Why's the media falling for the ‘budget billions cuts’ line again?

IT’S ‘budget billions’ time again.

With less than three months to Budget Day, Fianna Fáil used the first day of their annual ‘think in’ to upscale their summer campaign of ‘more cuts are coming’.

With the Irish news media primed to cover the two-day event, they fell mostly into the trap of parroting the day’s message from Brian Lenihan that €3billion budget cuts are the minimum to expect.

What a masterstroke. Fianna Fáil have managed to turn the media debate into one which focuses on what the maximum amount of cuts may be rather than the question of who will suffer most from these cuts or do we need the cuts in the first place if we stopped bailing out banks?

The role that the media plays in economic debate in Ireland has come into sharp focus in recent days. Earlier this year, the two Brians (Cowen and Lenihan) were quoting positive coverage in the international press about their fiscal policies.

As the coverage turned negative earlier this year they began to complain about the international news media. The negative coverage began with Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman increasingly focusing on providing an analysis of the Irish economy.

Have a search for his ‘Erin Go Broke’ article in The New York Times in April 2009 or the more recent ‘A Terrible Ugliness Is Born’ from June of this year, where he wrote:

All that savage austerity was supposed to bring rewards; the conventional wisdom that this would happen is so strong that one often reads news reports claiming that it has, in fact, happened, that Ireland’s resolve has impressed and reassured the financial markets. But the reality is that nothing of the sort has taken place: conventional wisdom that this would happen is so strong that one often reads news reports claiming that it has, in fact, happened, that Ireland’s resolve has impressed and reassured the financial markets. But the reality is that nothing of the sort has taken place: virtuous, suffering Ireland is gaining nothing.

Of course, I know what will happen next: we’ll hear that the Irish just aren’t doing enough, and must do more. If we’ve been bleeding the patient, and he has nonetheless gotten sicker, well, we clearly need to bleed him some more.

So this week it is back to bleeding the patient and a news media not pointing up that there are other treatments available or even that the consequences of these cuts are huge for Irish society.

There has been a deafening silence in the Irish media to a British Trades Union Congress study headlined in The Guardian last weekend and widely reported in Britain. The TUC analysis argues that the Conservative/Liberal Democrats Coalition cuts will “hit the poorest in society 10 times harder than the richest”. So what is the Irish context?

Today, most of the Irish news media took the Lenihan bait. The Independent front-page headline tells us that, “Taxpayers face fresh onslaught in Budget”. The RTÉ website pronounces:

“Minimum of €3bn Budget cuts being sought.”

Newstalk bulletins had a similar line.

The sombre Irish Times reports the story as “Lenihan may seek to impose over €3bn in Budget cut”.

The cuts threat also makes the front page of the Examiner, Mail and Mirror today. The Sun covers the story on page 2, though they tell us that it is €4billion in cuts. You have to wait until page 10 of the Star to get the “We could chop more than €3bn in Budget”.

Strangely, it is only the Mirror that brings any different angles to the analysis. Their front-page headline reads “Fianna Fools”, photo-shopping Cowen and Lenihan into Laurel and Hardy with a strap that reads, “Another fine mess as Cowen & Lenihan get their sums wrong and demand €1bn MORE in cuts.”

It would be funny except the time for laughing at our worries is long gone.