Low and lower

As I write it's Christmas Eve and I'm reluctant to intertwine the arrival of the saviour of the world with the stinky world of journalism, but there are a couple of examples of how stories should NOT be reported that cry out to heaven for comment.

Stinky Story 1: The Irish Times a day or two ago had an article which, in keeping with that paper's anti-republican stance, tries very hard to link the secret world of child sexual abuse with the secret world of IRA operations during the Troubles. The implication is that the same sort of thought process goes into both areas of activity and the same sort of thinkers work well in both. Since the article doesn't tell me that the writer is a qualified psychiatrist/psychologist, I'm not going to conclude, as some might, that his article shows him to be a complete idiot. I'll settle for guessing he's a half-wit.

Stinky Story 2: This one's from yesterday's Daily Mail. Ah yes, the Daily Mail, the comfort blanket for all those who enjoy slippping into a nice warm prejudice at some point in the day. "Revealed - The full chilling story of how Gerry Adams lied to protect his paedophile brother - and helped him work with children". Got that? None of this rubbish about being innocent until proven guilty - 'paedophile brother'. And the bit about 'helped him work with children' - you know, helped the paedophile in his pursuit of prey.

Maybe there's a new dawn coming when journalism of this sort will be used in media classes to show students how NOT to go about covering a story. But if we look at the Irish media's treatment of the Murphy Report and now the Liam Adams case, you can see that such a dawn may be a long time coming. Christmas, mercifully, will come with tomorrow's dawn, which means we're all safe for at least twenty-four hours. Nollaig shona duit...

The Great Whore of Babylon

I was on BBC Radio Ulster on ‘Sunday Sequence’ two days ago, discussing the Murphy Report and the fall-out thereof. The man discussing it with me was Wallace Thompson, who is secretary to the Evangelical Protestant Society, and who has issued a statement saying there needs to be a thorough-going investigation of the Catholic Church in the North, including the statement ‘If anyone in any other walk of life was involved in the sorts of crimes committed by priests and nuns, he or she would find no hiding place’. You got that ‘crimes committed by priests and nuns', did you? Not some priests and nuns – just plain priests and nuns. They’re all at it and all of the time, probably.

Wallace was very straightforward on the programme – the Roman Catholic Church was/is rotten to the core. I found myself getting a bit peeved with his universal condemnation, which I shouldn’t have, and I suggested that Protestant churches should equally be scrutinized, which I’m glad I did. From there on things got a bit tetchy and William Crawley cut us off after a few brief minutes. Some people I’ve spoken to said they thought he did so because Wallace and I might come to blows (no chance – Wallace is younger than me). Others - myself included – figured that RTE’s Joe Little had chuntered on in far too much detail earlier in the programme and so they had to cut back on what time they could give to us.

Because I’m a lazy bugger, I didn’t check the website of the Evangelical Protestant Society prior to the radio discussion. If I had, I’d have spotted a few straws in the wind re the Evangelical Protestant Society's views on Catholicism.

‘Rev. John McDonald, B.D. declares, "For a succession of fifty Popes not one pious or virtuous man sat in the pontifical chair. A system which has acknowledged and honoured such men to be each in turn its head, and still honours them, has fairly earned for itself the title 'Man of Sin'." Yet the ‘Man of Sin’ poses as ‘His Holiness’, an attribute which belongs to God alone, and he describes the Popish ‘synagogue of Satan’ as ‘the Church’.’

‘The spirit of Antichrist was in the world in Paul's day. “Even now", wrote John, "are there many anti-christs ..." (1 John 2:18). But when Paul wrote, the Antichrist had not been “revealed”. We hold that there are many forces in the world to-day which are diametrically opposed to Christianity, but that the Papacy is the Antichrist of Scripture.’

The message is clear. Wallace and his co-congregationalists will not be inviting Pope Benedict to address their Ladies’ Knitting Circle this year and ecumenism is a moral bog to be avoided if you value your immortal soul.

It might have been helpful if BBC Radio Ulster listeners had been clued into the EPS position vis-à-vis Rome before Wallace was allowed to launch his offensive offensive. (No, that’s not a misprint.) On the other hand, I had more positive feedback from that six- or seven-minute radio discussion than I’ve had for some time. For which small mercy thank you very much, Mr Thompson.

The family way

And so the Gerry Adams/ child sexual abuse saga rumbles on, gathering muck on its wheels. Today’s Irish News comes hard on the heels of Saturday’s Irish Times with a front-page story on Mr Adams’s (of COURSE they mispunctuated it as ‘Adams’ ‘ - what do you think they are, literate?) father’s abuse of his family – in Gerry’s words, ‘physical, emotional, mental and sexual’ and a four-page spread inside. The story also led on the RTE news last night and, I\m told, Channel 4 news as well. So why did Gerry Adams come out with these revelations about his father, and was he right to do so?

