Gotcha - Kelvin McKenzie calls out the Media Studies machine

The British Independent is running a fascinating perspective from old Red Top warrior Kelvin McKenzie on the explosion of media studies courses and journalism schools.

The article, which is an amended version of a speech he provocatively made at a London University recently, suggests that the media studies industry is little more than a racket, aimed at providing funds to universities and keeping hasbeen hacks in employment, rather than training the next generation of journalists.

On some of his points, he's clearly correct. Journalism isn't a profession requiring years of study. It's best learnt on the job, in a newsroom, under the guidance of older, wiser journalists. And with the print journalism industry currently in crisis and laying off workers left, right and centre, there are no job opportunities for the veritable hordes of graduates emerging from colleges every year.

McKenzie is probably right to advise would-be journalists to avoid such courses and seek employment directly from local newspapers and train up that way. However, in such a job shortage, there are few opportunities for starting journalists even there.

They are, in effect, competing with the many recently unemployed journalists who have experience. There has been a growing trend in the media as in other industries to utilise graduates as work experience fodder, paying them nothing as interns in order to avoid hiring staff. So a would-be young reporter is really up against it, seeking work where there is no work, against more experienced journalists and also against those who are prepared to work for no pay.

Many will struggle even to find unpaid placements. Others will struggle along for years as freelance workers, living on pittances. Most will simply give up and migrate into other industries, or else retrain in something else. For this latter cohort, they will effectively have wasted money and time on three years of study that was of little or no use to them.

The explosion of media studies courses has been identified in some quarters as an example of the dumbing down of education at both secondary and tertiary levels. It seems, on surface analysis, like an easy ride for kids to 'study' TV shows and newspaper articles for three years, play with sound editing software and video cameras a bit, then emerge with a degree.

McKenzie's point - that a shrinking industry does not require the 25,400 media studies graduates emerging from British universities each year - is only one aspect of the debate, however. Not all of those graduates wish to work in the media, any more than all history graduates wish to be professional historians or all literature graduates wish to be professional poets.

There is a sense in which a liberal arts degree functions to equip a student with critical apparatus that can be used generally in their lives. Educating young people about the intricacies of an ever more proliferating, ever more agendized media is not the most useless thing a university can do.

However, it does seem odd that we are now in an age where people are becoming professionally trained consumers of media even as the media itself is debasing (by way of job losses, lower reporting standards and increased dependence upon PR materials.)

There is an argument in favour of applying the same academic rigour of analysis to the sort of media people consume today as was traditionally reserved for the analysis of classical literature. Why should The Wire or the lyrics of The Beatles not warrant such attention? But the question arises as to where the line is crossed into risibility. What value, for example, might a doctoral study of Britney Spears' music possess? Ironic kitsch value only, I'd suggest, which itself serves to debase the concept of academic rigour.

On the one hand, if people want to go to university to study media, then that is in itself a legitimate consumer decision and universities are merely responding to the education market. Increasingly, they are encouraged to take this service provider perspective by governments.

But on the other hand, what is achieved for society by churning out tens of thousands of people with degrees in how to read newspapers closely? Is this not a form of dumbing down from the days when they learnt to apply that level of criticism to Ulysses or the Peloponnesian War? It clearly doesn't serve the media industry, as McKenzie acutely and somewhat cruelly points out. The only industry well served by this trend is the media studies industry itself.

In the meantime, McKenzie must be commended for making the point that such graduates ought not to expect an entrance into the industry with their qualification. Perhaps the universities might be more up front and honest with their 'customers' on this point. Then tens of thousands of students might not enter such degrees harbouring ill-fated ambitions to form part of the industry they spend three years studying.

Poison Pens 9: telling the opposite of the truth

All today's headlines from the CSO unemployment figures would suggest to you that the number on the dole is actually dropping.

Take this one - you'd assume that meant there were nearly 7,000 more people in work than there were last month.

Here's Pravda RTE singing the same good news song. And here's the Irish Times.

At least to the latter's credit, they reveal buried in their story the actual truth -

"While the number of people on the Live Register did increase over the month the level of increase was less than the increase recorded in the month to January in the previous three years. As a result, on a seasonally adjusted basis there was a monthly decrease of 6,900 on the Live Register in January 2011," the CSO said.

There you are. Actually the number signing on increased. All the headlines are telling you the opposite of the truth.

I'd expect this crap from the government. I recall successive British governments fiddling and massaging dole figures so often as to render them meaningless.

But why are the Irish media telling the opposite of the truth when it comes to unemployment?


PS: Loving the work of this gentleman on Twatter.

Poison Pens 8: the art of confirmation bias

Confirmation bias is, speaking simply, the psychological process where you seek out things that agree with your opinion and dismiss those which do not.

It's most commonly acknowledged among market traders, who seek to be ever alert to the prospect that they could be wrong, and try to remain open to contradicting views. The reason they do this is because if they didn't, they'd quickly lose a lot of money.

But for most of us, confirmation bias isn't something we worry about. We like our own opinions, and we like those who share them, mostly. Sure, we might like people who disagree with us too. But being around them all the time would eventually become... disagreeable. So we don't.

Confirmation bias is one of the things that makes people interact with the media they choose. It's a long-standing canard that tabloid readers buy the redtops in order to confirm their own neanderthal point of view on the world.

In fact, it's much more likely that the very people levelling this argument, smug broadsheet readers, are themselves the biggest victims of confirmation bias.

Tabloid readers are very aware that the world consists of more than X Factor, celeb affairs and premiership football. They read them like some women read Hello! or Elle - for the escapism away from the humdrum reality.

Broadsheet readers, however, do not have the same level of disconnect with their chosen media. Let's take, as an example, the following piece from today's Observer, entitled 'US shaken by sudden surge of violence against gays.'

According to the title, there is a surge of anti-gay violence sweeping across America, which is a shocking prospect, not least to the gay-friendly readers of the Observer.

