Media can’t have it all their own way regardless of consequences

WHY is it every time the role and freedom of the media is discussed, the voice of the ordinary citizen is never heard?

We get the views of media experts and journalists, politicians and lawyers.

But the rest of us, it seems, aren’t entitled to a view at all. It’s as if the media knows best what’s good for us.

Three issues in the recent past have thrown this subject up for discussion. On each occasion, the right of the media to report whatever it sees fit seems to be the predominant theme. But surely it’s about time we settled this issue in terms of where wider public and community interests lie.

I’ve already commented here about the treatment of Brian Lenihan by TV3 over Christmas, and I won’t repeat what I said then.

But it does seem to me that in fact some of the more important issues of legitimate public concern were actually obscured by the controversy that resulted from TV3’s poor judgment and bad taste. Had Brian Lenihan been left to his own devices and allowed to issue a statement in his own time about his illness, that would have thrown up questions in which there really is a genuine public interest.

Questions like — can he carry on? Who is the best judge of whether he is well enough to do his demanding job, and when he should take a break from it to concentrate on health? What does it all mean for the future (the future leadership of his party, for example)?

Legitimate as those questions were, and are, I think people were actually afraid to ask them because of the way TV3 had behaved. So sometimes, perhaps, the rush to be first can actually get in the way of the pursuit of the public interest.

The other two issues throw up wider questions. First there was the speech by Martin Cullen during last week in which he described in great detail how he and his family had suffered from defamation. The issues he was raising have been obscured somewhat by some of the language he used, especially his reference to feeling like a rape victim.

I’d be inclined to the view that the comparison wasn’t appropriate and did little service to the debate. But who knows how someone would feel in those circumstances if you weren’t caught up in them personally? It’s surely unreasonable to condemn the use of particular forms of language to express feelings if you haven’t suffered the range of emotions that go hand in hand with being talked about, and sneered at, behind your back, for something you haven’t done. The much more fundamental issue behind that story is whether or not the media has any obligation to try to put things right when they know they have done someone wrong.

The truth is that, for reasons I’ve never been able to understand, our media will go to extraordinary lengths to avoid admitting responsibility, at any level, for doing unfair damage to an individual.

If you speak privately to journalists or newspaper editors, they’ll tell you they’re the prisoners of their lawyers. If there is even the remotest risk that someone might ultimately sue for libel, the lawyers will always advise against apology. Once you apologise, they say, the game is up. An apology is an admission of guilt and, once it’s published, the only thing to be settled is the amount of damages.

That’s exactly the same defence offered by the Christian Brothers and other religious orders, and by the whole Catholic Church, in relation to people who had suffered abuse at their hands.

The tactical approach — to settle when they had to without admitting liability, and to fight the survivors tooth and nail in other cases — was motivated by a wish to save money rather than by a wish to make peace with people whose lives they had destroyed.

And it is the motivation as well behind the refusal of the state over many years to admit wrongdoing in all sorts of situations. Women whose health had been broken in the Hepatitis C controversy, haemophilia sufferers treated with tainted blood, young people with an intellectual disability deprived of necessary services — all of these, and many more, have discovered over the years that the legal tactics employed against them had nothing to do with any sense of justice.

At the heart of all this, of course — and nowhere is this more true than in the case of the way the media deals with individuals — is our so-called adversarial system of justice.

It was another young woman — caught up in the same system, though this time in the context of a murder trial — that provided the third media controversy worth looking at. The outrage in sections of the media at their failure to be able to publish photographs of a witness in that trial, and all sorts of po-faced commentary to the effect that freedom of the press had been infringed, was a very interesting illustration of the attitude of the media. Like most people, I was curious to see what the young woman looked like. It wouldn’t have occurred to me, until I stopped to think about it, that her life is probably in bits. She got caught up in something that could well follow her for years and make it very difficult for her to live a normal life again.

When she’s a mum herself, and her name and photograph appear in years to come in rehashed accounts of a sensational trial, how is that going to affect her family? So I can’t for the life of me see what harm has been done here.

THERE have been instances over the years when people accused of serious crimes have been instantly labelled to add to the sensation and the newsworthiness of the coverage — Scissors Sisters and the Black Widow are two examples that come to mind — but I’ve never been able to see what value that adds to the search for justice.

There is nothing more fundamental to our overall sense of freedom than a free press. And it doesn’t have to be a polite press either — especially where public policy and its makers are concerned. Mind you, the media in general has chosen to be very polite over a lot of things.

How many times did you read praise for the Government over the “tough” decisions in the budget, for instance? And how much critical analysis did you read about whether those decisions were fundamentally fair or not? But our media constantly falls into the same traps as other institutions — especially the adversarial system trap — and it frequently isn’t capable of exhibiting occasional compassion when it’s warranted. More to the point, there is far too much confusion between “freedom of the press” and their right to publish whatever their own commercial instincts tell them. If we’re going to debate these issues — and we should always be ready to — there is absolutely no reason why, in a fair and open society, the media should have it all their own way and always on their own terms. Despite what they might tell you, that’s not the way democracy works.