Indo led with the lawyers’ reform story.
And look at the way the three stories were written.  The main emphasis of the Times report was a rehash of Rabbitte’s stated preference for no deal with FF, merely quoting him as saying that he has “no intention of resigning the leadership” if Labour and Fianna Fáil emerge as the only viable coalition possibility.
The Indo, which shares the Times’s distaste for an FF-Labour government, also spent its article trying to undo what Rabbitte said in his TV3 interview.
But in the Examiner Áine Kerr described Rabbitte’s stance –  correctly – as “a major u-turn likely to send shockwaves through the political landscape”.  Kerr also places this u-turn in the context of the continuing evidence of opinion polls that the Rainbow cannot win and that the public favour an FF-Labour alliance.
The Times was obviously unhappy with the whole thing, and decided to have another bite on Tuesday.  Once again it tried to comprehensively rubbish the story by reiterating Rabbitte’s known preference for a Rainbow coalition.  But try as it could, it couldn’t deny that Rabbitte had revealed a chink in the Rainbow’s armour, and made the prospect of an FF-Labour government even more likely.
It is not accidental that developments that the Irish Times doesn’t like are put somewhere where they will have little impact, while developments it does are either made up or given prominence, or both!  It’s no accident either that the Times writes them up when it suits, and writes them down when that suits.
Reader beware!

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Sport is an area which has its own controversies, although rarely are they directly political.  But surely Brendan Mooney’s Examiner report on the food poisoning shock for Irish athletes in Italy missed the obvious Russian connection?
Mooney blandly ignored the sinister fact that Russian reactionary Yegor Gaidar got ‘food poisoning’ when visiting Ireland.  In the light of the ‘radiation poisoning’ of Russian renegade Litvinenko  – now an established fact because the British press have said so – the stomach troubles of Gaidar and the Irish athletes take on a new significance.
The idea that Litvinenko - a renowned crook – was dealing illegally in nuclear material and so ‘poisoned’ himself is not worth consideration, and has therefore been ignored by the British press, with the Irish lapdogs following suit.
But surely this dastardly attack on our athletes cannot be ignored?  And how come “schoolboy Brendan O’Neill ran the race of his life to finish 19th”?

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Northern papers are generally much easier to classify than their Southern counterparts:  The Newsletter services the unionist community; the Belfast Telegraph upholds a more liberal version of the same thing, with a few gestures to the fanciful notion that Catholics might be human; while the Irish News works to keep Catholics ill-informed and in their place.
But reading these papers over the recent while, I was struck by more fundamental differences.
The Newsletter writes as if ‘Northern Ireland’ was really part of Britain.  It doesn’t just argue the benefits – real or imagined – of a union with Britain, but deludes itself that it’s part of the main game.  So this week saw a ludicrous article about David Cameron, the leader of the British Tories.  This was not an examination of the impact or otherwise that Cameron might make on northern affairs, but a philosophical discussion about the nature of Cameron’s challenge to Blair.
This sort of nonsense would be silly enough in a British paper like the Daily Mail or Daily Express, but it’s surreal for the Newsletter to delude itself and its readers that this is the real world in which it lives.
Of course, it’s all part of the pretence that “Northern Ireland is as British as Finchley”.
The Telegraph naturally does not stoop to this level.  It just pretends that the issue doesn’t exist.  Its coverage is completely provincial and localised, though its political discussion at least faces up to some of the reality of the domestic scene.
The Irish News instead acts as the main purveyor of news to the nationalist community.  Its main discussion thrust, however, is to argue the SDLP case against Sinn Féin, as illustrated in a recent article by Tom Kelly which trivialised the whole policing debate. But at least the News knows where the North is, unlike the Newsletter.
The point is that, while the context of northern papers is clearer, they are as unreliable as their southern counterparts - because their prejudices are not always the same as those of the bulk of the people who buy and read them.


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