Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees
Tuesday, 13 December 2022
Joint Oireachtas Committee on Climate Action
The Role of the Media and Communications in Actioning Climate Change: Discussion (Resumed)
Mr. Peter Woods:
I am looking at what the Deputy said about the immediate and the important. We look at both. Sometimes what is the immediate is also the important, but as I said earlier, it is the same editorial line that "Liveline" is in that put "Hot Mess" on air and it is also part of the answer to Deputy O'Sullivan's question. We put "Hot Mess" there not because of ratings but to change the argument, to look at policy and to influence the way our people think about and engage with things. In terms of the immediate and the important, one would not want to ignore how the important feeds into the immediate. I reference the Brendan O'Connor programme on Sunday mornings around a month ago when doing a newspapers review. I cannot exactly remember what subject the panel was discussing, but Brendan O'Connor said maybe they were missing the point and it was the economy they should have been discussing. That was the weekend of the United Nations climate change conference, the COP summit, and they went on to discuss that. That would be an instance of what is happening generally in respect of the long term impacting on the immediate. We have to look to both sides of that and we do.