Victory for our human sympathy

It was a week in which the oft-derided intrusiveness of the microphone was vindicated - if not for the survivors and victims of Omagh, at least for the rest of us, who found our sympathy called upon as never before.

Time and again we heard the terrible, terrible stories of violence, of suffering, of loss. And while television was compelling, it was too often completely unbearable to hear these stories and see the faces of the bereaved; on radio it was just about possible to listen again and again to the unbelievable truth of what occurred, what is still occurring, for the people caught up in that strange and barbarous moment.

It was one of those weeks when RTE was at its indispensible best. For the broadcasters involved it must have been emotionally exhausting. And among them, special mention should go to Emer Woodfull, who without the resources available to Morning Ireland, News at One and Five Seven Live, continued to tease out human-interest and political angles to the story all week - when it would have been easier to move on to other, easier stories.

Instead, Today with Emer Woodfull did the right thing by recognising that the national station must continually validate the overwhelming importance of this event, that other items might intrude, but that Omagh must cast its shadow over every hour, every day.

The same can be said right across the Radio 1 schedule. On RTE radio, only Liveline lost the plot a bit, getting caught up in the anger of Dundalk. Early in the week, Joe Duffy stopped his callers short of naming the Sands-McKevitts, but by directing readers to English papers where they were named - "and I could nearly find their house from the description in one of the papers" - he was, arguably, a participant in the targeting of the couple.

Ironic, isn't it, that we've been hearing about three savage and bloody bombing attacks in recent weeks. For the African embassy bombs, a suspect was - without evidence - pilloried in the media and finally militarily attacked; for Omagh, the media also joined in a rush to judgment. In the case of the Cruise missles, we know exactly who did it. And as punishment for killing dozens in Afghanistan and destroying a pharmaceutical plant in Sudan, Bill Clinton is subject to jokey comments about his impure motives.

Today FM, meanwhile, has rightly attracted the pundits' attention to its growth, as shown in the latest JNLR figures, and particularly to the success of the Eamon Dunphy-led Last Word programme. In fact, the show has been treated to the free publicity of direct attacks from its competitors: RTE headed its pair of post-JNLR newspaper ads "The First Word" and "The Last Word", while Dublin's FM104 pointed out that its drive-time audience, for Rick O'Shea's programme, dwarfs Dunphy's in the capital.

In spite of those knocks, Today FM can be proud of the show - Navan Man, Drunken Politician and all - closing the gap on such well-established rivals. Far more worrying is the other gap: between The Last Word and everything else on the station. Check out the stats: 107,000 for The Last Word, 67,000 for Today FM's Breakfast Show. Compare that to RTE Radio 1, where the Morning Ireland audience is nearly three times larger than that for Five Seven Live.

And as for those housewives that the new Today FM set out to target: sorry, lads, Morning Ireland attracts them in numbers about 20 times larger than The Breakfast Show. The station suffers only slightly less devastating defeats right through the day.

Today FM's overall daytime market share remains low at six per cent; but its share of housewives is worse than low: it's embarassing at two per cent. The optimism about the arrival of Ian Dempsey in the morning slot (hopefully bringing some of his 226,000 listeners from 2FM) is surely born of desperation. Perhaps Today FM should now try building on the strengths that see it competing in the early evenings - not only with Dunphy, but with the good music that attracts audiences roughly equal to Radio 1's (admittedly paltry) evening listenership.

In Dublin, of course, the local stations demolish the nationals in the evening. Of late, with Chris Barry back on the air this week, the most publicised weapon in that victory is the late-night "shock jocks". Unfortunately, the market demands that we return to that subject next week. In the meantime, reflect on Adrian Kennedy's attack, in Saturday's Irish Times, on the "snobs" who criticise the content of his FM104 Phone Show. The show's mission, he said, is purely to entertain - which presumably means FM104 will stop telling the IRTC that Adrian helps fill the station's news and current affairs quota.