Yet, the evidence doesn't remotely support that. Within the article, the entire evidence offered consists of one suicide (well-reported, and subject to legal action towards alleged bullies), one quite vicious beating of a gay man and some vaguely euphemised 'other youths' in New York, a group of men who had a bin thrown at them, and a customer of the Stonewall Inn who was robbed.

I don't wish to diminish the seriousness of any of those individual acts, but frankly, all of that and much worse likely happened in any single Dublin housing estate last night. It doesn't add up to anything close to a surge of violence against gays in a country of 300 million people.

The article opens with the poignant scene of one brave man's 'lonely vigil' protesting for civil rights for gay people. Then swiftly moves on to inform us that, like him, 'Liberal America looks on aghast as virulent homophobic prejudice seems to have returned to its streets and cities.'

'Seems' is the key word here, the mealymouthed weasel word which excuses the writer from offering objective fact and allows him to present biased opinion in its place. It's a technique pioneered and perfected by the dark minions of the Daily Mail, where insinuating invective has been house style for many years.

'Seems', 'may be considered to be', 'is now thought by many' - such phrases are bullshit euphemisms. They are shorthand, telling the reader - here is what you should conclude, here is what you should be thinking.

Ironically, the very people who would be impervious to this technique in the Daily Mail are suckers for it in their own favoured papers, like the Observer.

This is confirmation bias in action.

The issue isn't whether there is a tidal wave of anti-gay violence in America or not. Clearly there isn't, and even the article is forced to concede in a single hurried line that the US is set to overturn the ban on gays in the military and Florida has just introduced gay adoption.

The issue is that the Observer, for some reason, has thought it legitimate to pretend that there is, using all the Daily Mail's rhetorical tropes of insinuation to depict skewed opinion in place of objective fact, when those facts do not add up to support their argument.

Journalism is becoming ever more debased, and nowhere is this more evident than in the broadsheets. Don't let confirmation bias blind you to that.

The Irishness of Protestants

I've fairly simple criteria for what it means to be Irish.

Are you from Ireland? If you can answer yes, then you're Irish in my book.

Of course, not everyone sees it the same way. And according to a new study by a Protestant academic, apparently Irish Protestants are seen by many of their compatriots as somehow being a lesser form of Irish.

Which is frankly despicable, especially in this day and age when the Irish Times and the many, many statefunded multicult quangos spend so much effort trying to insist that people from distant continents who arrived here in the last few years to scam our welfare system are, in fact, 'new Irish.'

Let's be blunt - Irish Protestants are Irish. Some may like, as indeed some Irish Catholics like, to carry other passports too. But they're no less Irish for that or indeed for their choice of religion or their family background.

This study is now likely to be used as another stick with which to beat the Irish nation. A cold house, Rome rule, etc, etc.

But I think perhaps something else is feeding into this.

All Irish people are familiar with the selective co-opting of Irish people by Britain when it suits them.

When Michelle Smith was winning Olympic medals, she was hilariously described as 'one of ours' by the BBC. But when she was caught urinating whiskey into drug sample bottles, of course she became an Irish cheat.

And let's not forget Samuel L. Jackson's legendary correction of Brit telly hackette Kate Thornton when she sought to claim Colin Farrell as British.

But this trend continues today, even in something as vapid and irrelevant as Piers Morgan's top 100 British celebrities list. The former tabloid hack states up front that Irish celebrities 'such as Bono and Colin Farrell' aren't included.

Then he goes on to list a bunch of Irish people on his list anyway - Kenneth Branagh, Christine Bleakely, Graham Norton.

Let's go through that carefully for a moment. Branagh and Bleakely are from the North, which is British-ruled. But Norton? Born and raised in Cork, for goodness sake. And where's Liam Neeson or Terry Wogan, surely bigger stars than either Branagh or Bleakely?

Obviously the real criterion here is their religious background. According to Morgan, you're British if you're an Irish Protestant, even if you're from Cork, but you're not British if you're an Irish Catholic, even if you grew up under British rule or lived your entire working life in England as the beloved voice of middle-aged Middle England.

We remain firmly in the cultural hinterland of London, and hence it isn't surprising to me to find that research indicates a reticence about the Irishness of Protestants, when the British media still firmly insist that the Protestant community of this island belongs to them.

I look forward to the day when Irish Protestants start directing their anger at attempts to dilute their nationality, not only at their fellow Irish people, but also at the British who continually assume prior claim to them.

One further criterion I ought to have added above: you're Irish only if you want to be Irish.

So while I consider it despicable that some Irish people see their fellow citizens as somehow lesser, I think the only way that can be addressed is for the Irish Protestant population to be a bit more vocal in insisting on their nationality, especially when it comes under such regular assault from our ever-colonial neighbours.

You're Irish - shout it out and then no one can dispute it, not your Catholic neighbours or your British ones.

Take your medicine

Anyone else see the egghead student whining in the Indo today about not getting into medicine?

Some privileged 17 year old from Tipp got a load of A1s in her leaving certificate but failed the aptitude test for medicine which they introduced this year.

Now she's in the national press moaning her hole off about how terribly unfair it all is, since last year her top grades would have secured her a place in any of Ireland's medical schools.

Talk about missing the point.

We've had years of only the very bookish students being permitted to study medicine and, do you know what? It didn't improve our health service in the slightest.

In fact, the doctors themselves have been complaining that the system was promoting eggheads into medicine rather than people who actually had a vocation to be doctors. The Irish Medical Organisation has been pleading for changes to the system for years.

So now we finally have a system that says you still need something massive like 520 points in the leaving cert, but also demands that you pass a test designed to see if you're suited to being a doctor. Good news for all.

Except for whining Marie Claire McGrath. She blew the aptitude test after aceing her leaving cert. In short, she's been found out in a standardised test not to be a suitable candidate for medicine. The test itself examines specifically "a candidate's logical reasoning, problem solving and social skills." We'll come back to that in a minute.

