journalism – Page 5 – Slugger O'Toole

RTÉ Prime Time Investigates is dead. But what happens next?

Mick Fealty on April 5, 2012, 9:49 am

| Readers 184

Okay, so RTÉ Prime Time Investigates is dead ahead of a critical report due to publish from the BAI tomorrow… On Tuesday night, Vincent Browne brought together a first rate panel to discuss the wider issues flowing from the mater… The discussion here falls roughly into two parts. The broken system of journalistic checks and balances, and the value of RTE’s public service broadcasting product as opposed to privately owned print journalism… Three things occur: – This case demonstrates that …

Executive planning to cut the ties that bind the NI press to government revenue spend?

Mick Fealty on April 4, 2012, 11:56 am

| Readers 46

One of the most obvious absences in the PSA’s Northern Irish sessions is a serious consideration of the precarious position the mainstream media finds itself in viz a viz the proverbial speaking of truth to power (as opposed to confidence building). And, as the The Detail notes that position, for print media at least, is just about to get even more precarious. Mr Robinson and McGuinness provide their own take on the link between cuts and the journalism of the …

All change at RTE over Prime Time

Mick Fealty on April 4, 2012, 8:53 am

| Readers 54

And there’s some movement on the situation at RTE, which has two major concurrent headaches going on at the moment: A report to be published shortly by the Broadcasting Authority of Ireland (BAI) is expected to find that the Prime Time Investigates: Mission to Prey programme, which libelled Fr Reynolds last year, was unfair and breached his privacy. The authority can impose a penalty of up to €250,000. RTÉ, which didn’t defend the programme on either of these grounds, yesterday …

Is Northern Ireland’s government funded tail wagging the media dog?

Mick Fealty on March 5, 2012, 9:50 am

| Readers 60

Newton Emerson from last Thursday’s Hearts and Minds argues that complaints from the First Minister ring a little hollow, not least because very little in the media originates in the media but in the vast bank of Press officers in Stormont, and a closed loop between government funded civil society and Stormont MLAs: As the resulting tide of hysterical press releases floods out an increasingly hard pressed media simply repeats them. Peter Robinson should know how that balance of power …

Iain Dale’s Total Politics moves right into the heart of Westminster…

Mick Fealty on March 1, 2012, 12:28 pm

| Readers 47

Not everyone is hampered by the demise of print journalism. Ian Dale’s Bite Back media has bought Parliamentary Brief, a sort of house magazine for Westminster with an impressive array of writers and political topics far beyond Westminster. As usual the acquisition was engineered by local lad Shane Greer: Parliamentary Brief has been on our radar since we launched Total Politics in 2008. As a competitor, I respected the passion that clearly went into each issue. And when the opportunity …

Better journalism: “We have to learn directly from news consumers through experiments”

Mick Fealty on February 6, 2012, 10:28 am

| Readers 53

There’s an interesting confluence of work on journalism in the digital age today. This morning I’m at conference in Dublin on the importance of Diversity in the Media (organised by the Labour MEP Nessa Childers), and at the same time Blair Jenkins’s Better Journalism in the Digital Age, is published by the Carnegie Foundation across the water. Jenkins – with whom I shared a platform at the Cleraun Media Conference last November – is highly conscious of the current controversies …

OFCOM finds against ITV’s computer game slip

Mick Fealty on January 23, 2012, 12:41 pm

| Readers 58

You remember that computer game footage that was used to show what was supposed to be an IRA attempt to shoot down a British Army helicopter. The footage was included in an ITV network programme “Gaddafi and the IRA” shown on Sept 26, 2011. Well, not surprisingly OFCOM have found against them… You can read the full report in their latest Broadcast Bulletin. But it seems it was not just the helicopter scenes that were, erm, finessed up but the riot …

Morgan’s line on #Hacking is less than convincing…

Mick Fealty on December 21, 2011, 12:26 pm

| Readers 6

Quote of the day has to be this opener from Guido: It’s an interesting contribution, not least after Piers Morgan’s assertion he knew nothing about phone hacking at the Daily Mirror. As the Sabotage Times notes: …while he could offer up an explanation of how to hack a phone he struggled to remember who had told him how to do it. And a former financial journalist on the paper, James Hipwell, has told inquiry and reported by the Daily …

“When this is all over, ordinary priests and regular RTÉ journalists will have something in common?”

Mick Fealty on November 28, 2011, 4:39 pm

| Readers 37

Hard to deny Jude Collins’ observation that there is a “not-too-obvious-but-still-there anti-Catholic Church strand in the Irish media”. It’s not just in the Irish media. There is a wider assumption that the Catholic church and only the Catholic church has questions to answer in relation to child sex abuse. An accurate assay of the extent of the problem is hard to make since it is a necessarily hidden practice. One of my freer primary school teachers (a devote Catholic himself) …

David Carr #NYT and fearless journalism…

Mick Fealty on November 25, 2011, 4:40 pm

| Readers 93

If you missed BBC 4’s excellent documentary on journalism in a digital age, then it is well worth the hour and a half it takes to watch on the iPlayer this weekend… (I want the DVD if it ever comes out in that format)… I remember talking with John Lloyd at the Frontline Club in London a few years back when wikileaks was pouring out all those clipped insights from the US State Department, and recall him saying that we …

Does no one in the Northern Irish media check the provenance of political stories?

