Coverage of North fostering 'spoilt' attitude in politicians

CLERAUN MEDIA CONFERENCE:THERE IS too much coverage of the North in the southern media and this is helping to foster a "spoilt child-type attitude" among its politicians, a former leading loyalist has said.

David Adams, who was once a senior figure in the Ulster Democratic Party, said the North could do with a lot less interest from outsiders. He said the attention of everyone from US presidents to taoisigh had only led the North to be "self-regarding, self-centred and spoilt with attention", and it had benefited from billions of pounds of investment even though other conflict zones were worse off.

"The less attention for attention's sake that Northern Ireland gets, the better it will be for us all that have to live there, and the more encouragement it might be to the politicians who are actually supposed to work and earn the large cheques that are passing through their letterbox every week," he said.

Mr Adams, now a freelance journalist and columnist with The Irish Times, said northern Protestants were not very likeable. "There's no denying we are a dour people, we don't attract sympathy. We're stubborn, pigheaded, and compromise does not come easy to us," he said.

However, he told the Cleraun Media Conference that the Protestant tradition got better press in the South than in the North.

He said there was a detachment in the South which regarded both sides as "the other" and unionists got more sympathetic press as a result.

The Press Ombudsman, Prof John Horgan, said he hoped the recession would not lead to a retrenchment in "fresh-air journalism" with journalists retreating to the internet and the monitor because of budgetary cutbacks.

He said it was particularly critical in relation to reporting on Islam, because "there could hardly be a more serious task" than understanding the complexities of the Islamic world.

Irish TimesForeign Affairs Correspondent Mary Fitzgerald said the western world's media tended to concentrate on stories which portrayed Islam as an extreme religion and Muslims as extremists.

She said media organisations needed to move beyond the "superficial reporting, lazy assumptions and gross stereotyping that too often shape public perceptions of the faith and its followers".