Marie Claire clearly feels entitled to study medicine. So entitled that she's moaning in the media. You can't blame her for feeling entitled. Unkie is a well-off doctor and she'd like to be too. She tactically dropped subjects and changed schools (to one in Cork!) in order to max her chances of passing these exams.

She's also the kind of person who gives up easily. Having blamed the HPAT test for her own failing of it, she now 'doesn't know what she wants to do', but is not considering repeating the aptitude test for medicine.

Now, I don't know about you, but I don't want doctors who give up and whine at the first moment of failure. I want doctors who stay the course and get people well - who are prepared to fight, in other words.

I also don't want doctors who are so nakedly ambitious and self-entitled. Marie Claire's idea of problem solving isn't to retake the test or rethink her suitability for medicine. It's to complain in the national media. The test, she feels, is at fault rather than her. That's a major breakdown in logic: the test failed her; she didn't fail the test.

I don't know what her social skills are like, but if they're like her logical reasoning and her problem solving, it's not a bit of wonder that she flunked the aptitude test for medicine.

The whole point of the new medical entry system was to weed out the unsocial, self-entitled, egghead medics and replace them with warm caring human beings with a drive to help people. That's what the aptitude test is for, and it looks like it worked perfectly on this occasion.

Perhaps Marie Claire, a 17 year old girl who apparently 'dreams of working as a GP' since she was a kid, should take her medicine and go and do something else with her life.

Stop, please! No more irony!

I am suffering from an overdose of irony.

Evening Herald columnist and stay-at-home mom Suzanne Power has an especially pertinent title to her column this week.

It's been titled: "So look, stranger, don't bore me with your sad life and pathetic small talk."

I'm still not sure if this title refers to her article, which of course is the usual oul shite about men being crap, daytime TV and bodily functions - in other words, the same oul shite EVERY stay-at-home mommy columnist writes about.

In fact, I suspect it may be a comment from a wry editor or sub-editor forced to read this drivel as they put it on the page.

Poison Pens Six: Feminist columnist wants to ban men

No knee jerks with such predictable, goose-stepping precision as that of a feminist when men deign to comment on female health issues.

The not-so-hidden subtext of such reactions is generally that men should STFU about women's health issues entirely, the patriarchal scumbags.

In this context, one can of course understand that British hack Melanie Reid (medical qualification: X -X chromosomes) is infinitely more qualified than a certain Dr Denis Walsh (medical qualifications: associate professor in midwifery at Nottingham University) to comment on childbirth (scroll to bottom, past the other shite she's written this week.)

Dr Walsh has opined that women are having too many epidurals these days. Not so controversial, you might have thought, to suggest that too many dangerous spinal injections for pregnant women during labour should perhaps be discouraged.

But that would be to disregard the righteous wrath of people like Melanie Reid, who, like Caroline Simons in a very different context, is apparently supremely qualified for everything by virtue of her possession of a functioning womb.

Let's start by reminding ourselves that Melanie is, first of all, a HUGE fan of medicalising pregnancy and birth as much as possible. Not for her the hippy nonsense of homebirths or that sort of delinquent behaviour. No, no. Mel wants hospitals, and caesareans, and drugs. And she wants everyone else to want that too.

Bear in mind, she's expressed some extremely strange opinions in the past. Probably the most bizarre before today was when she went on BBC Radio to talk about how caring for the elderly is bad for them and people should just let their elderly senile parents die alone of hypothermia like she did.

So let's ignore her prescriptive preaching, since it actually serves to strip pregnant women of choice. Let's ignore also her nonsense about what nasty people medics are for encouraging women to breastfeed. Let's instead focus on her latest bout of uterus-focused lunacy - men can't talk about pregnancy or childbirth because men don't have wombs.

Dr Denis Walsh is a midwife. Not just any old midwife, though. He teaches other midwives. He teaches them so well that he is now a professor of midwifery. He's been in the childbirth game for decades, and has seen the rates of epidurals rising rapidly, and he's concerned.

He's concerned because epidurals are risky, and because they lead to women needing hormones to boost their contractions, which has god knows what effect on the children. As the good doc says, we've no idea what the long-term effects of this will be.

He also reckons that there are a load of other pain relief options for women in labour. And he'd know, because he's a professor of midwifery and this is his subject of expertise.

But that's not good enough for Mel. She's got a womb, so clearly she is way more qualified to discuss such matters than Dr Walsh. In fact, she reckons that he should be sacked from his job for the sole crime of being a man - him and every other male midwife.

Let's imagine for a moment that I said: "Look here, this Melanie Reid is a pretty piss-poor journalist. Here she is criticising experts who know way more than she does. She's clearly not qualified to be doing her job. In fact, it's unnatural for her to be doing it at all. For centuries we relied on men to be journalists. All women should be banned from journalism because it's unnatural."

I take it the flaws in that argument would be evident to all. So now let's look at what Melanie has to say about Dr Walsh. (You might want to settle down and get the popcorn out for this - such spectacular nonsense rarely gets a public outing):

"There’s simply no point trying to be reasonable about this. Dr Walsh either wants women to suffer or he thinks being controversial is a good career move. Either way, this is the midwifery equivalent of bombing women back to the Stone Age. Personally speaking, I’d rather take my chances with the Taleban [sic] than inhabit a system run by Dr Walsh and his kind.

And incidentally, don’t you think men should be banned from becoming midwives? If we’re talking tradition, after all, a male midwife is even more unnatural than a pain-free childbirth."

She has no intention of being reasonable.
She'd rather receive pregnancy and labour care from the Taliban than a professor of midwifery in one of the safest countries in the Western World to give birth.
She considers his sage advice that less epidurals be used as akin to being bombed into the stone age.
She wants men to be banned from a job that many do well, saving little lives each day, purely on the basis of their gender.

Shrill? Yup. Unscientific? Yup. Kneejerk? Yup. Preposterous? Yup.

I have a little suggestion of my own, if we're in the business of proposing that people be banned from stuff. Melanie Reid should be banned from writing about childbirth, or medicine, or health, or men ever again, since she clearly has only frothing-mouthed feminist cant to contribute.