Mick Fealty on November 14, 2011, 8:15 am

| Readers 15

IN the first of a series of posts examining Northern Irish blindspots, Ian Parsley takes last week’s announcement of the effective abandonment (read the detail in Pete’s post if you don’t believe me) of the A5 project (predictable since the downturn of 08, inevitable since the change of government) as a classic dog bites man story with which Northern Ireland media is bursting at the seams. But, he argues, there is a huge cost to paid for such poor attention …

Bogus Twitter accounts, plausible deniability, and the use of unqualified leads…

Mick Fealty on October 31, 2011, 11:38 am

| Readers 61

As Chris notes, no one in current Sinn Fein will cry any tears over the way the Irish media tripped over itself to gobble up the fake story of Sean Gallagher and the cheque that never was… Update: It seems that the @Martin4Prez2011 (official) & @McGuinness4Pres (bogus) were born on the same day. But, as noted by Stewart below (and missed by me), the official account begins to tweet *2 days after* the parody. Which is odd. Update to the …

#Aras11: How the Press got it wrong on Gallagher (and failed to admit it)

Mick Fealty on October 27, 2011, 8:48 am

| Readers 48

Whilst it was perfectly legitimate to probe Martin McGuinness on his paramilitary past in the course of a Presidential election the key reason (character) for doing so was rarely crystalised by the many good journalists who did so. To be blunt, you cannot make political murder a reason for not taking office in state that was founded on killing and rebellion, no matter how many columns of outrage get printed in the Sunday Independent. You can make lying about it …

Liam Fox: The first post ‘Screws’ resignation?

Mick Fealty on October 15, 2011, 8:22 am

| Readers 18

I was talking to a young Conservative councillor in London yesterday, who asked me if I thought the Defence Minster would survive… At the time, I reckoned, not having taken a huge interest in the Westminster gossip (or the conflicting prognoses emanating from the Guido household), that it was pretty clear he wouldn’t (or rather shouldn’t). But for only one specific reason. Dr Fox’s friend Adam Wherritty had casual access to the Secretary of State (styling himself advisor on some …

Eamonn Dunphy: “It is better if listeners know what your views are”

Mick Fealty on October 4, 2011, 11:01 am

| Readers 23

I have to say I cannot see what’s wrong in principle with Eamonn Dunphy declaring which candidate he was going to vote for whilst continuing his role as a journalist during a tense election campaign. He may have run foul of the strict broadcasting rules, but as he notes himself: Dunphy said as a “general principle” he believed it was right that broadcasters should not publicly declare their support for an election candidate in or out of the studio, but …

“Come back John Wilkes. Your work is about to be undone. Politicians are losing the plot.”

Pete Baker on September 27, 2011, 2:52 pm

| Readers 14

Well, some politicians. Specifically, the Labour Party’s shadow culture secretary, Ivan Lewis, MP, who is calling for suggesting a register of professional journalists. So they can be “struck off” if they transgress. As Roy Greenslade comments Lewis and the cheering delegates in Liverpool need to understand the danger of their position. Look at the contradiction at the heart of Lewis’s crowd-pleasing speech. At one point he said: “In Britain, a free press is non-negotiable.” At another, when demanding “a new …

Breaking news and the infantalisation of audiences…

Mick Fealty on August 24, 2011, 4:24 pm

| Readers 7

When you strip it all back, much of the bad blood generated on Twitter towards the BBC during Sunday’s lightening rebel ‘intrusion’ into Tripoli, was primarily for not giving good entertainment in the time frame required. On Dale and Co David Prever observes: Waving tablets instead of toys we’ve reverted, without realising, to our inner child. We demand to know what’s going on right now, or sooner. None of this is new. The historian Christopher Lasch made a similar observation, …

Britain’s Irish Post closes after 41 years…

Mick Fealty on August 22, 2011, 12:07 pm

| Readers 85

Sad news for Malcolm Rogers and the staff at The Irish Post… I did my first piece of paid journalism for the Post… It gave a voice to the Irish in Britain for nearly two generations… Latterly it probably suffered more than most from the Internet age along with an ageing demographic… Put simply, the diaspora did not get less passionately Irish, it just got socially mobile and harder to sell to (Tipp born Mike Lynch f/e)… The decision to …

Rebels take Tripoli; Dale apologises…

Mick Fealty on August 22, 2011, 10:58 am

| Readers 7

I keep an eye on Twitter rather than live ‘there’. It can be a pretty febrile place, even when discussing less important matters than a bona fide Arab revolution. At one stage last night, one Syrian broadcast journalist had Gadaffi dead; shot near Rixos Hotel where many of the world’s journalists reporting from the government side of the Libyan conflict were stationed. It turned out to be mistaken identity. There was much discussion of how the Beeb had been caught …

Guido: Met’s failure to investigate #Hackgate is a ‘private matter’…

Mick Fealty on August 20, 2011, 9:26 am

| Readers 19

Strange piece from Guido yesterday. Ordinarily, I’m a fan. Despite his reputation for bumptiousness and arrogance, I generally find his judgement to be precise (and he has some impressive scalps (not all of them Labour) swinging from his blogger’s belt). But I don’t ‘get’ what he clearly wants the rest of us to see here. For instance, he accuses the Guardian editor of, erm, not going through the Met’s Press Bureau in breaking its #Hackgate stories; which is odd coming …