Sir, - Although I was initially surprised by Roy Greenslade's rapid change in his assessment of my book, Ulster Loyalism and the British Media (Books, July 11th) - he had described this as "a fascinating book" on Today with Pat Kenny - I am rather more concerned by his apparent misunderstanding of both the book's underlying themes and his assessment of David Trimble's "new" unionism.
Mr Greenslade suggests that one of the "insistent themes" of my book is that the media in Great Britain have "misrepresented" unionists over the past 30 years. My argument is not so much that the media have deliberately falsified the unionist case, but that their coverage of the Northern situation in general, and loyalism in particular, has been one-dimensional and has failed to provide the British public with proper analytical coverage of events in Northern Ireland. Thus, I am less concerned about being an apologist for Ulster loyalism, which Mr Greenslade implies, and rather more interested in discerning why the British media has been so poor in improving the knowledge which its public has of the Northern Irish conflict. Perhaps this is why Mr Greenslade appears to be so sensitive on this issue. As an English journalist, surely he and his colleagues must bear the lion's share of the responsibility for the paucity of understanding which their readers have of events in the North.
Mr Greenslade's eagerness to castigate a whole community, without any apparent reservation, is also worrying. As I suggested to him on Irish radio, this might well be construed to represent covert "cultural racism." He seems to forget that only a minority of Ulster Protestants belong to either the Orange Order or Ian Paisley's DUP. The majority of them proclaim their passionate, if rather obdurate, belief in the union of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, obviously a political ideology which Mr Greenslade finds repugnant. He is also inaccurate in claiming that the "new" unionists offered support to the "unreconstructed Orange throng at Drumcree" and his conclusion that "new" unionism is going to be "a short-run phenomenon," is, to put it mildly, rather pessimistic. - Yours, etc., (Dr) Alan F. Parkinson,
South Bank University, London.