In fact, perhaps we should consider a breeding ban for Mel too. After all, she clearly doesn't like the way women are given options and advice and care when giving birth in Britain, and she clearly hates the fact that men are allowed to perform some of these tasks. And do we really want someone with such bizarre opinions in control of kids, even her own?

If she falls pregnant accidentally, we could of course refer her to the Afghani health service and those Taliban midwives - you know the ones, all dressed in black with zero education, living in squalor and under genuine male oppression - that she rates so highly.

Melanie Reid, take a bow for being the stupidest cow in British newspapers this week.

Poison Pens Five: HOLD THE FRONT PAGE!!!!

'Journalist asks question at press conference shocker!'

Seriously, I'm not making this up. About four national newspapers have all covered this non-story.

A journalist went to a press conference, plucked up the courage to ask a question, got an answer, then left.

I mean, OMG!!! All those scary old dudes there, asking about, like football and stuff. No wonder plucky Lisa has her hand totally to her chest in shock at what she's done (while posing for a photo, natch.) She, like, TOTALLY asked a question at a press conference?

I know! Like, who knew journalists did that? She should get a medal or something. Probably Fianna Fail are already tapping her up to run in the next general election.

Let's remind ourselves - this chick went to university. She trained as a journalist. Her daddy was a journalist before her. So she's seen her dad do this, she's educated and trained to do it. Why is it so shocking that she went as a journalist to a press conference and asked a question? It's her JOB to do that!

What so-fucking-what yawnathon will the Irish media treat us to next? 'Man rose early and drove electric cart to deliver milk'? 'Sun expected to rise in the East tomorrow morning'? 'Moon disappointingly not made of cream cheese'?

The media rightly get it in the neck sometimes for their sense of whats worthy of reporting and what isn't. People see endless tabloid headlines about Jade Goody, or Jordan, or David Beckham, and despair.

But this article is a spectacular classic of an even more debased genre - journalists puffing themselves and each other.

People do their jobs everyday without expectation of public acknowledgement, and many people do a damn sight more important work than asking Cristiano Ronaldo about his shorts.

Where are their articles?

People who perform surgery, fly airplanes, teach children or cure cancer, take note. Here's what a REALLY difficult job is like:

"It was mortifying from my point of view," said Lisa Cannon, "but at the end of the day that's what I was sent there to do."

Well done for spotting that, love. Yes, you went to a press conference and did your job. Congrats. Do we have to read about it in the paper everytime you do your job properly?

"It was a pretty difficult interview because I couldn't ask him any of the questions I really wanted to but I'm glad I did it," she continued.

Oh, hold on a minute. She didn't ask any of the questions she wanted to? Why not? Isn't asking some questions the sum total of her task? What stopped her? Did someone overpower her and clamp a chloroform cloth over her mouth before she could get the words out?

Perhaps she didn't do her job so well after all, if she couldn't ask questions at a press conference when your job is to do exactly that.

I don't mean to knock the girl - she's probably very nice and might well be generally excellent at her job, which I understand involves talking about clothes and make-up a lot on TV3. And it wasn't her decision to put this tripe into the national press.

My only questions remain for the national press themselves:

Why should the public give a fuck about this?

What is it doing in a newspaper?

How many 'Journalist did their job' stories do you reckon you could print before gangs of brain surgeons, airline pilots, firemen, nurses, teachers and other actually relevant people storm your newsroom and gag the lot of you with chloroform cloths?

Some questions about Monica Leech

1. The court has found Monica Leech was not libelled by an Evening Herald article which said she travelled to New York with a ministerial delegation and did not attend the UN. So, what was she doing there and how much did it cost the taxpayer?

2. You get a quarter of a million for a lost limb from the personal injuries board. What lunatics rate a married woman's virtue as worth nearly ten lost limbs?

3. Monica Leech was hired in a process found to be flawed and wrong in which no one else was allowed to apply for the position, was paid well in excess of going rates, and has not been replaced in her role since departing her job with the minister. Since then, she has worked on the Higher Education Authority - a ministerial appointment - despite having little knowledge of that sector. Given that the articles did not make any reference to any affair, how is it possible for a victim of an alleged libel to completely make up such an allegation and attribute its meaning to a series of articles that clearly and overtly describe cronyism?

4. Monica Leech said during the trial that the articles 'only got her name right' and afterwards that the Evening Herald 'made up a story'. Since the court has found that their article was true, what story does Monica Leech believe they made up?

5. When are Ireland's creaking libel laws going to be overhauled, and when are caps going to be put on libel damages?

Twatter

The next big non-thing thrown up (literally, quite possibly) by teh interwebz is, as I'm sure you all know by now, Twitter.

I'm not going to link to it because it's already ubiquitous.

Basically, it's a retrograde medium which reduces the expansive capacities of the world wide web and mobile communications technology to the paucity of a phone text message.

Now, while 140 characters is just about sufficient to let the other half know you're running late in the car, it's clearly not that big a canvas for people to generally communicate to a wider public in any meaningful fashion.

The mobile texting experience might have implied this anyway, but nevertheless that seems to be the appeal to many, oddly enough. People are hanging out of Twitter, updating frantically every few minutes with admittedly brief inanities.

It's the internet equivalent of when a child starts narrating in the present tense, with their limited capacity to communicate meaningfully.

"Mummy, I'm running! Mummy, look at how high I can jump! Now I can reach the branch, Mummy. Look at me, Mummy!"

Yet it appears to have sucked in punters like Jonathan Ross, George Hook and various Hollywood celebs, but since they're all just shills with careers to promote and products to sell, that is only to be expected.

What isn't to be expected or welcomed is when journalists crawl so far up their own arses while using it that they start demanding other people communicate with them using only this vapid medium.

Clearly the prick involved lost sight of his own actual importance (not a lot - he edits a Business website, for crying out loud) a long time ago.

