conor brady

8/3/2019 Conor Brady

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Accuracy and authority in journalism do not float in on the air. They are costly, labour- intensive commodities,

writes CONOR BRADY

TO FIND a Minister in office expressing concerns for the welfare of the news media is unusual. When two of

them do so within a week, we are into white blackbird territory.

Many politicians will quietly acknowledge the truth in Minister for Education Ruairí Quinn’s warning about

traditional news media collapsing under the onslaught of the internet. And many politicians and journalists

undoubtedly empathise with Minister for Communications, Energy and Natural Resources Pat Rabbitte’sconcerns about the concentration of media ownership.

Both points are crucially important if we are to preserve a healthy, properly resourced and diverse news

media. But the more immediate issue is arguably that raised by Quinn.

If traditional news media are driven to extinction by the internet, he told an audience last week at the

University of Limerick, “I personally think it would matter very much. I say this in spite of the shortcomings in

the traditional media.”

Alan Crosbie, chairman of the company that publishes the Irish Examiner and the Sunday Business Post ,

may have overheated somewhat in describing the “tsunami” of internet news media as a “threat to humanity”,

when he spoke at a Dublin seminar on Monday. But he is not wrong to raise a warning flag.

The danger is not of an imminent inundation but, to extend the metaphor, of a gradual submersion; a process

of incremental deterioration with ultimate failure of mission.

Quinn is of a generation of Irish politicians who understand how good journalism, for all its faults, interacts with

public institutions to ensure a fuller and healthier democracy.

The news media, sometimes in collaboration with elected representatives or with the law, have done much

good in exposing abuses in our society. They have sometimes failed, too. They fell down in their role as

supposed “gate keepers” as the State stumbled into the abyss of de facto insolvency.

Nobody can see more clearly than the politicians that the traditional media – newspapers, television and radio

– are in deepening difficulties; caught in a downward spiral of dwindling revenues with consequent contraction

in their products and services.

Quinn spoke of the strengths of traditional media as “the high degree of reliability, accuracy, authority and a

willingness to accommodate different points of view”. But reliability, accuracy and authority do not float in onthe air. They are costly, labour-intensive commodities. And although there has been huge cost-cutting, media

organisations are finding it increasingly difficult to fund them.

The proliferation of internet-based news providers, and particularly the emergence of the social networks, has

immensely expanded and enriched the business of news delivery. But while much content is original or

“citizen-generated”, too much of it is unashamedly pillaged from traditional news media sources. It is theft on a

grand scale, ripping off the work of reporters and editors whose organisations have to pick up the bill. Worse,

the information thus plagiarised is hardly ever sourced and is frequently misrepresented. As Quinn told his

audience, the problem with the internet is that its “inhabitants are unaccountable and live in cyberspace . . . a

playground for anonymous backstabbers.”

That is a generalisation. But like most generalisations, there is some accuracy in it.

There are, of course, some fine internet-based news media. For example, high standards, combining accuracy

and urgency, are set by storyful.com, established by RTÉ’s former man in Washington, Mark Little. David

Eadaoin O'Sullivan 8/2/12 13:15













Comment: Can you substantiate this?(name politicians, examples of their

expressing this view for e.g.) If not, it’scoming out.

Comment: Granted, ‘undoubtedly’ is aweasel word, but it indicates that you arespeculating; your construction was toodecisive.

Deleted: alike will

Comment: While chances are many polsand journalists do hold this view, you can’t say they all do. Don’t generalise right acrossa spectrum.

Comment:Link to text of speech please

Comment: Link please

Comment: This implies that politiciansnot of Quinn’s generation do not understand this. Also, ‘interacts…fuller andhealthier’ is extremely arguable. I’d excisethe line about Quinn, as it’s superfluous andraises too many questions in the reader’smind, and maybe construct this along thelines of ‘As such‐and‐such argues in such‐and‐such a book, goodjournalism…democracy.’ That way you’regiving at least some idea of where your ideaof this interaction’s ensuring full andhealthy democracy comes from.

Comment: Link to examples please (threeor four at least.)

Comment: Ideally link here to an article oressay that gives a good overview of thesefailings, with referenced examples.

Comment: Link to report with figures plz

Comment: Link plz, with examples

Comment: Link to examples of unashamed pillaging plz

Comment: Link to examples of failure tosource and examples of misrepresentation



Cochrane’s politics.ieis a valuable and intelligent forum for discussion of important public

issues. thejournal.ieis an excellent public notice board.

