The media haters should be careful what they wish for

There’s nothing new about the phenomenon of a rich and powerful elite owning the vast majority of newspapers in Britain, thereby wielding huge influence over the State’s decisions and their effect on ordinary lives.

If anything, it’s far worse than in Wilson’s day, as was clearly (and bravely) illustrated in the BBC2 series ‘The Rise of the Murdoch Dynasty’.

It featured the playwright Dennis Potter’s last television interview before his death in which he revealed he nicknamed his pancreatic cancer ‘Rupert’, such was the malignant damage Murdoch has done to the country’s media.

“There is no one person more responsible for the pollution of what was already a fairly-polluted press,” said Potter, “and the pollution of the British Press is an important part of the pollution of British political life.”

That was in 1994. He was spot on then and his words are even more appropriate now.

It you’re thinking by now that my withering criticism of the “evil press” means I’ve turned traitor on my profession, you’d be wrong; 180 degrees wrong.

We need a free press now more than ever.

Any decent society needs a free press, it’s a central plank of democracy. How fragile a democracy can be; it was no coincidence that one of the first things Hitler’s dictatorship did was to neuter the media and across the world today the greatest human rights abuses are invariably in countries where the press is under State control.

So, forgive me when I get a bit prickly when I see people generalise and denigrate “the media” as if it all behaves in an unprincipled, even dishonest way.

There’s a certain irony in seeing someone post something on Facebook completely unchecked and just because it ties in with their view, they’ll say “you won’t see this on mainstream media,”.

Or re-post a dishonest image of a tv crew manufacturing a riot, as if that’s the norm. That’s what the media does, eh?

Such a blanket portrayal of the “scum media” is not only insulting, a cheap and lazy shot and spectacularly unfair, it should ring the alarm bells for anyone wanting an open and fair society.

Here in Ireland, north and south, the print and broadcast media has its faults, and it’s extremely important to acknowledge that and for us to ask how we could do better. But generally speaking it provides a good service in informing people, stimulating debate and challenging authority.

To people who dismiss the press with a general condemnation, I often wonder if they think through what society would be like if they got their way and the press as we know it disappeared.

Without a free press, you would not have principled and tenacious journalists like Rodney Edwards who performed a public service by telling the stories of victims of sex abuse in this county, and in the week he leaves we should remember that Rodney shone a light on some very dark issues.

Without a free press, we wouldn’t have Sam McBride informing us taxpayers about the shocking waste of our public money in the RHI scandal; nor would we know about the dreadful happenings in our care homes thanks to Seanin Graham, Marie Louise Connolly and others. Or indeed, about the debate over the handling of the current Covid crisis.

Indeed, day-in day-in, our free press lets us know what is happening in our local, national and international worlds.

So forgive me if I see a danger in the scoffers who say they don’t pay attention to what they pejoratively call “the mainstream media.” Don’t watch the news they say; well, ok, don’t if you don’t want to.

Destroy the press? Where would you get your news, then? Facebook? Aye right. Or from those in power? Hmm….

More often than not, the critics of the mainstream media (or MSM, as it’s even got its own initials) tend to base their distrust on their own world view.

I don’t like you covering this subject, or the way you’re covering it, so you’re not being impartial, say the haters who have a monopoly on truth and fairness. As a result, although we live in a communication era where information and debate are more plentiful than ever, the contradiction is that too many people want an echo chamber.

It often seems to me that nobody approaches anything with an open mind any more. I’m always intrigued that when I write a column about a sensitive subject, no matter how I balance it there’ll always be a few comments with the laugh emoji, the social media equivalent of the sniggering “Pah!” Hey ho.

I often wonder if the haters’ reaction to the media says more about their prejudice than it does about the media itself.

Interestingly, I spoke at an event some months ago, when Irish Republicans formed probably the majority of the audience; and in a question and answer session at the end, it was clear that they felt suspicious of a media that they see as totally biased against them.

The crass comment by Newton Emerson that Sinn Fein need house-trained won’t have helped.

And this week, in a letter of complaint to the BBC, loyalist Jamie Bryson claimed that there is a large section of the Protestant-Unionist-Loyalist community that feels disconnected from the Corporation because of its coverage of them. He did say with the “notable exception of Nolan!”

In the wider world, it’s another irony that the view of the media as a liberal leftie conspiracy is a direct contradiction of the truth of a media generally to the right.

“You won’t see this on the mainstream media,” Nigel Farage tells his social media followers; that’d be the same Farage who’s never off the, er, mainstream media.

Indeed, how often do you see people here who are most vocal in their criticism and mistrust of the media are the very people who use it the most for their own profile?

As the aforementioned Murdoch documentary showed, the media tycoon uses all his powerful newspaper and broadcast outlets to promote his favoured political objectives. From Thatcher through to Trump, and the Leave campaign, Murdoch’s media used some pretty dark arts to promote the right.

The only time Labour won a British election in the last 40 years was when Tony Blair cosied up to Murdoch after years of the Australian magnate’s papers viciously taking down previous Labour leaders, particularly Neil Kinnock.

In return, successive Prime Ministers danced with the devil and relaxed regulations which led to sickening tabloid culture in Britain which ended up in the phone-hacking scandal.

Blair admitted at the Leveson Inquiry that he choose to “manage” his Government’s relationship with the press, rather than confront it.

Trump chose to confront it in a major way, and he has diminished the role of the media with his “fake news” cynical agenda, a sort of an upgrade on the “gutter press” jibe favoured by some who want to undermine what’s written rather than face up to the merits or otherwise what’s reported.

Often I read columnists and find their views unpalatable; I listen to radio and wonder if the presenter is there simply to wind people up, (as the documentary put it about Fox News, “doesn’t just take the temperature of the country, it heats up the temperature.)

We as an industry must bear in mind we have an awesome responsibility to society, and we could do more in covering many other important issues.

All journalists are not alike, however. In my experience, the vast majority of them are people of honesty and integrity who want to properly inform their readers, viewers and listeners about the world around them, to investigate what’s going on and to challenge authority and hold it to account.

Denigrating all journalism to promote your own agenda and wiping out a free press will diminish the work of all those decent journalists.

Be careful what you wish for.