But while you might sympathise with his clear and utter hatred for the oxygen thieves who earn a living in public relations, by demanding that people only access him via Twitter, he's outted himself as a complete twat.

Ironically, he announced his twattish decision in an email - not a tweet (seriously, people, they're letting you KNOW that this is akin to birdsong in terms of relevance).

If there's any sense left in the world, people will respond to him in kind, by refusing his phone calls and emails too. That way, he should be out of his job by, ooh, Monday lunchtime.

If this is where journalism is going, it's even baser than I thought already.

Poison Pens 4: Propping up the Property Ladder

The pips are now officially squeaking.

As the Department of Finance sends auditors into the banks to view their loan books, the developers are beginning to panic properly now.

Previously, they'd been merely concerned. No one was buying their boxy apartments in the burbs for the inflated prices they'd listed them at. They'd tried every stunt in the book, from offering interest-free loans, to throwing in boats or Bulgarian apartments to seal the deal.

But the public weren't interested in buying in a plummeting market, and those few mad enough to consider it can't get a mortgage from the banks.

There seemed to be some light at the end of the tunnel for the developer classes when the budget was presented last week. The state was now going to offer its own sub-prime mortgages which would only apply to the surfeit of new build homes still on the builders' books.

Talk about a bail-out of builders masquerading as helping the homeless!

But now that people are actually being repossessed, there is little tolerance for Government stunts aimed at propping up the property market.

In recent times, the banks have been keeping the whole routine going, rolling over the interest on massive (by which I mean from the tens of millions upwards) loans to developers.

But that is likely to come crashing to a halt once the Government auditors oversee the banks' books. After all, why should the rest of us pay our mortgage under threat of repossession when builders who owe stratospheric amounts of money are being facilitated?

The builders know that many of them are likely to go bust if they are made pay the interest on their loans and the Government bail-out doesn't work.

Which is why we're seeing this week their mouthpieces in the media spinning like mad on their behalfs.

From Independent Newspapers come two classics of the genre: the first for grown-ups by someone who ought to know better (and perhaps does), the second a piece of cartoon analysis by an Evening Herald useful idiot.

In his piece, McWilliams paints his usual colourful pen portrait of his creation Breakfast Roll Man, who starred in his epoch-defining book 'The Pope's Children'.

But now Breakfast Roll Man is on his uppers - the developments won't sell, he can't afford the bank loan, pressure mounting on all sides. It's not an entirely sympathetic picture, but McWilliams ensures to inject some pathos into it.

Where McWilliams lets himself down is when he concludes that Breakfast Roll Man was duped by Bertie, and deserves a dig out of his own. This duplicitous piece of writing runs contrary to all common sense.

But since McWilliams was involved in advising the Government on the bank guarantee, we should take this latest message from him seriously. This is what he is advocating, and he currently has the ear of those in power.

The Evening Herald article is way more transparent. It's an outrageous puff piece in favour of granting Sean Dunne planning for his white elephant Ballsbridge tower before he is declared bankrupt.

Sadly, it's not available online. Let me judiciously present a few representative gobbets for you to choke on:

"Were the city planners pleased? Oh no. The well-heeled resident Leafies of lush Ballsbridge got on their mobiles to the Irish Times and muttered darkly about the destruction of Ballsbridge - meaning their snooty little enclave would no longer be as exclusive nor their houses as expensive."

It's priceless, isn't it? The coinage of the term 'Leafies', for example, as if leaves were exclusive to Dublin Four. What was wrong with the established pejorative term of 'Deefer', I wonder?
Then the snide reference to the Irish Times, the depiction of Ballsbridge as an 'enclave' - gated it is not - all add up to paint a desperate picture of little Dunne versus Big Bastard D4 snobs.

But wait, there's more. So much more.

"After all, Dunne deserves our support and indeed admiration. He's a swaggering, carefree buccaneer, who lives life to the full, takes terrible risks and spends his money rather than squirrelling it under the mattress. In short, like his tower, he's a diamond in the rough."

Let's parse that a little. A buccaneer is a pirate. It's probably the most honest word used by the author, the aforementioned useful idiot, Gwen Halley. Mind you, she likely wouldn't have used it if she knew its meaning.

But a pirate is indeed what Dunne is. And yes, he did indeed take terrible risks. Unfortunately, they didn't work out. He gambled and lost. But Gwen thinks the planning system should see 'the bigger picture' by throwing him the lifeline of planning permission.

Perhaps if Dunne had squirrelled his money away, perhaps if the nation and the Government had all done so, instead of squandering our new-found wealth (Dunne on leveraging property deals, the Government on pork barrel infrastructure and propping up their funders in construction, the nation on easy credit and inflated mortgages) we'd all be better placed to face this recession.

McWilliams and Halley are spinning on behalf of the developers, and Independent Newspapers is facilitating their doing so.

But nothing will save the developer class now. Sean Dunne will go bust, and so will Breakfast Roll Man.

The only remaining issue is how much money will the State (via this preposterous sub-prime lending scheme) and the rest of us (via buying those boxy apartments in the burbs in a falling market) waste in propping up the property ladder until its fall can no longer be postponed.

Freedom of the Press

Next time you open up the Indo and see a vomit-inducing hagiographic puff-piece about His Royal Highness 'Sir' Tony O'Reilly, remember this.

Or when you wince as the Irish Times lectures you like a prissy maiden aunt about how you should vote in a referendum, remember this.

Or when you peruse the rows of red top tabloids and sneer at the garish pictures of scantily clad starlets and schlock headlines in a superior manner, remember this.

Freedom of the press is a privilege we enjoy. With it comes things we are interested in hearing and happy to be informed about. With it also comes lectures, preposterous opinions, spin, fluff, puff and outright nonsense on all too many occasions.

But that's the point of diversity of opinion and press freedom. It permits all sorts of truths to be told, in a free and open manner.

