Mr. Harry Browne:

I thank the committee very much for the opportunity to speak with it today.

In starting, I should note that although the arguments and conclusions that I will bring to the committee today in this statement are certainly my own, some of the research that I will cite here is not and I will endeavour to make that clear. Indeed, Dr. Mercille would have been a major source for this statement were it not that the committee had already heard from him for two hours already.

I will endeavour to mention other researchers whose work I am drawing upon, but I should also note that a fully referenced version of the statement has been furnished to the committee, with a works cited list, and I will also be making a link to that public on social media later today.

Print and broadcast media in Ireland played a difficult-to-measure but almost certainly significant role in the inflation of the property bubble and the legitimisation of risky behaviour by the financial services sector in the lead up to the crisis of 2007 and 2008. It did so partly by ignoring or marginalising scepticism about these phenomena. I will focus in my statement on the newspaper industry and I will argue that this socially destructive role should be understood not necessarily as a failing of Irish newspapers but, to some extent, as a feature, one that flows predictably from commercial media's structural relationship with the corporate forces that benefitted from the bubble. While this relationship is of very long standing and continues to some extent to this day, I will further argue there were certain aspects of the development of newspapers in the 1990s and early 2000s, which were particularly acute here in Ireland but also experienced elsewhere in the world, that made them especially vulnerable to domination by those forces and weakened the capacity of journalists to play the critical, adversarial and investigative role that most of them do undoubtedly value. Within journalism and in research about journalists, that value is often referred to under the rubric of "professionalism," a term that encompasses a set of principles and performances that supposedly drive journalists to seek the truth impartially and to question the powerful doggedly. The values are captured in such largely symbolic documents as the National Union of Journalists Code of Conduct and the code of practice of the Press Council of Ireland. I will not endeavour to romanticise the journalism of an earlier age, which had plenty of its own problems, many of them involving the limits and shortcomings of professionalism itself. However, over the last 30 years or so, those principles have been widely understood to be increasingly at risk all over the world, with particular features of the media landscape endangering them. Daniel C. Hallin, a leading American scholar of journalism, has written, "For the most part I don't think journalistic professionalism is breaking down from the inside, by journalists becoming less committed to it; instead [Hallin continues] I think professionalism is being squeezed into increasingly smaller niches within the media field."

It is my contention that in Irish newspapers we can literally see that squeeze occur over the period between about 1990 and 2007, as the physical construction of newspapers changed. There was an inscription of an unquestioning pro-business ideology, in practice, onto increasingly large advertising-heavy portions of the newspaper - indeed, sections that owed their existence precisely to advertising, including the ever-growing business finance, property, and lifestyle sections, dedicated to the advertising of, respectively, recruitment, real estate, and consumer goods and services. Even the most scrupulous of newspaper editors, I contend, came to see those sections as a realm of, at best, what one might call "professionalism lite" where soft treatment of the rich and powerful was expected. Even if one worked in the niches where full-blown professionalism still held sway - the journalists who filled news pages and provided political coverage, for example - it was hard to miss the message that was embedded in that big colourful product about your employer's relationship with financial institutions, property interests and other corporate bodies. Those supplements were, after all, paying the bills. When The Irish Times Limited infamously paid €40 million for myhome.iein 2006, it appeared to confirm the company's dedication to what increasingly looked like its core business - the advertising of property sales.

There is a piece of research that has already been cited today in which a group of Irish financial journalists, speaking on condition of anonymity to a team of academic researchers who published their findings in 2010, discussed this relationship. One of them said, in that research by Fahy, O'Brien and Poti:

Much of the mainstream media seems to me to be very conflicted because of their reliance on real-estate and recruitment advertising. That doesn't mean reporters consciously avoid writing bad news stories, but it's hard to run against the tide when everyone is getting rich.

Another stated explicitly that journalists "were leaned on by their organisations not to talk down the banks [and the] property market because those organisations have a heavy reliance on property advertising".

In 2006 I interviewed dozens of journalists about The Irish Timesat that time. One of them, who was retired from that newspaper, said:

In the mid-1980s ... we had a series investigating the truth behind buying and selling property. Can you imagine that now?

That was in 2006. Now, the idea that certain parts of the Irish newspaper industry were professionally compromised territory was already in the air as early as the 1980s. The former business editor from Independent Newspapers, cited in that same research that we have discussed, and to whom one of the Deputies has already referred, recalled a lunch from that period where journalists and stockbrokers gathered to mark the appointment of a new president to the Irish Stock Exchange. The journalist recalled the event to a researcher many years later. He stated:

The lunch went well and all the proprieties were observed, until, during the port, the topic of mutual dependence came up in the conversation. "What do you mean mutual?" a rubicund and slightly tipsy broker ventured. "The business pages are ours. We own them."

The editor continued his recollection:

Trudging back to the office, however, I admit an icy feeling was coursing through my veins. Maybe, the chap with the English public school accent was right. He was implying that we [journalists] were lazy, dependent and largely uncritical. More chillingly still, maybe our employers (who shared the same gentlemen's clubs with the brokers) were happy with such an arrangement.

That was in the 1980s. By the time of the Celtic tiger, this compromised turf of business and financial journalism had expanded many times over, both in the volume of pages produced and in the number of journalists employed. In that research cited earlier, the author summarised the views of several of the Irish financial journalists whom they interviewed, and this is an extensive quote from that research:

According to journalist F, because of the need for regular contact with financial sources, "some journalists are reluctant to be critical of companies because they fear they will not get information or access in the future". Journalist E ... believed that some journalists had become "far too close to their sources": They viewed them as friends and allies and essentially became advocates for them. Their approach was justified editorially because many developers and bankers limited access to such an extent that it became seen to be better to write soft stories about them than to lose access. Extremely soft stories would also be run to gain access too ... Journalist B criticised daily financial journalism for being "almost entirely press release and stock exchange disclosure based[.]" ...

