International reportage about Ireland is more important than ever in the corridors of power, writes NOEL WHELAN
IN THE mid-1980s, like many others, I spent a summer on Long Island, in New York, on a J1 visa. One of the many great discoveries I made that summer was the New York Times. Every weekday afternoon I would take myself off to a quiet diner for lunch, spread the newspaper across a table and devour each one of its pages.
Those were dramatic weeks in American politics and the New York Times extensively covered events surrounding the Reagan presidency and the Iran-Contra affair as well as Ed Koch’s New York mayoralty. The metro and national news pages were riveting while the opinion pages were full of varied and thought-provoking columns. I also enjoyed the foreign news pages, which appeared to provide coverage of world events with a particular authority.
I thought that, as a newspaper, the New York Times was perfect. I was, however, being naïve. Five weeks into my stay I came across, for the first time in the paper, a story with an Irish angle. The newspaper had sent a reporter to cover the 12th of July in Northern Ireland and it then gave her piece prominent full-page treatment in the feature section. I still remember how shocked I was at the simplistic nature of the coverage of the Troubles communicated by the article.
The characterisation of the participants in the conflict was largely stereotypical and any explanation as to what formed the basis of Northern Ireland’s problems was vague and generalised.
It was not that I could necessarily single out any particular inaccuracies in the reportage in the article. Rather, it was the fact that in order to compress the detail and summarise the Northern Ireland story into a 1,500-word piece that would be interesting and accessible to a wider American audience, the reality had been distorted.
For someone who absorbed themselves in Irish media coverage of the Northern Ireland events, the weaknesses in the New York Times article were disappointing, and even unnerving. It shook my confidence in the newspaper’s coverage of events and stories in all other countries.
Today, I occasionally read the New York Times online. While its coverage of American politics continues to be flawless I choose to maintain a healthy scepticism about its reporting of all other countries.
We Irish have always had a particularly heightened sensitivity about how well we are thought of internationally. We have a habit of judging our success on the basis of how the international media, and in particular the US and UK media, perceive us. Many, for example, define the nadir of our recession in the 1980s as being the week in which the Economist magazine described Ireland as the basket case of Europe.
On the other end of the scale they define the peak of our boom as the week in which the same magazine carried a cover story highlighting the success of Ireland’s Celtic Tiger economy. More recently the magazine has described Dublin as Reykjavik-on-Liffey.
Now in a more intimate world and at a time when we have arguably the most open economy in the world, international reportage about Ireland is more important than ever. This is not so much because of what it says about us to the general populations of other countries but because it may be exacting an influence in the corridors of power and financial circles abroad.
Of course, we would expect and hope that those in other governments or international finance houses would have more comprehensive sources of information than what they read in their local newspapers but it would be careless to think that it doesn’t have some influence. It is for this reason that media briefings and meetings with various editorial boards were included in the itineraries of many of the Ministers travelling abroad this week for St Patrick’s Day.
During the Celtic boom years many fine articles and reports comprehensively covered the reasons for our economic success but there were equally hundreds of generalised pieces which held us up as an example of economic success with little assessment or understanding of what our economic revolution was about. At the height of our boom the majority of international media opinion would have been well disposed to Ireland and its success but it would be naïve of us to think that the economic success we then enjoyed didn’t also attract resentment in some parts of the international media, particularly the right-wing elements of the British media.
Now that our economic fortunes have taken a different turn, much of the assessment of our predicament is equally superficial. Putting Ireland and Iceland into the same headline may appeal to subeditors but it is not as easily justified by those claiming to engage in substantial economic analysis. Recently international media outlets have been sending their high-profile reporters to do pieces on Ireland. Some have filed copy, the superficiality of which has embarrassed those outlets’ permanently Dublin-based correspondents.
It further underlines the importance of Ireland’s political and economic leaders being out there telling our story and rebuilding and maintaining essential international confidence as required.