So please remember that, and remember Mohammed Omer, the young and talented award-winning journalist from Gaza who was this week tortured by the Israelis for having the audacity to speak the truth about his homeland to the world and be acknowledged for doing so in an exemplary manner.

And remember him the next time you hear the Israeli propaganda machine kicking into gear with another well-rehearsed bout of lies about how peace-hungry, reasonable, beleaguered and free Israel is.

Because Mohammed Omer's neck bears the mark of the jackboot that says otherwise. Literally bears the mark.

The power of positive thinking

Ten days sampling the Aussie media has left me pondering the power of positive thinking.

I recall how some years ago, ITN news presenter Martyn Lewis was laughed at for suggesting that British news was too negative and could benefit from being lightened up with positive stories. Images of front pages about cats saved from trees filled the heads of his cynical colleagues and they chuckled.

I did too.

But it is true that the British media environment is a profoundly negative and mean-spirited one. The Irish media climate is little different.

I've noticed this especially here in Australia, where they are prepared to put a story about a medical discovery or a community initiative on the front page without apology.

In some other places I've been, the positive news can seem seriously parochial. Israeli papers see little beyond their own siege mentality, as if everything on the planet related to the Middle East or Jewish affairs, even when the story is something light-hearted or positive, for example.

But Australia is a heavyweight country with a large, cosmopolitan, travelled, multicultural society. And if they can make positive news work, both on the airwaves and in print, then why couldn't we?

I'm slightly dreading returning to the land of scandal as substance and negativity news, now. I fear the face of Ireland I'll see in our media will seem scowling and mean in comparison to the optimism - tempered by reality and proper coverage of current events and affairs, of course - that is expressed in Australian media.

And without wanting to seem simplistic, I wonder if the media mentalities of both nations can perhaps be mapped onto the nature of the peoples who read them?

Are Australians outward-looking and positive can-do people inherently and that is expressed through their media? Or does the media perhaps encourage such an outlook in those who view and read it?

And by contrast, what does our own sour, negatively troped news say about us?

Is the Indo systemically anti-Muslim?

Certainly, some Muslims seem to think so.

As far as I'm aware, there have been at least two complaints to the Press Council and Ombudsman from Irish based Muslims about articles that appeared in the Irish Independent.

One was a somewhat inflammatory piece by commentator Kevin Myers, whose flights of fancy I've previously examined here.

The other complaint apparently relates to Ian O'Doherty (airbrushed above), whose otherwise interesting and light-hearted column I-Spy is regularly marred by his blinkered defence of all things Neo-Con or Israeli, and his blanket demonising of Islam.

After yet another crack about Shariah law in Ireland from Ian, a large number of Irish Muslims finally had enough and collectively wrote a letter to the editor, which was published in today's edition.

What I found intriguing, though, is that the grammar of the letter was sporadically abysmal. Not consistently so, just sporadically so, almost as if errors had been deliberately inserted to make the writers look stupid.

What errors JC, I hear you ask with my now well-known superpower of being able to hear your thoughts over the interweb?

Errors like: "Let us start with Saudi Arabia as an example quote by himcountry in the world named after a family..."

Or "We would also like to point out to yourMuslims were unmatched in the advances in the fields of mathematics..."

Or "It is similar to what the British didthe IRA was bombing Britain."

Now, some of the signatories included at least two consultant surgeons, not to mention other doctors, as well as 'students, shopkeepers and housewives.'

Either we are to believe that they took it in turns writing a line each, which might explain why a letter that is otherwise coherent and eloquent could include a series of incomprehensible grammar clangers.

Or we could assume that the Indo butchered the letter for their own impenetrable reasons.

I wonder which it is? Could the Indo be so systematically anti-Muslim as to deliberately make a community of Muslims out to be illiterate?

Poison Pens - Irish media nonsense exposed

Obviously every single day you can pick up an Irish newspaper, any of them really, and roll your eyes in horror at the errors, misspellings, pretensions, outrageous opinion masquerading as objectivity, and blatant spin.

So I'm going to reserve this occasional series for serial offenders and major errors of fact.

In the first category is long-time frustrated poet, Irish Independent sports writer Vincent Hogan, whose airbrushed, outdated 'matinee idol' byline picture is only matched by his fondness for prose more purple than a crate of Ribena.

Maybe you were busy Wednesday night, and didn't catch the Ireland V Brazil game? Thought you'd pick up the Indo on Thursday and read all about it? Vince has other plans for you.

From the casual racism of the opening line - 'It was settled by the deftness of a street thief" - you knew this was going to be vintage Hogan balls.

There's the one word sentences, the irrelevant multi-paragraph digressions, and the errors of fact that make you think he wasn't at the game at all. (On this occasion, the suggestion that the Brazilians were singing Ole. Ole is a Spanish word, associated in South America with Brazil's bitter rivals Argentina. It was the Irish fans chanting Ole, Vince.)

Receiving my inaugural 'Liam Lawler's Hooker' award for getting their facts completely wrong in an Irish newspaper is inevitably the Daily Mail, who've never enjoyed the closest relationship with factuality.

In a heavily topspun and overwritten article about the British Embassy employment dispute (with inevitable tired references to Ferrero Rocher and ironing newspapers), the offending scribe Lucie van den Berg manages a whopping error in her opening paragraph. See if you can spot it:

"It had all the appearances of the final days of the Raj. The last bastion of the Perfidious Albion's Imperialism in Ireland - or the British Embassy as we now call it - was the site of outrage among what Edmund Burke called 'the swinish multitude' yesterday."

It's got everything, hasn't it? The ridiculous analogy with the Raj is a nice starter, followed by a main course of ungrammatical factual error. Last bastion of English imperialism in Ireland? Erm, try 70 miles north of Dublin, love. And for desert, a sickly sweet pointless quotation culled no doubt from www.findmeaquotetomakemesoundsmart.com.

The story itself, you ask? There isn't one, really. Some people at the British Embassy were laid off, and their mates took a two hour picket action in sympathy.

Congrats to Vincent and Lucie, penning Irish media drivel at its finest.