The report continues: "... Journalist F noted [that] it was "well known that some PR companies try to bully journalists by cutting off access or excluding journalists from briefings".

The sort of ambivalence that this engenders about telling good tough stories while maintaining source relationships is not unique to financial or property journalism; it is present throughout journalism. However, as the role and prominence of those sorts of journalism increased in the 1990s and early 2000s, their particular compromises of professionalism played a proportionately bigger role in newspaper coverage of these important areas of the economy and society. Their growth was not inevitable, nor was it unique to Ireland. It was part of an international development in the newspaper industry that sought to diversify papers' content and appearance to make them more attractive to advertisers and, to a lesser extent, to readers. In the United States in the late 1980s and early 1990s this came to be known as "total newspapering", with a de-emphasis on news and - this is the "total" part - an effort to break down the traditional barriers between editorial and commercial considerations. A study of this phenomenon, also known as "market-led journalism," in the 1990s carried the cautionary title, "When MBAs rule the newsroom." This was already worrying journalists cited in British research during this decade:

Among journalists there are fears that the delicate balance between the self-interest of capitalist media owners and the "public interest" motives of journalism has been upset ... Some journalists have come to believe that the news is being stolen from them.

This market orientation does not express itself merely in the growth of financial and property journalism but in the explosion of entertainment, lifestyle and consumer-oriented sections and stories. As one scholar summarises it - again, I quote this from Hanitzsch:

When market orientation is high, journalism gives emphasis to what the audiences want to know at the expense of what they should know ... Audiences are not addressed in their role as citizens concerned with the social and political issues of the day but in their role as clients and consumers...

These developments in newspapers did not happen by accident or in isolation. They were a vital cultural component of the larger global development of politics and economics over the last several decades that we have come to call neoliberalism. The great historian and student of that phenomenon David Harvey writes: "Neoliberalization required both politically and economically the construction of a neoliberal market-based populist culture of differentiated consumerism and individual libertarianism."

It is important to note that I do not believe we should blame most journalists either individually or collectively for this situation. Nor have journalists been its obvious beneficiaries. Even in Ireland, where the booming economy helped newspaper circulation and profitability to remain healthy past 2000, a journalistic culture of increased workloads, casualisation, rapidly changing technological expectations and declining real rates of pay was in place throughout the industry even before the wider bust of 2007-08. When I did that series of interviews with newspaper journalists in 2006, many of them told me that their capacity to engage in critical scrutiny of Government and business was overwhelmed by the day-to-day pressures of filling ever more space in print and online.

The job of careful consideration and analysis of events was largely left to a small coterie of editors and senior political writers who were generally believed to have risen to those posts through a combination of caution and conservatism. As research outside Ireland has also suggested, journalists who continued to feel that they should be doing hard-hitting, critical scrutiny of powerful institutions felt disempowered from doing so. It is not surprising that a reputable transnational "scorecard" of journalism's coverage of the financial crisis found that in Ireland, most stories were episodic and short of analysis. These conditions have, if anything, deteriorated further in the intervening years of collapsing circulation and desperate digitisation.

Such conditions also provide the context for the increasing power of the public relations industry. As noted above, the capacity of PR officers to give and withhold the information that hard-pressed journalists require in order to do their work gives them an inevitable influence over content to the benefit of their State and corporate clients. An even more insidious form of PR influence comes in the form of "flak", which is the negative attention and pressure that comes upon journalists when they attempt to report on sensitive stories. In theory, flak can come from any side of a story. In practice, most of it comes from the sides that can afford to generate it at a volume and with a social standing that catches the ear of editors.

For reasons of space, and because it was not a specific part of the brief, I have not greatly addressed the question of media ownership in this statement, although I am happy to do so hereafter. The enormously high concentration of media ownership in this State is, of course, a major danger and fundamental public concern. However, ownership of media cannot tell the whole story about it. The Irish Timesis owned by a trust but has not been immune to the commercial pressures discussed here. RTE, which is genuinely dominant media outlet in this State, is owned by the people of Ireland but its role in broadcasting non-news and current affairs based "property porn" in the Celtic tiger years certainly bears scrutiny. It is worth saying that both RTE and newspapers did break many scandals although they were less likely to raise systematic questions about the state of the economy and the housing market.

The committee has asked me to address potential conflicts of interests among media organisations. Based on much of what I have said here, it is tempting to conclude that there was no real conflict of interest at all but rather a congruence of interests between media organisations and the developers and financiers who were advertising with them cashing in handsomely on a speculative bubble. While there would be some truth in such a conclusion, it would also be excessively simplistic because journalists and the organisations that employ them do also have an interest in producing strong stories that challenge conventional thinking, afflict the comfortable and comfort the afflicted. Indeed, nothing in what I have said here should be interpreted to mean that they do not sometimes do precisely that. The purpose of this analysis is not moral condemnation but to understand why, in the specific context of Celtic tiger Ireland and also beyond that context, the structural congruence might have been stronger and more influential than the sense of ethical conflict. While much of the professional practice of journalism is conducted with an acute awareness of "how it should be done", nonetheless, a host of other influences determine the shape and content of the journalistic product leading to biases in favour of, for example, "talking up" the economy and the market, home ownership, property investment and the soft landing. How this happens is complex and contingent located where newspapers find themselves - at an intersection of daily events, longer term history, commerce, design, technology, routine, process, pressure and, not least, economic and political power. This intersection is traversed by the workers in a newspaper on a daily basis.