Adam Maguire

15 February 2006 | Politics/ Current Affairs | Adam

In a recent speech at the Broadcasting, Society and Law series in UCD, Minister for Justice Michael McDowell criticised those in the “state media and state licensed media” for what he labelled agenda setting a campaign journalism.
The speech (available for download here in PDF format) covered many aspects of Irish media and made some valid points on the transformation it is facing in respect of digital advances and online competition. The following is the short paragraph he dedicated to his concerns in relation to Investigative Journalism (it can be found on pages 8/9, titled “Agenda Setters?”

Which brings me to the issues of “agenda setting”, “campaigning journalism” and “investigative reporting” by state media and state licensed media.
As a matter of law, and for the purposes of the Broadcasting Acts, is the choice of subject matter for “campaigns” and “agenda setting” on issues of current affairs a matter on which there must also be impartiality and objectivity?
This is a fraught issue. And I have no simple answer – legal or political.
At one end of the spectrum, we could have an absurd doctrine that paralysed and stultified public service current affairs broadcasting by insisting that investigative reporting be randomly deployed on issues in a manner that considered one issue as important or unimportant as another.
At the other end of the spectrum is the equally unacceptable doctrine that state broadcasters might be completely free to campaign on issues chosen personally and subjectively by those in the employ of the broadcaster as representing their own ideological or political priorities.
Watch-able and educational, but fair and objective, television requires a position taken somewhere on the spectrum in between those polar extremes. And not too close to either of them.

Of course; this type of comment is typical of our Minister for Justice. He criticises but fails to justify; of course it is easy to criticise the media without detailing the exact reasons why. It is also easy to dictate a utopian balance that reporters should find without giving specifics away. Who decides a story to be important? The journalist themselves? Doesn’t that mean it gets too personal? So how about the public? What about in cases where information is not in the public domain but may be in the public interest? Should we ask the Justice department to decide instead?

As for the attempts to set the agenda with unbalanced an unobjective reporting, it’s impossible to argue against that without specific examples, but I think the Minister is missing the point. The very basis of an investigative piece is to highlight some kind of wrong-doing or public inadequacy. Take the excellent Prime Time Investigates series, for example. Their episode on the Lea’s Cross care home scandal was most certainly agenda setting, and rightly so. It was also undeniably balanced in its account; not in the way that the operators of Lea’s Cross would have liked but the way the public deserved. Being balanced in investigative journalism is not about coming to a neutral conclusion, it is about giving every possibility fair consideration and research. If an investigative piece is inconclusive, or if it finds that there is no wrong doing why on earth would it be broadcast or published? Can you imagine a station or newspaper wasting everybody’s time with a piece on corruption in Bank X which concludes that nothing is wrong and everything is above-board?
It’s understandable for the Minister to feel that RTÉ and others are always critical in their “campaign journalism” but that is because campaign journalism, by its very definition, is the act of highlighting an inadequacy in public life that has not been dealt with. When there are no outstanding and underlying issues in the world then journalism will return fully to its comfortable remit of reporting the facts rather than uncovering them; unfortunately for those who must bear the brunt of this most important aspect of journalism, we are living in no such world and are unlikely to at any point in our generation.
Finally, perhaps if politicians operated in a more transparent and engaging fashion then they could be the ones to set the agenda rather than just react to it; the willingness of the majority of politicians to sit back and take things as they come only means that somebody else will be forced to bring debate to the fore and to their doorsteps.