Leech by name

Let us once again indulge that rare suspicion that there may indeed be a benign deity in this universe.

PR Puffmistress Monica Leech has been laughed out of the High Court after losing her libel action against the Irish Independent.

The woman, who was banking 650 euro of taxpayers money PER DAY while swanning around the planet on junkets in Martin Cullen's wake, now faces a 350,000 euro legal bill.

(Not that one need feel too sorry for her - her mammoth paycheque for sitting on the board of the Higher Education Authority and her chairmanship of Waterford Chamber of Commerce, as well as her ongoing PR work means that she's probably not shy of a few quid. Oh, and didn't she just take a quarter of a mill off RTE too?)

Leech's team had sought to argue that the offending article, published in December 2004, inferred that she had had adulterous sexual relations with the separated Minister, and that she had performed deeply intimate sexual favours for the minister for the sake of a well-paid and beneficial contract.

Leech, and I tread very carefully here because she is a notably litigious person, was the subject of a crass and coarse allegation, apparently made tongue-in-cheek by a caller to Joe Duffy's Liveline radio show.

It seems fairly obvious to me that few listeners would have for a minute thought that a random caller making such an accusation should be believed for even a second. He was clearly simply being crass and coarse.

RTE apologised immediately at the time, but it's not like you can do much about it when someone comes on the air. You assume they have a proper point to make and not crass insults to share. The Independent reported the incident the following day, mentioning the insult directed at Leech.

Monica's response has been to sue all around her. She sued RTE, despite the apology and the fact that the insult came from a caller. She banked a quarter of a million from that case a few weeks ago.

(Another victory for the TV licence payer. We're paying Bev Flynn's lawyers and Monica Leech's lawyers. No wonder 'Fair City' is so crap.)

Monica also sued the Independent for repeating the allegation in the context of an article about the phone-in incident. She lost that case yesterday. She's also suing at least another couple of media outlets over reporting the phone-in incident, and she's taken some further libel cases against Irish newspapers too, though it seems those relate to separate issues.

Monica is either extremely unfortunate when it comes to being libelled, the most libelled woman in Ireland, perhaps. Or else she is extremely litigious, with an eye to the quick bucks to be made by making yourself out to be a martyr of the Irish media.

It is worth remembering that Monica Leech got her contracts with Cullen in breach of the EU law that says such contracts should go out to tender. No one else was asked to tender for Monica's incredibly, spectacularly lucrative PR contracts.

Of course, all the departments that Cullen worked for have their own civil service press officers. He can also call upon the very able Fianna Fail press office at any time. Obviously those squadrons of spin doctors just weren't sufficient for his spinning needs.

Only Martin Cullen can explain the dire need for a phenomenally paid Monica Leech by his side, especially when on a goodly number of the trips abroad she accompanied him on, including that beautiful trip to romantic Langkawi, not a press release was issued nor a statement made to the media.

Certainly, the two government investigations into the conditions of her recruitment didn't really explain it.

Hopefully this welcome verdict will discourage people from treating libel actions like lottery tickets. Hopefully the Supreme Court, where Monica's headed next, will uphold this verdict, and hopefully her other libel cases against other Irish newspapers and publications will similarly be dismissed.

There is a need to overhaul Ireland's ancient libel laws, as Captain Moonlight cogently argues, which date from the early 1960s. Perhaps greater penalties for those who take frivolous and unsubstantiated libel actions should be incorporated into any future libel law.

They're laughing at us now

All empires bear within them the seeds of their own destruction, history informs us.

Even as Rome was in it's Imperial pomp, with Caligula appointing his horse as consul, or Nero blowing the entire Imperial fortune on interminable poetry contests, a bit like John O'Donoghue used to, we can see with retrospect that the fall of the Caesar family was inevitable.

So it will be with Fianna Fail and it's rum cast of dynasties.

As their grip on Ireland, or at least the 26 counties of it they still claim is Ireland, copperfastens, we have seen the many various dissenters come scampering back into the fold for the third term.

The Donegal Blaneys, who'd make a Shinner feel Unionist, have now signed up to the whip. So have the Kerry publicans the Healy-Raes, their ongoing feud with the former minister for poetry readings now ended in their favour with his demotion to head boy of the Dail.

And so to the Flynns. Pee Flynn, as Senator David Norris was wont to call him, was classic Fianna Fail through and through. Viscerally clientelist, he first showed up as a TD in the Dail wearing a white suit, not unlike that worn by journalist Martin Bell when he ran against the corrupt Tories as an independent.

Of course, it was the Tories rather than Martin Bell that Flynn intended to emulate if not surpass.

He was an early exponent of fundamentalist Fianna Faildom. That's one way of describing those within the Soldiers of Destiny who believe it is their divine right to rule Ireland without interference from anyone, whether it be the Opposition, the electorate, or god forbid, a coalition government partner.

He opposed the coalition with the PDs, not because the PDs are an evil bunch of political degenerates, but because the coalition 'hit at Fianna Fail core values.' He opposed Mary Robinson as President, not for the sane reasons that she was another party's candidate and a lefty, but because she was 'a wife and mother.'

By 1993, he was such an embarrassment, that Fianna Fail parcelled him off to Europe where he became part of the EU Commission that had to resign en masse due to allegations of malpractice in 1999.

That same year, he went on the Late, Late Show and openly boasted about taking bungs from developers. He, poor diddums, actually complained about the hassles of his millionaire lifestyle, his houses, cars and housekeepers.

The public's collective jaw dropped to hear how the Fianna Fail inner circle actually lived, for this was in the days before the full extent of Haughey's corruption and ferrying of Charvet shirts via the diplomatic black box was known.

And so to Beverly, the offspring, the one proud daddy Pee Flynn called 'a class act.'

Beverly worked as an investments advisor for a bank, and advised her customers to salt money away in off-shore accounts to hide it from the taxman. So while the rest of us were paying taxes through our noses to Fianna Fail governments, Bev's 'high net worth' customers were not.

