Dr. Julien Mercille:

Yes, it affects it to a great extent. Media entities are large corporations. Like any other corporation, if they want to invest in a new project they will have to borrow money, they have to talk to bankers, they have to survive as economic businesses, they have to sell and they have to get advertising. That leads to a series of consequences for their reporting. There are many reasons for that but I shall deal with ownership first. It is owned by large corporations so they have specific interests. We do not have any problem recognising that. A trade union paper reflects trade union viewpoints because they are owned by the trade unions. The same thing applies for the corporate sector.

For advertising, I am not sure whether the Deputy wants me to talk about it right now. Advertisers will not support publications that are contrary to their interests, by and large.

For sourcing, journalists are under time constraints. It is much cheaper to send a journalist to a parliament to collect the views of TDs and other officials than to send a journalist for a one-month trip to rural Ireland to look at the effects of poverty which is much more expensive. By and large, journalists will go to the organisations that have a ready supply of press releases. Those are, by and large, in establishment institutions and that is what gets reported in the media.