Tomas Sullivan
Staff Writer
We’ve witnessed our first presidential election with mature eyes. We’ve seen it through the lens of the national media. The role the media played in the election means that, like never before, we’ve gained explicit insight into the role that the media plays in how we perceive national events.
Two frontrunners in the polls lost their lead due to so-called scandals. Sean Gallagher’s defeat occurred on live television a few days before the election. Martin McGuinness accused the media of being west-Brits. Dana Scanlon was hounded over the most irrelevant issues imaginable. Both Gay Mitchell and Martin McGuinness used various media platforms to attack each other and other candidates.
Professor Michael Gallagher, head of the political science department here in Trinity, explains that in elections of this size, it is the media that provides the primary platform for candidates to present themselves to their electorate.
It’s the media’s job to ask tough questions: We get to see candidates’ reactions, ‘whether or not they get angry, and certainly some of them did become angry’. When this happens we learn something important about their personality. Professor Gallagher says that, ‘the media has done its job, though certain candidates might believe this to be unfair’.
Certainly Sinn Fein would hold Martin McGuinness’ treatment to be unfair. It was predicted at the beginning of the campaign that he would be repeatedly asked the same question about his continuous membership of the IRA. This is exactly what happened. It provided the second most entertaining event of the campaign, Vincent Brown, during the TV3 debate, piling book upon book on the table, all of which stated that McGuiness was a longstanding member of the IRA, during and long after the Troubles. His response was that one of the writers said a bishop was his uncle.
For the most part he was simply asked about his membership of the IRA again and again. David Norris too, was asked again and again to disclose ‘those letters’. In both cases it was clear that they were going to repeat the same answer. Asking these questions once or twice makes sense, but when you get an answer it’s time to move on, because asking the same question a dozen times does not change the answer you receive. What changes is that candidates spend time on the defensive. This means that some candidates were smothered while others could speak more freely.
Journalists also have the ability to rapidly distribute information, accurate or inaccurate, in context or out of it. While Dana’s campaign was never exactly promising, the gossip about her US citizenship damaged it. Was that really newsworthy? An American passport simply does not require you to destroy an Irish one. But this tit-bit of gossip was spread about like wildfire, as was the speculation that a burst tyre was an attempted murder and a few other such stories. While the media has a duty not to censor information, given its unique ability to be heard by others, it does have a duty to deploy common sense.
But it’s an absence of coverage that could have had the most serious consequences. There was practically no coverage of an amendment to the constitution that gave questionable powers to politicians to carry out inquiries. The people of Ireland cannot initiate constitutional changes, so an amendment to the constitution could last forever.
Professor Gallagher says that there was no debate for the media to report. There was broad opposition and government support for the amendment and journalists can’t just go on a personal ‘crusade’. Nevertheless, it went unremarked that the government only sent the wording of the referendum to the commission on October 5th.
Media ethics are a tricky subject. But what cannot be doubted is that the media wasn’t just a messenger during this election, it played an undeniable role in how we made our decisions.
