LAST week I mentioned the feeling that exists within Fianna Fail at the moment that the media are out to get the party. This is hardly an original perspective. Fianna Fail has always felt the media were out to get it.
The point I was making is that even now, when the party - as part of the coalition Government - is leading the State through some very good times it feels it still can't get an even break. It has become so extreme that some members believe that an editorial policy decision has been taken in certain branches of the media, including The Irish Times, to bring down the party leader.
In the good old, bad old days Fianna Fail had almost no relationship with the media. We wouldn't co-operate with them because we figured they were just troublemakers. We couldn't see any upside to doing radio or television appearances. The reporters and researchers knew this. If, for example, they wanted someone for Seven Days or Today Tonight they would never ring parliamentary party members directly. A call would be put in to the party press office.
That call would be passed on to P.J. Mara. In turn he would seek the blessing of Charlie Haughey and if, and only if, he saw fit to allow the member in question to appear would clearance be granted. And that individual would then do his or her level best not to say anything at all. No, that's not entirely true. They'd take pot shots at the opposition, attempt to shift the blame to whichever previous administration Fianna Fail had not been part of and then clam up.
Some of our number did try to cultivate some journalists. In completely the wrong way. They would quietly meet them and leak information from the parliamentary party meetings or pass on the latest inparty gossip. This wasn't cultivation at all; it was ingratiation. The journalists behaved exactly the way journalists should and kept listening, perfectly happy to have a tame source of information while holding these characters in the same esteem as cops hold their grasses.
A circle of assumptions was created. We assumed the journalists were purely interested in negative stories, particularly if they reflected badly on Fianna Fail. The journalists assumed we had something to hide because we didn't want to talk to them. They further assumed that our distrust of the media was based on ignorance, conservatism and dislike. So they'd go digging for stories, find them and print them. We'd be reinforced in our belief that we were the victims and co-operate less. And so the cycle would repeat.
Whatever else may be said about Charles J. he is not stupid. He spotted the growing influence of the media. Somewhere around the mid-1980s he started to get us trained in media skills. At that point we almost managed to break the cycle because we started to learn what the agenda really was.
Journalists just want good stories. If we could give them interesting, understandable and memorable material they would print or broadcast it. Some of us embraced the concept and started to do very nicely on TV, radio and in the newspapers.
Our relationship with the media promptly turned sour again. The party ran into scandal after scandal. We found ourselves having to defend the indefensible. As each new story would break Brian Lenihan would be wheeled on to whatever programme was necessary with an impossible brief. And he would do what he could. Inevitably, and tragically for such a bright and well-read man, he became a caricature - the Fianna Fail apologist, who would say things like "I'm glad you asked me that question" or "Let me put this in context" while avoiding the questions. Fianna Fail came to be seen as untrustworthy, foolish, greedy, anti-intellectual and muck-behind-the-ears rural.
The prejudice had been established. As with most prejudices it was based on the behaviour of a few and unfairly extrapolated to a much larger group.
And prejudices don't go away. When the prejudice was first established it was so strong that it allowed an entire political party to be built on it. When the Progressive Democrats was first formed it was as a reaction to Fianna Fail. ail".
When Albert Reynolds called the prejudice a form of racism he was almost right. It is an ism, but closer to classism than racism, though it probably deserves a new classification of its own. In Jiving at the Crossroads, John Waters identified it a decade ago. And it is that that is at the heart of the current paranoia.
Fianna Fail's problem is that because it feels discriminated against it has turned it into a conspiracy. It has decided that the newspaper and programme editors have created a secret agenda. That they have decided to target FF as the bad guys and that this hidden agenda informs everything they do. It doesn't. In common with most conspiracy theories any intimate knowledge of the proposed participants usually shows how utterly impossible a conspiracy would be.
The degree of organisation involved, the degree of secrecy involved would be staggering. Journalists are simply not that co-ordinated. They live in a chaotic state where their success is measured by readership and scoops. They have a very simple plan. Stay employed by staying one step ahead of the other journalists. Yes, they do meet in the pub and do quietly bolster their existing judgments. Which means they become more assured that Fianna Failers wear the bad guys' black hats.
But there is no plan. The other element of the journalistic make-up that must be understood is the pressure of the deadline. They need their stories quickly. So they go where they "know" they are most likely to get the scoop they're after. Fianna Fail has provided them with the scandals before, so why not return to that fertile source?
This creates two problems for Fianna Fail. In the short term it has to figure out how to get the messages it wants to communicate across to the voters. It will have to do this by circumventing the newspapers and pre-recorded TV and radio programmes.
BECAUSE the editors are viewing Fianna Fail through a distorting lens, they are producing a distorted view of what the party is achieving. The party will have to concentrate on live TV and radio shows and constituency work.
Lots and lots of constituency work. Face-to-face communications work best and that is where the party can win back the votes it is currently losing.
In the longer term the party will have to deal with the prejudice. But isms are difficult to kill. Take sexism. The "battle of the sexes" has been fought for a century at least, and it hasn't been won. Women are still discriminated against. Racism has been actively tackled in the United States for more than 40 years. This week a white man was sentenced to death for chaining a black man to the back of his truck and dragging him along a road until he died.
Fianna Fail will have to understand that getting rid of the reactionary negative judgments made against the party will take decades. It will have to wait until the tribunals are over . . . Until it can prove it is whiter than white. Not just that it behaves better than everyone else, but that it behaves flawlessly. And it will only happen when it stops being paranoid and starts to understand the reality of the situation. The media are not out to get Fianna Fail because of what Fianna Fail is. They are not even out to get Fianna Fail because of what they think the party is. They are out to get stories, and Fianna Fail has to stop providing them with bad ones.