He came out with them, I suspect, because he was under media pressure from the case of his niece Áine, who claims that her father, Gerry’s brother, sexually abused her as a child. The media fell on this story like the proverbial ravening wolves, and clearly in some instances at least did their damnedest to somehow discredit Gerry Adams as well as his brother. It may be that Gerry, who can be a consummate media performer, decided to use the story of his father’s abuse as a spectacular addition to the Adams-and-child-abuse story, so increasing the chances that the media would respond to it in a way that’d show him in a favourable light. Certainly last night's RTE interview evoked sympathy for the Sinn Fein president and his siblings, and their efforts to cope with a father who appears to have been a destructive force.

But that second question: was Mr Adams right to reveal so much unfavourable information about his father? In terms of political self-defence, you could argue he was. Unfortunately, however effective this story proves for public perception of the Sinn Fein president, it also encourages the media in the belief that the private life of politicians here (or anywhere else) is legitimate prey for reporters.

Why should it be? Only if the politician is, say, a stout proponent in his political life of family values and then turns out to be someone who shows contempt for family values in his personal life, would his private life be of concern. We elect politicians because we believe they will be effective public representatives – that is, good at their job. Likewise with brain surgeons, dentists, accountants, plumbers, rat-catchers: we hire them because we believe they will be effective at the job they do, give us value for money. I have never in my life checked on the private life, sexual or otherwise, of my doctor, dentist, accountant, etc. In God’s name, why should I? I’m not looking for a boy scout or a saint to tend my teeth – I want a professional, and what he (or she) does the rest of the time I really don’t care.

Probing into the private life of politicians can be great fun and may even be what a lot of people prefer to the tedious examination of party policies, but that doesn’t make it right. So even though this story will probably end in greater public sympathy for Gerry Adams, he still shouldn’t have aired it.

Spin or no-spin?

Right. Have a look at the words of the following two people as reported in The Irish Times last Saturday.

Interviewee 1: “We have had no contact with the victim. We were there for Danny and for Danny only. They came along because they wanted to support Danny and they believed Danny. Nobody organised anything. We went because we hadn’t been able to contact him since he was found guilty. We wanted to shake hands with him – he’s our brother, our son. People followed suit. It was a spontaneous reaction. We had no idea that girl was going to be in court”.

Interviewee 2: “Now Áine was about 14 at the time, she was a wee kid, but she was always a very good wee girl and always, you know, I , I just couldn’t imagine a child like her making up such a serious allegation. And although I didn’t have you know, the the, the awful details of the, the wrong that was done to her, I think it was doubly done by Liam refusing, called her a liar and denying emphatically that he had done any wrong. Áine in this case is the direct victim, but child abuse has a whole ripple of other victims. You know, for me it’s like, you know, a permanent bereavement”.

It’s those “the, the”s and “I, I” s and “for me it’s like, you know”s, isn’t it? What has happened, as you’ve probably guessed, is that the reporter in the first paragraph has almost certainly screened the words of the speaker, eliminating ‘you know’s and repetitions and the rest of the wandering, self-correcting swing-around-the-houses extras that we all use in the spoken word. Ninety-nine per cent of journalists do this. It’s not that they falsify what was said – they just nudge the syntax and grammar into a form that makes it more readable.

In the second paragraph the reporter hasn’t done this. She’s simply given the words of the speaker in the raw form, with all the twists and hesitancies that the normal spoken word contains. But while we readily accept and sometimes don’t even hear such hesitancies in real life, in written form on the page it looks odd, suggests an uncertainty or maybe evasiveness on the part of the speaker.

The two reports appeared on the same page of last Saturday’s Irish Times. The speaker in the first story is Tim Foley, brother of the man sent to jail in Kerry for a sexual assault on a woman but greeted warmly in the court by about fifty local people. The second is from an interview with Gerry Adams about his niece Áine’s claims that her father, Gerry's brother, sexually abused her as a child.

The question is, in terms of reporting style, which speaker is made to look shifty, evasive, almost caught on the hop?

But hey – the Irish Times is Ireland's quality newspaper and would never slant its reporting against someone it didn’t like. The record shows that the Irish Times has always treated Sinn Fein the same as it has any other democratically-elected party. Like, I mean, right? RIGHT?

Sound-nibble...

The only medium which allows less scope for thoughtful analysis than radio is television. I was on ‘Hearts and Minds’ last night on BBC2, part of a two-man panel with Brian Feeney, and while the topic of (what else?) clerical child abuse was given seven minutes approx, it didn’t even begin to tickle the surface of the subject.

One example. I was trying to point out that the cover-up crime of the bishops might have been something more than callous abandoning of the innocent to the whims of a predatory monster in order to protect the Church’s good name. So I gave some figures about the likelihood of child abusers offending again (1-8% for treated low-risk offenders, 15-50% for high risk offenders).

