Engaging in agenda journalism is a real threat to our democracy

By Ryle Dwyer

This has since given way to a kind of agenda journalism in which some journalists have made reckless charges in furthering their own agendas.

Within the last couple of years, for instance, unsubstantiated charges have been made against both Taoiseach Bertie Ahern and Tánaiste Mary Harney.

Unfounded allegations were also made against Seamus Brennan, but he was not named initially. He did not help his case by the rather indecisive way in which he refuted the allegation that he had not paid for Christmas presents of brandy and cigars.

Bertie Ahern was accused of taking a £50,000 bribe in the parking lot of the Burlington Hotel on the night of an All-Ireland football final. On such a night there was a great chance that Bertie would have been at the Burlington Hotel, which would have given the story some credence, but the man who made the accusation was not within a 100 miles of the place. He was at a dinner in Cork that night and could not possibly have been in the Burlington car park when he said he handed the money to Bertie.

The Taoiseach had to sue his accuser to clear his name. He could also have sued the media, but he accepted that they acted in good faith and did not pursue them in the courts.

He deserved a great deal of credit for that, but the media gave him little.

Mary Harney was the victim of a smear on the eve of the last general election when Magill magazine published an unfounded story, but she did not go after those who repeated the story either. Michael McDowell has recognised that the media have had legitimate grievances in relation to our libel laws, but now that he is in office as Minister for Justice, he seems to be reluctant to introduce the kind of changes he had foreshadowed. Breaking promises is nothing new for members of this Government, but one must have a certain amount of sympathy with the Minister for Justice in this case.

The media have been their own worst enemy by engaging in agenda journalism, which is not only a threat to members of the Government, but to our democracy. The Government should bring in the needed reforms, but ministers are obviously reluctant to expose their reputations to the kind of media irresponsibility we have witnessed. Turkeys don’t vote for Christmas!

The media will probably have to endure the harsh libel regime for some more years. Nobody on the outside is likely to have much sympathy because of the way the media has conducted itself. They are all tarred with the brush of their own reckless elements.

An independent press is vital to a healthy democracy, but more than the libel laws have been encroaching on our press freedoms. A few years ago, Mary Ellen Synon provoked controversy with an insensitive column in the Sunday Independent on the Special Olympics, ridiculing the spectacle of handicapped people running around an athletic track.

The Sunday Independent apologised and not only repudiated her views but also her right to express them. When the Eastern Health Board made threatening noises about withdrawing its advertising, Synon was dismissed. The Sunday Independent effectively accorded the right of censorship to the Eastern Health Board. This set a dangerous precedent.

One of the more notorious examples of agenda journalism was on the morning of the 1997 general election when the Irish Independent came out with a front page editorial calling on readers to vote against the existing Fine Gael-Labour coalition on the grounds that it had bled the people white with its taxation policies. Had the newspaper come out in favour of the Government there would probably have been little surprise, because the Independent was popularly associated with Fine Gael over the decades, while the Irish Press group was identified with Fianna Fáil.

There is nothing wrong or unusual about newspapers taking an editorial stand in favour of a particular party at election time. Even prestigious newspapers, such as the New York Times and Washington Post, take a partisan stand at election time, often in conflict with the views of the newspaper’s most prominent reporters and writers.

What was staggering about the “It’s Payback Time” editorial was not so much that it seemed to buck the newspaper’s traditional line, but that it was placed on the main news page, rather than an opinion page.

Of course, there is no way of knowing the extent of its impact on the election, but politicians obviously believe that newspapers have a tremendous influence on voters.

Fianna Fáil and the Progressive Democrats were the beneficiaries of the Irish Independent’s infamous election day stunt, even though Fianna Fáil had been even more responsible for the profligate policies of the 1970s and 1980s that led to the high taxes. Was there another agenda behind the controversial editorial? It was recently suggested at the Moriarty Tribunal that the editorial was Tony O’Reilly’s way of getting revenge on the coalition for his company’s failure to get the mobile telephone licence. Of course, the people at Independent Newspapers say O’Reilly does not interfere with his newspapers.

Bruce Arnold, one of the leading columnists in the Irish Independent, sought to demonstrate this lack of proprietorial control by having the temerity to criticise O’Reilly over a £30,000 donation to Ray Burke by one of his companies in June of 1989.

Mr Arnold argued in a subsequent article that the publication of his criticism in the Irish Independent was proof that O’Reilly did not interfere, but that later article did not appear in the Irish Independent. It was spiked. Maybe O’Reilly had nothing to do with pulling the article. He did not have to act himself. Others were looking after his personal interests for him, and the public interest was ignored.

This was an issue of major public importance. That year, 29 MMDS broadcasting licences were awarded by Ray Burke’s Department of Communications to Princes Holdings, which was half-owned by Independent Newspapers and controlled by O’Reilly.

As Minister for Justice a couple of years later, Burke wrote to Joe Hayes, head of Independent Newspapers, with an assurance that “immediately MMDS service is available in any of your franchise regions, my department will apply the full rigours of the law to illegal operations affecting that franchise region”.

Once Albert Reynolds came to power in early 1992, Burke was pushed out in the cold, so he was not in a position to act against the illegal broadcasters once the MMDS services were ready. In 1996, O’Reilly personally asked the Taoiseach, John Bruton, to close down the illegal transmitters.

For the health of our democracy, many questions need to be asked, but O’Reilly has effective control of not only the Irish Independent and Sunday Independent, but also the Evening Herald, Sunday World, Sunday Tribune, and the Irish Star. No person should have that kind of control because it poses a real threat to our democracy.