Peter Feeney knows how little time some journalists have.
During his eight years in his role as Ireland’s press ombudsman, a stint he has just completed, he noticed that complaints were being made to his office after reporters said they had not been able to leave their desks and had not been able to make basic checks, exposing them and their readers to the regurgitation of mistakes.
“It’s a very demoralising aspect of journalism,” he says.
He is in no doubt, either, about why it happens. The instant demands of the internet, known to encourage a fastest-finger-first culture in newsrooms, play their part. But it is the slashing of newsroom resources — amid serious financial pressures on the industry and the related, unresolved issue of transitioning the news business model from print to online — that worries Feeney.
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“There has to be a digital subscription model that actually generates money. We’re nowhere near that at the moment,” he says.
He is amazed by the price differential between print and online editions. Some titles promote introductory digital offers at a fraction of their print cover prices and that, to him, seems unsustainable.
“The declining print industry is supporting the online one,” he says. “The model has to change at some point.”
I bring up the subject of how, at an annual report launch in 2019, Feeney described as “depressing” a job advertisement seeking reporters who would be expected to file four to six stories a day. That had struck me at the time as a fairly normal number.
“I think you have to acknowledge that newspapers have a lot of space to fill and a lot of the time you can do little more than just repackage what you’re given,” says Feeney. Indeed, radio stations sometimes do “soft interviews” too.
This repackaging of press releases can have some value, he adds, though the public “might need to be sceptical sometimes that maybe that’s not the full story”.
Feeney (72) was the second Irish press ombudsman after Prof John Horgan. The third — writer and journalist Susan McKay — was leaving the office, off Dublin’s Pearse Street, as I arrived to talk to Feeney ahead of his departure. She officially started her first term this week.
Feeney believes the Office of the Press Ombudsman and the Press Council must evolve. It was initially set up with print journalism in mind, but complaints increasingly refer to online articles, while the list of digital-only member publications has lengthened over the years.
His attempts to raise its profile involved a phase of being more opinionated on the Press Ombudsman’s Twitter account, but he “pulled back a little bit” after concluding it was not possible to do this in a way that was compatible with the role. “You have to err on the side of caution,” he says.
The office usually receives 300 to 350 complaints a year, though on occasion this tally has shot up, such as in 2018, when the total was swelled by 160 complaints about a “rosarectomy” cartoon in the Sunday Independent published in the wake of the Eighth Amendment referendum. A “lead complaint” was examined and not upheld.
The 2021 crop, meanwhile was inflated by 200 complaints about Covid-19 reporting, many of which were driven by social media campaigns, with 54 more or less identical complaints originating from one anti-vax group with a Facebook page.
Whipping up others online to make mass complaints is “of no great value to the complainants”, Feeney says, because of the office’s strategy of establishing and then ruling on a lead complaint. Multiple complaints about the same article merely clog the process.
“You can see it in the populist press in Britain, the Mail and the Express,” Feeney says. “They will encourage their readers to complain about the BBC, about its [alleged] bias against the monarchy or its left-wing bias or whatever it is. That’s part of the lobbying world we live in, but we’re not influenced by the number of complaints we get in. It doesn’t matter to us if it is one or 50.”
Most complaints still come from a single individual, and they must be able to show that a possible breach of the code of practice — typically on grounds such as truth and accuracy or privacy — has personally affected them.
The Press Council, to which the ombudsman can refer complaints and which also decides on appeals, is a 13-strong body. Seven members (including the chair) are independent, and the remaining six are drawn from the industry. This is a balance that other European countries have not got right, prompting a loss of credibility, Feeney says. In any case, his experience was that there is “collegiality” that overrides tribalism.
“It is never broken down between industry members voting one way, independent members voting the other,” he says.
There is this tendency to scream a bit more. We have had one or two complaints where essentially the issue has been the headline, rather than the article itself
The question arises as to whether 300 to 350 complaints a year, only a portion of which are subject of formal decisions and fewer still upheld, is the “right” number. Editors and their deputies “respond better to complaints now” than they did when Feeney first started, he says, an attitude that might help reduce the number of upheld complaints.
