Media should not be allowed to put its own agenda before fair play

AN interesting point arose in a recent MRBI survey on people’s attitudes to the compensation deal struck between the State and religious orders, under which the orders agreed to contribute €128 million in property and cash to compensate victims of institutional child abuse.

The overall result was that 55% of those surveyed opposed the deal and only 33% favoured it. But the breakdown of the figures showed that among young people, strangely, there was more support. Whereas 60% of 35-49 year olds disapproved of the deal (as against 28% in favour) there was a slim majority (42%-40%) in favour among the 18-24 cohort.

It is not clear why opinion varied so much among the age groups, but a number of possible conclusions could be drawn. The first is down to pure economics. Among 35-49 year-olds you are likely to find more taxpayers than among 18-24 year-olds. And taxpayers don’t like anything that takes money out of their pockets. A second, more profound reason for the survey findings may be that anger with the Church, and therefore anger over anything that could be construed as a ‘sweetheart deal’ for the religious orders, is more likely among those who came to maturity in the 1960s and ’70s than among older or younger age groups.

The 1960s-‘70s cohort bought into a reaction against the Church, widely purveyed in third-level colleges and in the media. Many of them imbibed a hostility which continues to influence their attitudes.

Media coverage may also have influenced the survey findings. The deal with the religious orders aroused considerable controversy and journalists enjoyed a field day. Conspiracy theories were trotted out in an effort to discredit the agreement.

But, significantly, the controversy featured largely on RTÉ and in the more serious broadsheet newspapers which draw a larger proportion of their audiences from older people.

As a result, young people were less susceptible to negative editorialising.

Those who did follow the media line were badly served. Journalists chose to portray the religious orders as contributing only a very small percentage towards the cost of compensating victims, but largely ignored the much greater resources at the disposal of the state, the responsibility of the state for not monitoring the institutions and the vast unpaid contribution made by the religious orders to education and health care down through the years. They also hyped up the possible cost of the compensation at a billion euros, the better to convince the public that the religious orders had got off light.

But that projection may not be accurate at all. A few years ago, the Minister for Defence, Michael Smith, predicted that the cost of army deafness cases would come to €2 billion, but it now seems the final figure will be closer to €500 million.

The episode perhaps shows how journalists can distort public opinion on issues by not presenting facts impartially. Is it really a scandal, for example, that the Government proposes to spend millions of euro on a new jet? Last week RTÉ, TV3 and others suggested as much. Instead of focusing on the actual need for a government jet, RTÉ’s Richard Downes wanted to know if there would be a ‘gold-plated jacuzzi’ on board (there was never any suggestion of this). The message was that the Government was ‘living it up’ at our expense, but in the case of the government jet this is not true at all. Government ministers need to enjoy certain standards when they travel abroad, if only to portray a good image of the country as a place suitable for foreign investment.

Were Bertie Ahern or Mary Harney to use the jet to open a pub in Tralee on the other hand, they would be rightly condemned, and the media would be doing us a service in outing it.

Journalists have been understandably perturbed at the Government’s secretive approach to the amendment of the Freedom of Information Act, under which access to internal Cabinet correspondence will now be held back for ten years instead of five, but the media’s over-the-top response now seems to justify the Government’s approach. It makes perfect sense, for example, that details of civil service advice to a minister should be held back for a considerable period.

Otherwise ministers would be restricted in their ability to govern free of media manipulation. But the media, being an interested party, failed to bring out this point, preferring instead to campaign under the banner of ‘openness’.

What we are seeing in all of this is the media’s darker side, where it pursues its own agenda for the purpose of sensationalism or in order to enhance its own power. On the other hand, the campaign to stop ministers from speeding shows journalism at its best, operating in the public interest. Having tackled Bertie Ahern for speeding during last year’s general election campaign and the former Minister for Justice John O’Donoghue before that, journalists outed Minister of State Noel Treacy in January after his civilian driver was convicted of speeding at 95mph in a 60mph zone.

Last week, the chairman of the National Safety Council, Eddie Shaw, told RTE’s Morning Ireland he had been reassured by Garda Commissioner Pat Byrne that gardaí in charge of ministerial cars would obey the law in future. Within hours of Shaw’s radio interview Dr Jim McDaid, the junior minister with responsibility for road safety, was telling journalists he didn’t think there was “any situation where a Government minister would need to speed”.

The media also deserves credit for drawing our attention to inconsistencies in the Government’s handling of the public finances. Last week, doctors in Dublin’s Beaumont Hospital worried about the fate of night dialysis patients after hospital cutbacks dictated the closure of the night service. But journalists reported that over €500,000 had been spent refurbishing offices and providing other services for Ministers in the Department of Health. Thanks to an enquiry under the Freedom of Information Act, the public was in a position to hear about Government inconsistencies and to draw their own conclusions.

Journalists wield considerable power, as Joe Jacob discovered when Marian Finucane called his bluff on the details of our nuclear emergency plan. But the fact that this power is not balanced by any system of making journalists themselves accountable reveals a major deficiency in Irish public life.

Journalists are capable of unprofessionalism, corruption, bias and error. At their best, they guarantee accountability in public life; at their worst they contribute to a culture of mistrust and suspicion, and they destroy reputations needlessly.

We need to take a long, critical look at the way they operate. We should ask why they distort issues by failing to ask crucial questions. We need to look at the training of journalists, and to ask if there is a sufficient ethical component in the teaching of journalism skills.

And we should ask why, in 2003, we still do not have a media ombudsman, a press council or a competent broadcasting authority to deal with complaints from the public and to ensure redress.