IT IS now coming up on a year since the Press group of newspapers was closed down. It need not have been closed and it is sorely missed. In the narrow sense, its closure was due to commercial opportunism and political cowardice. But the continued absence of the voice it represents is more the consequence of faintheartedness based on flawed analysis.
During the Irish Press crisis, it was said, by way of mitigation, that newspapers have a natural lifespan, that they shouldn't be kept alive artificially or mourned unduly, that if they are allowed to die with dignity a successor will emerge to do more justice to the times. But it is a mistake to suggest that newspapers must necessarily follow a pattern of rise and fall. This pattern is frequently discernible, but it is not inevitable.
The crisis at the Irish Press was not the inevitable consequence of its newspapers outstaying their welcome in the marketplace. It was the result of a failure to understand how Irish society was changing and to redefine the Irish Press products in an appropriate manner. In their heyday, the Press newspapers represented a unique and unmistakable voice in Irish society the voice of the countryside, of the small farming class, and of the grassroots supporters of Fianna Fail.
The thesis is advanced that it was the failure to realise in sufficient time that these elements of Irish society were in decline that lay behind the slide. This is only partly true. The people who used to read the Irish Press newspapers have not ceased to exist. What happened was that the newspapers they read ceased to keep abreast of the complex reality of their changing lives.
There remains a cultural and political space where the Irish Press used to stand, which cannot any more be filled by the Irish Independent or the Irish Times than it can by the Irish Press, Evening Press and Sunday Press as they used to be.
Frequently, newspapers which have been successful over a long period tend to lose contact with the reasons for that success. Forgetting their own dependence on some form of symbiotic relationship with the public, they begin to regard themselves as the custodians of some form of cultural/political Holy Grail. A management, editorial and journalistic elite begins to behave as though it were the font of all wisdom and truth.
And, for a time, this impression may well appear to be correct, as the newspapers go from strength to strength. But then, one day, a perception begins to emerge that the view which has been promoted is no longer as irrefutably self evident as has been presumed. Then, slowly but inexorably, the spiral begins to curl around. Within a short time, the newspaper is in decline. The view which was previously the cutting edge of the society's self perception is now regarded as old hat.
PLURALITY of ownership does not in itself provide diversity of viewpoint. It is not enough to have our newspapers con trolled by different people if these people have the same perspectives and aspirations, and the power to quash all eccentricity or dissent. Gay Mitchell made some interesting and important points in his recent speech, in particular about the homogeneity of media ideology. (A bit rich coming from a Fine Gaeler, but however.)
Talk by media people about diversity is often more a condescending tolerance of terror than an offer to provide a channel for true pluralism. If our media believe that there is only one reality, and that they are already accurately representing it, then what they offer is the opportunity for others to express their fundamentally wrong headed views, so as, paradoxically, to validate the existing consensus.
Ireland is changing at least as fast as anywhere else in the world, but the true nature of the change is either being inadequately reported or presented against the backdrop of an outdated ideological agenda. Major changes are now taking place in the relationship between people and power, but media culture is insufficiently adaptable to do these changes justice. Because media are them selves institutional in character, they are preoccupied with other institutions and power centres and have difficulty engaging with the less tangible movements in the lives of people who are not in positions of power.
Moreover, all our newspapers, and most of those who work in them, believe in much the same things the power of the market, the virtue of business and the essentially sound nature of the modernising project.
There are, for example, hundreds of groups around Ireland remaking this society by the minute, but this revolution under our noses is going unreported because the media are fixated on the power structures in Dublin. A whole new lease of life is possible for the newspaper which starts to report this change. The failure to do so is not simple inefficiency or myopia it is the consequence of a particular ideological view, ingrained in the deeply conservative culture of newspapers and journalism.
CONSTANT renewal is an essential part of any newspaper. Not only did this not happen at the Press group but, such was the complacency at managerial and editorial levels that, when the crisis loomed, there no longer existed anything but the remotest connection with what was going on in society. The only options available were blind pursuit of off the peg marketing strategies and imitation of the methods employed by the Press's competitors.
As a consequence of the blind pursuit of the phantom ABC Is, who would not be seen dead with a Press newspaper anyway, there developed within the Press group a deep hatred of the readers who were its very bread and butter.
The gap is there to be filled. There still exists the possibility of an almost infinite range of other views and perspectives in the Irish media. It is wrong to assume that the reason such viewpoints are not represented is that there is no demand or appetite for them. There are dozens of niches for all sorts of newspapers, and countless matters of concern at a national, domestic and local level which the existing Irish media seem intent upon ignoring.
The changes taking place in Ireland now are emblematic, and to a degree prophetic, of shifts which will face the whole of western society in the coming decades. In other words, reporting on Ireland today is not merely a matter of local events, but of global patterns. This makes the issue of media diversity one of responsibility to the wider world as well as to ourselves.
This is why the debate about Irish newspapers needs to become much broader. We who work in the media need to interrogate in the most rigorous way all of the assumptions with which we have lived. Our society requires a period of public self examination on issues of economics, political culture, faith, art and countless other aspects of modern life, which only the media are capable of facilitating.
The necessary process requires a journalism which will find ways of accessing the public thought processes, both to report and affirm the true nature of change. We need the Irish Press now more than we ever did.