‘Ear To The Ground’ made all the right political noises

Ear To The Ground (RTE1) Agenda (TV3)

WE are hearing a lot about “fake news” and its influence on the unfolding of the Donald Trump catastrophe, and of course we are dismissing it. We just find it astonishing that anyone would think that Facebook or the internet in general has brought such mischief into the world.

People have always been making things up and putting them out there in whatever bad-minded form happens to be the most convenient — historically that would be newspapers — and we have accepted this as a fact of life that can best be addressed by the reader exercising his or her judgement. And it doesn’t even require much of that judgement, to realise that if you’re reading a magazine that you bought at a supermarket checkout, it is probably all a lie, and if you’re reading this column, it is so full of truth it burns to the essence of the human soul.

My beef in recent times has not been with the “fake” news merchants but with our old friends in the “hard” news departments, who are now quite far behind the supposedly “soft” operators in most matters of importance.

A programme such as Ear To The Ground might be regarded by the “hard” lads as essentially a “magazine” show, yet it is not only remarkably diligent in it of anything that is even vaguely agricultural , it was than anything that I saw on the main evening news programmes in relation to Brexit and to Trump.

A report by Helen Carroll on a mushroom-growing operation just outside Athlone made it clear that the currency crisis caused by the Brexit vote is jeopardising not only this long-standing mushroom business, but large parts of the Irish food industry in general. These people were worried, and they told us more about the madness which has been visited upon our world by Nigel Farage and friends, than any sing-song news report from Westminster.

Likewise when Darragh McCullough went to America to do a feature on a dairy farmer from Fermanagh, who is now in South Dakota milking 4,500 cows, this farmer explained to him what the famous “Wall” between America and Mexico would mean — noting that many of the people who work for him in South Dakota are immigrants, he said that if they build that wall, there will be no breakfast on the table in America.

No breakfast in America — not only might this line have won it for Clinton, it illuminated this subject in ways that seem completely beyond the routine news reports, which mainly strive to tell you things that everybody knows already, but with a nice picture of the White House in the background. Maybe the Ear To The Ground team are just putting more effort into it — it is a theory of mine that some people do things better than others not because they are gifted in the sense that we usually understand that concept, but because they have the gift of just trying harder.

Which brings us to the hardest working man of them all, David McWilliams. His Agenda on TV3 at noon on Sundays reminds me somewhat of one of those westerns in which we learn that the saloon-keeper is also the accountant and the auctioneer and the undertaker. He presents it all in a studio which I’m assuming he sets up entirely by himself, like the interviews he does on location including a particularly enjoyable one last week with Patti Smith.

This above all, is why you’d want McWilliams to do well in this difficult time-slot just after the top brass of Official Ireland have exhausted us horribly on the Sunday morning radio shows — unlike them, McWilliams can actually do an interview with Patti Smith. But first of all, he knows who Patti Smith is.

And that is what makes all the difference. That and the fact that he doesn’t need a “hard news” reason to interview Patti Smith, it is sufficient unto itself that she is Patti Smith, who has done many interesting things in this world and known many interesting people, and made Horses one of the great albums.

That’ll do me, that will be fine, thank you.