Silly, silly, silly. If you don’t have a graphic that reinforces your spoken word, that’s going to be very difficult for the viewer to assimilate. On viewing the tape, it’s obvious that I should simply have said ‘Research shows that re-offending isn’t inevitable – most treated offenders don’t re-offend’. And repeated it a couple of times to drive the message home. So to be effective, you have to talk in short, punchy statements and repeat them. Television simply rejects complexity.

The other problem is length. Six to seven minutes is considered a reasonable period of time (outside of maybe Channel 4 News, you’d never get this on a news report – in fact three minutes would be considered very long. But for a topic as complex as the child abuse cases in Dublin diocese, that’s not nearly enough. Besides, it’s concerns like ‘God, he looks thin!’ that occupy viewer thoughts for the first thirty seconds or so, and in fact can keep distracting them from what's being said throughout the discussion.

How about a health warning similar to that they give on cigarette packets? ‘Believing that this discussion is either thoughtful or analytical could damage your mental health.'
PS 'Hearts and Minds' will have a new set in the New Year, so that'll be something else to distract us.

Community police service?

My mostrecent encounter with a British bobby happened nearly twenty years ago. I was in London to pick up a Sony Award for a BBC radio programme I presented , and I was heading for the Dorchester Hotel. Or I hoped I was. As usual I was a bit late, so I pantingly asked a friendly bobby the way. He looked at me, pulled out a little police radio-thingy from his breast pocket and said “I’m afraid I can’t – I’m busy now”. And he began to talk into his little radio.

I mention this because the latest survey shows that public confidence in the PSNI has dropped. Just 56% of people now think that our version of the British bobby is doing a good job; last April the figure was 64%. The UUP’s Basil McCrea showed his usual lightning ability to dissect a complex situation: ‘These statistics are heading the wrong way' he explained.

The whole question of policing here is both central and complex. It was early shots of the RUC batoning hell out of demonstrators that gave adrenaline and backbone to the Civil Rights movement, and reform of the police was a vital component of the peace process. But policing is still an issue that’s far from resolved.

Once Catholics composed around 5% of the RUC force. These days the figures for Catholics and Protestants joining the PSNI are near to equal. Unfortunately we don't have figures for how many of the new Catholic recruits are from the Bogside or West Belfast. My guess is that most of the recruits are middle-class. The areas which suffered most during the Troubles are not the areas supplying recruits to the PSNI. The Catholic middle-class may not have been the Prods-in-the-garden-centre who opted out of politics during the Troubles, but they experienced the Troubles as something relatively remote most of the time. Catholics in working-class areas experienced the Troubles up-close and personal. That’s why there are regular reports of mobs of youths attacking the PSNI in Derry and Belfast. It’s not their police service, it never was, and they’re telling the cops that with stones and bottles.

The Troubles obviously involve a clash between Catholics and Protestants, orange and green, but a class element has also been a crucial feature. In less affluent areas, particularly nationalist areas, the PSNI are still seen as middle-class muscle which keeps the scruff in their place. The fact that the police wear a symbol of the British crown in their caps isn’t lost on their attackers, either.

Restricted vision

It’s odd what we think of as alternatives in government and as extremes in politics. For example, we’re told that the DUP and Sinn Fein represent the extremist view, that having failed to succeed with an alliance of the middle ground (the Ulster Unionists and the SDLP) the British government has in recent decades turned to the ‘extremists’ to deliver peace and progress in the North of Ireland. Now that Martin McGuinness and Peter Robinson have fallen out in public, much is being made of what divides them. But when you think of it, the fact that they’ve been able to co-operate in government for as long as they have and find broad areas of agreement suggests that, the constitutional question aside, they’re not all that different in their thinking. The same applies to the south's coalition of the Greens and Fianna Fail. What could be further apart than the earth-saving Greens and the property-pumping FFers? Yet they’ve managed to snuggle up and work together pretty successfully for some years now.

The sad truth is that the voting public has been persuaded to think of centre and left and right in very limited terms. There was a time, for example, when Sinn Fein’s core belief was the establishment of a 32-county socialist republic. You didn’t have to agree to it to see that it offered a different way of looking at human beings and how they might best work together. The claim wasn’t that the economy would be run more successfully by them, or that corruption of different kinds would be rooted out (although these were part of it), but that the state would be organized in a way that would put emphasis on people working for each other rather than simply for themselves and their families. You don’t hear much of that now from Sinn Fein. The claim is that duplicate systems North and South are wasteful and that the economy could be managed more effectively as one unit. The same kind of thinking is on offer in Britain. The Tories don’t offer some radically new vision of what that country could look like; they simply argue that they would be less wasteful of resources, smarter in their management than their Labour opponents.

Since (despite popular rumour) there are quite a few very intelligent people in Irish politics, it seems hard to believe at least some of them haven’t thought how much better things might be if they were able to establish a truly different form of government. Not just an Orange and Green one, but one which offered fulfilment in a range of ways beyond the purely financial. Why don't they preach them, then? That's easy. Because of the great, dark, overwhelming fear that haunts every politician and political party: failure to be re-elected.