A great deal of what is put out on the internet under the label of news is either stolen property or unverified

gossip. Traditional news media values – verification, getting the “other side” of the story, checking against

archive material – sometimes seem to get short shrift. What has been described as a “culture of assertion”

appears too often to prevail.

Protestations such as Alan Crosbie’s, regrettably, do not have much purchase with the public and, in

particular, with the younger internet-engaged generation. There is a perception of special pleading, of adinosaur industry trying to hold back inevitable change, of a once-powerful elite desperately trying to reassert

control.

The newspaper industry has some ground to make up in finding humility. And it is probably not learning as

quickly as it should.

In the meantime, newsrooms are being starved of resources, working conditions for journalists are

deteriorating, traditional systems of supervision and “quality control” are being wound down. One of the

essentials of healthy public debate – a professional, decently resourced corps of full-time journalists – is in

effect being phased out in some news organisations.

Contracted freelances and day workers are replacing staff journalists. Those lucky enough to find employment

are required to work faster and across a wider range of tasks. There is less time for research, for verification,

for authentication. Editors’ budgets will only stretch so far.

Little wonder there is a drift to celebrity news and ephemeral comment in place of researched, accurate news

reporting.














Comment: Link to examples of sites that self‐describe as news sites that steal andthat publish unverified gossip.

Comment: By who?

Comment: Ideally link to example here ona self‐described news site

Comment: Link to examples




Comment: Link to examples. In these last three, if you can't find, say, a first‐personaccount of the deterioration of workingconditions for journalists, or of a report outlining cutbacks in resources in namednewsrooms, you'll have to speak to a fewjournalists and get them to go on the recordto talk about these phenomena. Iunderstand it may be difficult to get journosto go on the record on this, so at an outsidepush we might let them remain unnamed.On the last one ‐ systems of supervision andquality control ‐ maybe ref the Indo andHerald outsourcing subbing andproduction?(http://www.inpublishing.co.uk/kb/articles/the_sub_is_dead_long_live_the_sub.aspx)

Comment: Examples plz

Comment: Linked examples

Comment: Linked examples. You coulduse Nick Davies’s Flat Earth News as asource of figures for this, though that doesn't deal with Ireland. If hard figures arenot available anecdotal evidence is ok, but the newsrooms in which this is happeningneed to be named.

Comment: Maybe mention here the IT’sdisastrous acquisition of myhome.ie and theeffect this had on their journalism budget post‐2008. Might be worth talking about thecontroversy over cutbacks at the IrishTimes in that year in the context of thesalaries then being paid to Maeve Donovanand Geraldine Kennedy.

Comment:This has been happening sinceat least the 80s, no? As in, a long time before

the internet came along.



Politicians like Quinn and Rabbitte are long enough on the road to recognise what is happening. They know

that whatever flaws there may be in traditional news media, they discharge an essential function – and it is not

yet clear that the new media can or will adequately replicate it.

The proposed new broadcast charge, replacing the traditional television licence, will enable the broadcasting

media to regain some financial stability in a world increasingly dominated by the internet. It is to be hoped that

an appropriate provision will be made for news and current affairs.

Regrettably, no such relief appears in sight for the print sector.

Quinn and Rabbitte have done a service in voicing their concerns. They and their colleagues in Government

now need to start identifying practical measures that can underpin serious news media, whether internet-

based, broadcast or in print.

Other EU countries are examining ways of rerouting some of the internet’s earnings back to the organisations

from which they draw content without making payment.

A government that says it is committed to creating jobs might find ways of helping news media organisations

to keep expensively trained journalists and other media practitioners off the dole. A start might even be made,

as Crosbie suggested, by revisiting VAT arrangements to enable newspapers to better fund their newsrooms.









Unknown

Comment: I don’t follow this – wereQuinn and Rabbitte around for a now‐forgotten internet era in the 1960s?

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Comment: Slightly confused here – RTÉ isfunded by the tv licence, which anyone whoowns a set is obliged to pay – are you sayingthat fewer people are buying televisionlicences because of the internet? I presumeyou are talking about RTÉ here since so farthere’s been no mention of the broadcast charge being disbursed to commercialoperators. Also, has revenue from tv andradio advertising gone down because of theinternet? (As in, is that the kind of financialdifficulty you’re talking about here?) If it has, link to figures plz.

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