Mr. Harry Browne:

Yes, "episodic" essentially means that it talks about what happens on the day instead of giving an analytical or thematic framework of understanding for them. To be honest, it characterises most coverage of most stories, partly because of the constraints and pressures we talked about earlier. It is one of the richest areas of study of journalism. It is one of the areas where we find that there is actually a difference in how people read and receive stories depending on whether they are given real analysis and thematic understanding or whether they are merely told what happened today.

This analysis was an article by a series of scholars who looked at the coverage of the crisis in many different countries and found that in Ireland and most other countries as well, the coverage was largely bitty. It was not to say it was all positive. Obviously - we have not really talked about this - the crisis really did bring about a huge swing to the negative pole in how journalism talked about the economy, talked about the banks and talked about the property market. However, it was without rich analysis. It was largely the latest emanation of crisis.