TV reporting is also in Crisis
Ireland’s Property Crisis (RTE One)
WE are fortunate enough to be able to turn to the back page of the main section of this paper every week, to have certain aspects of the world explained to us by Gene Kerrigan.
And the only downside is that he can’t be everywhere, outlining the broad ideological movements of politics and society which have made certain problems inevitable, but which tend to be simply ignored by many commentators as if they were just a part of nature, like the weather.
So when I’m watching an otherwise excellent show such as Ireland’s Property Crisis, which brings us stories of individuals being crushed by the prevailing conditions, I am longing for an intervention by Kerrigan which goes something like this: as long as governments see the housing of citizens as something that somebody, somewhere has to make a profit on, then we can’t be complaining about vulture funds just scooping up whatever is available to them.
I would add that “this is how the world works”.
A long time ago the world worked in a different way, and Irish governments who really didn’t have much money, were somehow able to see their way to the building of large housing estates, many of which are still standing, monuments to a way of life that is now viewed as some form of radical communism — though at the time these projects were the responsibility of men so conservative, they could hardly go to the bathroom without first enquiring of the Archbishop in his palace if such extravagance was permitted on his watch.
Yes it is important for us to see Ireland’s Property Crisis, the couples tormented by negative equity, those who are being made homeless because they have lost their job, the trojan efforts of men such as David Hall to keep the weight of some massive institution from obliterating an unfortunate individual.
But we also need the proverbial man on the back page to point out that these things are not just unhappy accidents, they are created by a political culture in which everything is regarded as some sort of a business opportunity. Or else it can’t be done.
Likewise I have been watching coverage of the Bus Eireann dispute for some weeks now, and I have heard it said a hundred times that Bus Eireann as a business is going bust, that it has been losing money for a long time.
What I have not heard, is a proper explanation that it is a public service, not a business, and therefore, all things considered, it is supposed to be “losing money”.
I have found the union representatives to be quite poor in asserting this very obvious distinction between what Bus Eireann does and what any other bus company does. I find that they talk too fast and they talk too much about the minutiae of negotiations when they should be concentrating on the fundamental point: this is not a business going bust, it is not a business at all, or at least it wouldn’t be if it was being done properly.
Certainly there are allusions to this aspect of the dispute, but the argument is not made with sufficient clarity, at least not of the kind that we are accustomed to enjoying in a certain newspaper column, on a certain day of the week.
And I may have missed it, but I do not recall a single instance of a TV reporter looking at the issue of Bus Eireann management “remuneration”, wondering if these people will be taking a pay cut proportionate to that which they are demanding of the drivers, seeing as how the “business” is after all going bust.
It is a great failing in current affairs journalism, this notion that such an approach might imply the expression of an opinion, that their role is simply to report what they see as “facts”. And yet the biggest facts of all, are the structural arrangements which decree that a public service is now effectively classified as something that it is not.
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