RTE kindly let the world know that Bev had been up to this. This was important, as she was now a TD in her daddy's old constituency. Bev took a libel case against the national broadcaster. Bev lost, because she had been guilty of all the things RTE had alleged.

Bev now owed an awful lot of money in legal fees. If she'd been made pay it all, she could have been declared bankrupt. Then again, if she'd married her millionaire boyfriend who used to belong to someone else incidentally, she could have avoided bankruptcy, but would have been left with many fewer millions than she was used to.

If she'd become bankrupt, she would have been removed as a TD, and a by-election would have ensued in Enda Kenny's own constituency. That would have cost Bertie twice over in relation to his dolly mixture majority, as he'd have lost a vote and FG most likely would have gained one.

So suddenly RTE decides to settle the action for the legal bills. All of a sudden, like. Straight after the formation of Bertie's latest government. Sheer coincidence, you know.

And then Bertie's on the telly, talking Bev up to the skies, how it'd be great to have her back in the party with her troubles behind her, and sure, couldn't she be a great Minister some day soon?

They're laughing at us now. Caligula has just announced he wants to make his horse consul, and all of us are tugging at our togas in embarrassment, nodding dumbly and muttering, 'Well, if you must...'

But let us set aside our shock at the venality of this series of events. It should surprise no one if swine seek to put their head in a trough. We've seen decades of tribunals, we're all numb to the shock of such things now.

Let's instead consider the cost. RTE, the national broadcaster, are down around two million euro. That's a hole in their budget that's going to come from the licence fee. The licence fee paid by normal viewers like you and me, including many people who can barely afford it.

Let's consider the cost to our democracy. The good people of Castlebar, and they are good people, have elected the noxious Pee Flynn repeatedly, elevating him to the point where Fianna Fail behemoths start thinking in terms of Imperial dynasties.

Pee promoted the 'class act', and the Castlebar electorate duly voted her in. And then did it again, even after she had been bravely revealed by RTE to be assisting tax evasion.

We the people must shoulder the responsibility for the culture of excess, corruption, entitlement and arrogance that seem to hang around the upper reaches of Fianna Fail like a miasmic haze of smog.

Like the Roman Senate, we have permitted these people power and permitted their excesses to develop and degenerate.

And the next time the TV Licence Fee inspector calls round, remember how your hundreds of hard earned euro are paying Bev Flynn's lawyers in defending a libel case she lost.

And seek the same percentile settlement as Bev. Offer to pay half the money asked for. Tell them you want the same deal they gave Bev. And then drop me an email from Mountjoy Prison, which is where they'll send you.

But at least they have telly in Mountjoy, so if you behave, you might even get to see Bev being appointed junior minister in the next government shake-up on RTE news.

She'll be smiling. She'll be laughing at you.

P.S. Watch Pee Flynn's staggering hubris on the Late, Late Show at Public Inquiry's blog.

Daily Mail

For the media savvy reader who has everything - here's the Daily Mail-o-matic! Why bother reading the Daily Mail when instead the Daily Mail-o-matic can auto-generate a plausible and convincing Daily Mail headline for any occasion?

As you can see to the side, the Daily Mail has been responsible for outrageous headlines for a long, long time.

My favourite so far - Will the French impregnate Britain's Swans?

Well, will they????

Job cuts at the Indo?

Rumours of imminent job cuts at Independent Newspapers are reaching my ears. Hopefully they aren't true, but the rumours do appear to be consistent and substantial.

The Sunday Business Post and Roy Greenslade have already hinted at this, but what I'm hearing is genuinely disturbing.

Is Gavin O'Reilly really intent on outsourcing the production tasks (taking journalistic copy and pictures and turning them into newspaper pages) on his national papers to an office in Armagh, where ad copy is already processed?

Job adverts have already appeared in Armagh, offering salaries approximately half of what staff in Dublin currently receive. And if this is what's going on, then what will happen to the 200 or so production staff set to lose their jobs in Dublin?

Not that the management like it, but the Indo Group is unionised, and I understand that the NUJ may already be involved at this stage.

If jobs are to go, then hopefully the union will be able to negotiate fair settlements for all.

But the scale of these cuts appear to be on a level much higher than had been previously forecast.

And if this is the case, it translates into a further death knell ringing for the Irish Independent, Sunday Independent and Evening Herald, which would be well on their way to becoming mere copy generating shops in the capital, while the backroom work of assembling newspapers is done outside the state.

Bailey libel action collapses

The Ian Bailey libel action against five newspaper groups has ended suddenly. It seems that the eight year action, which Mr Bailey took when the newspapers suggested he may have been considered a suspect in the murder of Sophie Toscan du Plantier, was settled out of court yesterday.

The newspapers' defence was always that they had not said he was the murderer of Ms du Plantier, but that he was considered a suspect by the Gardai. Bailey sought to argue that they had attempted to pin the blame for the murder upon him.

But following the sudden end of the action yesterday, when the newspapers agreed to pay some of Mr Bailey's costs from a previous action which he lost in the Circuit Court and waived the costs they themselves had been awarded, the allegation that Mr Bailey was a reasonable suspect in the case, for which no one has ever been charged, remains standing.

Cutting through the jargon for a moment, it seems that either Mr Bailey murdered Ms du Plantier or he did not. If he did, then the correct forum for these debates is in the criminal court, not in a long-running libel action. If he did not, then he has been tried in the court of public opinion.

Either way, the call from the newspapers to reform the libel laws is correct. But they should have added that a full review of the competence of the investigating Gardai in this murder case is also necessary.

It is now over a decade since Ms du Plantier's death. The fact that no one has been charged and tried for her murder is yet another indictment of the Gardai. A woman died in hugely dubious circumstances. Ten years on, her family still do not have the facts of her death.

That should not be lost in the legal to-ing and fro-ing between a ruined former hack with a penchant for spousal abuse and the red-tops that fingered him as a likely murderer without his having been convicted of the offence.