Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees

Thursday, 8 March 2018

Public Accounts Committee

Business of Committee

9:00 am

Photo of Shane CassellsShane Cassells (Meath West, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

There is nothing more important than the independence of the media in doing its job. In the past two weeks I have heard that they are under extreme financial pressure and have effectively been coerced into allowing this to run because of the financial strain they are under. There is nothing more important than we have entered a sphere in which the State can buy the news. We are not living in some Russian creation; this is not Trump-land but a republic. In a democracy the independence of the media to present the news and people to disseminate are fundamental. People have become obsessed with side shows, which is unfortunate, about whether Fine Gael members were in pictures, but it goes far deeper than that.

The people running the campaign were extremely astute about what they wanted to achieve and I will tell the committee why. They dealt with the design of the page, which is the most important point, newspaper by newspaper, including the fonts used in headlines. One should not forget that it did not run as an advertorial, which is bad enough, but I will tell the committee how specific it was. The headline and subhead fonts and text style were the same as on every other page in each newspaper. The first thing one learns in journalism school is that every single newspaper uses a particular font which is unique to it. Newspapers are precise in how their readers react to them. If a newspaper engages in a redesign, it will be at pains to explain to its readers why it has changed the font. When The Irish Timesdid it a number of years ago, it was at pains to explain that it engaged in the redesign to make it easier on the eye. These guys were so specific that in every single newspaper the same headline font, subhead font and colours as on the other pages were used. That takes some work. The newspapers concerned have been caught out and they know it.

The NUJ has commented on the issue because it is worried that if its members and the owners of newspapers allow it to happen, we have entered a dangerous sphere. My local newspaper which is as guilty as all of the rest this week ran a full page viewpoint by Paul Murphy who is one of the most respected local journalists in the country and editor of the Drogheda Independentgroup for many years. He was my first boss when I worked with that newspaper. He said readers of the Meath Chroniclelast week had come across details of the plan spread across the pages but that the words "advertising content" or "advertorial" did not appear anywhere in the copy. An unsuspecting reader would have assumed it was part of the newspaper's normal news coverage. He said it had been a mistake to present the copy in this way and expected it not to happen again.

A number of experts in various fields had been asked to supply quotes about the national development plan, but they had not been told that their views would be part of advertorials paid for by the State. Even the most brazen PR stunt man or woman would not pull that one and hope to get away with it. It looks and is grubby in the extreme.

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