Sarah Carey, Geraldine Kennedy and the Lisbon hypocrisy of the Irish Times

national | arts and media | other press Wednesday November 19, 2008 10:31 by Aragon

Brave Sarah Carey exposes editorial bias at the Times of London

Sarah Carey is apparently a responsible 'yes' voter when it comes to Lisbon. We will all therefore appreciate the terrible position she was put in when she discovered that The Times of London (Irish version) was banning all pro Lisbon pieces in its pages. Carey went along with this - for a good long while, in fact. She has just fetched up however in the pages of the Irish Times, that bastion of balanced and fair journalism (not), armed with a revivified conscience, describing the horrors of the editorial interference of Frank Fitzgibbon at the London Times and wishing she had had the courage to bring the truth of his editorial perfidy to the world before. Read her heart-rending tale here:

http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/opinion/2008/1119/1....html

Sarah tells us that when reading anything in a newspaper, we had better be asking ourselves who is writing it and what is their agenda. Quite so.

Carey is not the valiant whistleblower of shocking media revelation that this silly piece would have us believe. Beyond its usefulness to Madam's fury that the little people didn't do as they were told by her about Lisbon, it's really a pile of sefl-serving crap. The clear inference to be drawn is that had Fitzgibbon gone the other way and banned all 'no' coverage, she'd have seen that as the editorially superior position - being it tallied with her own 'yes' pov. She'd still be working away happily for him. However, having spotted an opportunity to curry favour with Kennedy and the IT, it's unlikely we'll be reading her in the pages of Fitzgibbon's Times again.

Another ludicrous aspect of Carey's piece is that it is fatally undermined by the fact that the media was screamingly pro Lisbon overall and still the vote went against it. The only reason she's writing this in the Irish Times is precisely because of the same phenomenon she is decrying at the London Times as at the Irish Times - which was outrageously, even hysterically unbalanced at times in its coverage of Lisbon - the more so as it became apparent that the vote was going the other way. If anything The Times of London was more honest about Lisbon - it took up a position and everyone reading it knew what it was - there was no pretence at faux 'balance'.

Not so with the IT which is positively devious in its malign use of the appearance of balance to create the illusion among its readers that they have the unvarnished truth of all aspects of a given topic. There is hardly a single subject covered in the Irish Times that is ever subjected to anything like the sort of editorial standard they claim to uphold. Geraldine Kennedy is exactly the sort of editor whose agenda Sarah Carey ought to be highly suspicious of. Watch the letters page for example. You'll notice that for every 'no' letter there are approximately 4 'yes' letters. The exact same thing applies to a range of subjects from Corrib Gas to anti war letters. And yet all of these issues are popularly thought of by a big majority of people in a way that is the polar opposite of the paper's obvious editorial bias. It seems highly unlikely that the paper would receive more letters from a minority view than it does from the majority - every time something controversial arises.

Having burned her bridges with Times of London and Rupert Murdoch, Carey is clearly anxious to get a little bit of sucking up in to ensure her future career in the Irish media:

In Britain, buying a particular newspaper title is an explicit statement of political allegiance. Here, the lines are blurred and so our sensitivity to the political motives behind editorial policy is dulled. Sure, The Irish Times has its whole Dublin 6-intolerant-liberal thing going on. There is also the problem of a "newsroom culture" in which without any actual coercion, journalists will eagerly adopt each other's views. The Sunday Independent runs brazen campaigns such as the one to canonise Bertie Ahern and demonise Brian Cowen. But even the Sindo has Gene Kerrigan, so regardless of what paper one buys, Irish readers can expect that writers' political agendas will be both upfront and balanced out, allowing them to casually absorb different opinions across the political divide.

This last statement is complete horsesht. Not least because it's written in a paper whose editor boldly declares that the paper's role is 'to lead and shape public opinion' . On top of that, the Irish media is possibly the least independent in the the whole of Europe. Gene Kerrigan, cited by Carey in her gushing about the indepence of the Irish media hardly suffices as a clover leaf over the privates of the otherwise hideously biased Sindo beast - long since the laughing stock of most sane Irish journalists - whether they are prepared to say so in public or not - and most especially being that their own version of 'Lord Sauron' (to whom Carey compares Rupert Murdoch), Tony O' Reilly, is just as eager with summary justice for errant journos writing critically of, say, his role in the oil and gas giveaway - to take just one of many examples that can be found.

It's beyond doubt that there are US interests who don't want a yes vote in this referendum and that Libertas is their front line in the argument. But they are up against an equally self-interested and media-manipulating agenda from the yes side - which is already hard at work. This piece by Carey is in itself a fairly vicious salvo from the yes side - dishonestly painting the pro-yes media as the beleaguered victims of an evil 'no' campaign.

One wonders what the longer term ramifications of having published this piece will be: the IT has broken a code of silence here about how newspapers actually work. All the bsht about how they strive for 'balance' and 'fairness' exposed for the bsht that it is. It will be interesting to see how the London Times retaliates.

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