But if the volume of complaints was to collapse, might that also be a sign of fading news media relevance? After all, people only tend to complain about things that they perceive as important.
“If you look at what people do when they’re not happy about something, they tend to go on social media and complain about it. There are more places now for them to raise their unhappiness than there were ten years ago,” Feeney says.
This ability to sound off is “good in one way, bad in another way”. Alongside the constraints of time, anonymous online abuse is now something that many journalists must contend with in the regular course of their work. This is a “huge issue”, Feeney says, of bigger consequence than any self-censorship the existence of the ombudsman’s office and the Press Council might trigger, Feeney says, and he has “no great evidence” of the latter anyway.
The ubiquity of online platforms also means that once-regular journalistic practices such as the “death knock” - an attempt to obtain photographs of a deceased person from their grieving relatives - have been replaced by the lifting of photographs from social media, which has led to “a small recurring sensitivity issue” when reporting accidents and murders, he notes.
“What upsets the family is the choice of photograph, whereas years ago you would go to the house and the family would give you the one they want used.”
Some of Feeney’s concerns about how journalism fares in an online world spring from his own reading habits. He has a “huge preference” for print over online. “It’s age-related,” he admits. It influences his view that the more thorough, time-consuming kind of journalism — the “detailed, investigative, in-depth, background” variety, untethered to press releases — does not thrive in digital forms.
“The value of the press as the fourth estate, holding to account, investigating things . . . it is just harder to get that to have the same efficacy in digital,” he says.
It almost seems old-school in 2022 to discuss the influence the online business model has had on headlines, but as ombudsman, Feeney saw the effects. Articles that bore “a more sober” headline in print were given “a more exaggerated or slightly populist” headline to grab the attention online.
“There is this tendency to scream a bit more. We have had one or two complaints where essentially the issue has been the headline, rather than the article itself,” he says. It is “probably the nature of the digital world we live in”, but if it comes at the expense of a news title’s reputation, it will be a costly road to go down.
One “bugbear” during Feeney’s time as ombudsman was that changes made to online articles were not always acknowledged, making it hard in some instances to see what a complainant had been unhappy about.
“I would hope that we would get to the stage where editors recognise the need to acknowledge edits on the digital edition, and where the edit is for a significant reason, to say why it is made,” he says. Most do not.
There are mistakes of some sort in many articles, I say, many of them self-corrected after publication. Where to draw the line? Feeney suggests updating a grammatical error or correcting a geographical mistake as changes that can be made without explanation. But what if, say, a number in an article is inaccurate, temporarily giving a misleading impression to readers?
“Yes, I would like to see that acknowledged, because to err is human,” he says. There is little harm, in other words, in normalising that truth. “Journalists are up against deadlines, and they’re up against much worse deadlines than when I went into the business 40 years ago.”
Feeney began his media career when he switched from lecturing in politics in the University of Ulster to RTÉ, completing its producer-director course. He has fond memories of his early years at the national broadcaster, when he spent two years directing the five-part documentary series The Age of De Valera. After seven years as editor of current affairs in the 1990s, he became RTÉ's Freedom of Information officer, and headed up broadcast compliance before leaving the organisation in 2012.
He wishes the best of luck to anyone trying to resolve RTÉ's financial predicaments. “To say the whole public service model is now in disarray would be an exaggeration, but it’s certainly much more frayed than it was before. It’s going to be very difficult,” he says.
The forthcoming Media Commission may need even more luck. The planned successor to the Broadcasting Authority of Ireland will house the new online safety commissioner, who will — under a policy change announced by the Government last month — be empowered from 2024 to accept complaints from individuals about material posted on social media.
The resources required for this “brave” expansion of regulation will be “staggeringly big”, says Feeney. “That’s David and Goliath stuff. It’s well-intentioned, and good luck to them, I hope it works. But gosh, it’s an enormous task.”
