Dr. Julien Mercille:

That is a good question, because one often hears that it is a conspiracy. A conspiracy is a few guys in a dark room who take decisions outside the normal channels. The media are not a conspiracy but are institutional. If one asks any corporate leader, he or she will say what I said - that we have a structure, we have to increase market share, we have to raise revenues and so on. That leads to certain incentives. For example, if someone wants to cut costs in a newspaper, will he send his journalists for an hour to the Parliament to collect press releases and write a few articles very quickly, or will he send them to rural Ireland for a month? It is much more expensive to do the second. If he did not work in an environment based on profits he could do the second, but if he is competing with other organisations that will cut costs in that way, it leads to a reliance on organisations or the establishment.