Journalists are quick to condemn all shortcomings but their own

A RECENT Prime Time survey on the Church threw up an interesting but largely unreported statistic: compared to 90% of people who saw the role of doctors as very important, only 22% of people gave this rating to politicians, and journalists got a mere 20%.

Wasn't that ironic? Journalists are the scourge of every institution these days. They feed us all the bad news: Liam Lawlor's deals, Denis O'Brien's complicated tax-life, gardaí mauling innocent protesters and politicians' pay hikes. We had GV Wright's victim on the news almost as soon as she was run over. Why, after all that public service, are the whistle-blowers reviled even more than some of the supposed wrongdoers? Maybe it's because there is something terribly arbitrary about the way the media switches its attention from one institution to another as it exposes scandal. And the bizarre fact that journalists rarely shine a light on their own operation.

Last week I came across a neat bit of ass-covering by journalists whose salaries my taxes are helping to pay. RTÉ Radio's Liveline ran an item about a woman called Margaret, a former resident of a Magdalen laundry, who died in July this year. On Tuesday Joe Duffy spoke to former residents of the laundry who laid into the nuns for their callousness in not informing Margaret's family about her death. Unfortunately, running this item had the effect of revealing Margaret's identity, including personal details about her life which, when she was alive, she was anxious to keep confidential.