A few New Year resolutions by media could improve all our lives
You can get through the festivities without a lamb. The shepherd may look like he's not getting much job satisfaction without anything to herd, but your crib will still look OK.
You can even manage without a king. But without the baby, all you have is a set of little figures gazing fixedly at a gap in the middle. Getting replacements to scale late on Christmas Eve is not practical. So you end up on hands and knees searching for the bits to stick together again, you get covered in blood because kneeling on broken crib figures will cut the knees off you, and you end up with your mouth glued shut because you never take the warnings on superglue seriously.
Reassembling a shattered crib figure, together with the Christmas candle setting fire in the middle of the night to the windowsill, put paid to my New Year's resolution, which was to give up the F word. When you're extinguishing your own Christmas candle on St Stephens's night using a saucepan, doing more smoke-inhalation than you'll achieve in the average unreformed pub and waiting for the smoke-alarm to lift the neighbours a foot off their mattresses, you use up a whole year's worth of the F word. So there would be no virtue in my giving it up for 2004.
New Year resolutions, even when faithfully implemented by individuals, don't change anything very much, anyway. Not for the rest of us. If, on the other hand, a whole sector like the media, for
instance could be persuaded to adopt a handful of resolutions for the coming year, it could improve all our lives. Here's my suggested handful.
Resolution 1: Remove cruelty from talent contests.
Humiliation of the hopeful debases everybody concerned and endangers young people already vulnerable because of their hunger for fame. It's also in rotten taste, demeans the viewers as well as the contestants and sustains the dwindling profile of yesterday's talents through the public destruction of today's potential. Taking gratuitous cruelty out of talent contests would have the added benefit of removing Louis Walsh. Sinéad O'Connor may not be right on much, but on Louis Walsh, she's spot-on.
Resolution 2: Kill people at the right time.
Radio, TV and newspapers constantly kill people at the wrong time. Watch out for the stories that say "Three people were killed yesterday after a two-car collision on the Naas Road." AFTER a collision? You mean the poor sods were in a car crash and that wasn't bad enough, someone subsequently came along and topped them? Every day, we have people killed after explosions, crashes, eruptions and earthquakes. Now, I'll concede that sometimes people may actually DIE after explosions, crashes, eruptions and earthquakes, but they're never KILLED afterwards unless they're seriously unlucky. How about writing stories that kill people IN collisions, explosions and eruptions?
Resolution 3: Give up Opinion Polls.
Every quarter, if not oftener, some newspaper, often in collaboration with a TV station, halts us in our tracks in order to get us to tut-tut reverently at the opinions of one thousand people none of us know, who give the statistical impression that they're up to ninety about say crime. The reality is that the polling process frequently creates the reality it finds. If you ask any Irish person to measure, on a scale of one to ten, their concerns about budgies going bald, they'll willingly drum up an opinion about balding budgies. Even if they know nothing about budgies, bald or hirsute: they'll still have an opinion. A value-free opinion. The classic example of this was when Americans were polled on whether or not then President Reagan's skin cancer would be malignant. Headlines were crafted based on the views of a bunch of people who had no information on which to base a scientific judgment they weren't competent to make.
The anonymous people who star in opinion polls are also politically peculiar. They seem to want Ireland ruled by Gerry Adams and Mary Harney with occasional guest appearances by Pat Rabbitte.
MEDIA criticises "focus group" politics, where opinion polling establishes which policy is safest for a party to adopt, without acknowledging that media's often in the same business. As one American commentator puts it:
"How strange that we wouldn't dream of tolerating the captain of a cruise liner setting his course by surveying the passengers, but that we have become quite comfortable watching the ship of state being steered by polls "
Resolution 4: Get consistent about a Press Council.
Government proposals for a Statutory Press Council bring media out in a florid rash: how could anybody but media regulate media? Curious contradiction here, though. Just before Christmas, RTÉ's Prime Time broadcast a programme about medical errors and malfeasance. Media generally drew the inference from the programme that medics shouldn't be trusted, nay, COULDN'T be trusted to regulate their own affairs. Now, let's get this clear. We're saying the state must monitor doctors, but mustn't go near media? We're saying doctors can't be trusted to behave professionally and ethically at all times, but media can? Oh, right. Good to have that settled.
Resolution 5: Give up the Vision Thing.
Politicians keep getting beaten up, in media profiles and interviews, for not having a vision. It's not enough to belong to a party with stated policies and to work hard. You gotta have the vision thing as well.
On this one, it's worth quoting political scientist John Mueller of Ohio State University, who points out that "People with vast, sweeping visions caused most of the problems of the 20th century. Most of the time you don't want leaders with visions, you want society run by cautious pragmatists. At the moment, the pragmatists are in control of most nations, and it's making things better."
Resolution 6: Abandon Reality TV.
Nonentities are nonentities, even if you film them puking or slopping out stables or almost having sex.
Resolution 7: Pay Attention.
Media people spend so much time with each other, they sometimes fail to notice when things change. Take the constant portrayal of the Taoiseach as an incoherent waffler. The reality is that if you play the tapes from any of the substantial interviews RTÉ's Gerald Barry does every few months with Bertie Ahern, you'll find nothing but clear thought, lucidly expressed. Many media people were imprinted, a long time ago, by a less coherent Ahern. But he's moved on, folks.
Resolution 8: Abolish the Party Political Broadcast.
Resolution 9: Ban Mutual Media Bitching the public doesn't like it.
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