For many years now, the clearest signal to the public that a story was important was when Charlie Bird turned up to report on it. So, when the jury retired to consider its verdict in Beverley Cooper-Flynn's libel action against RTE and its chief news correspondent, it must have known it held more in its hands than the reputations of a politician and a journalist.
More, too, than the vast sums of money that the seemingly interminable trial must have cost. What was at stake here was the role of investigative journalism in public life.
Of all the politicians who have taken high-profile libel actions in recent years, Beverley Cooper-Flynn was arguably the least prominent.
When he took up the cudgels against the Sunday Times, Albert Reynolds was a former Taoiseach. When he put his career on the line against Eamon Dunphy and the Sunday Independent, Proinsias De Rossa was a party leader and cabinet minister.
Apart from bearing a well-known name, Beverley Coo per-Flynn was just another backbencher. Hers was one of the few political libel trials in which the defending journalist was undoubtedly better known than the plaintiff.
In moral terms, too, the trial could hardly be regarded as an epic conflict of good and evil. Even if many of the allegations RTE made against Ms Cooper-Flynn were true, many of the witnesses called to back them were hardly angels.
One of the fascinations of the trial was that it put human flesh on the infamous bogus non-residents who featured so heavily but so abstractly in the DIRT inquiry. In the big moral and political picture, therefore, the outcome of the trial was almost irrelevant. In terms of public debate as a whole, however, it was crucial. The question the jury had to answer was not just "did RTE libel Beverley Cooper-Flynn?" but "what role should the media play in public life?"
Should journalists simply report politics and wait for tribunals to investigate scandals? Or should they probe beneath the surface and try to hold politicians to account?
The case may have hinged, as libel trials always do, on fine details like the recollection of what Ms Cooper-Flynn's engagement ring looked like or who did or did not see particular internal National Irish Bank memos. But issues from far beyond the courtroom were bound to resonate in the jury's minds.
The role of NIB in the DIRT scandal on which the Public Accounts Committee reported last year could not have been entirely ignored in the jury's deliberations. The general standing of politicians after years of tribunal revelations was always going to be a factor.
Inevitably, too, the outcome would shape the climate of political reporting for some years to come. RTE's allegations against Ms Cooper-Flynn, and the series of reports on NIB from which they stemmed were perhaps the most dramatic evidence of the much sharper edge that the national broadcaster's newsroom has acquired in recent years under the editorship of Ed Mulhall.
That tougher stance, in turn, tended to embolden the rest of the media, making Irish journalism as a whole a much more self-confident force in public life.
Few people were more aware of this subtext to the trial than Beverley Cooper-Flynn herself. In August 1999, in a lecture to the Humbert Summer School in her own constituency, she suggested journalists were getting above their station, setting the political agenda rather than responding to it.
"It is my contention", she said, "that the national script, the agenda for public affairs, is being written, not by the Government or by politicians, but by the Sunday headline writers. In a classic cart-before-the-horse scenario, elected politicians over the past year have allowed themselves to be hounded and harried by what appeared in the papers last Sunday, or worse still, by what might appear the following Sunday."
She complained: "Politics has even got to the sorry stage where every single day in Question Time in the Dail the leader of the Opposition will inevitably stand up and use a newspaper article as a reference in his argument". The time had come for people in public life to simply stand up to "empty blather masquerading as political comment".
Concluding her rallying cry, she warned: "Politicians who allow themselves to be led by the nose are simply contributing to their own decline".
The source of this unease is obvious. Though still severely limited by the libel laws, the political power of the media has undoubtedly grown. Stories broken on television or in print have increasingly defined public perception of the political process. All the tribunals established in the 1990s had their source in media revelations, as did the DIRT inquiry.
Her decision to persist with her case against RTE can thus be seen not merely as an attempt at personal vindication, but as a case of putting her money and her reputation where her mouth is. If the Humbert lecture was a call to arms, the trial was almost certainly intended to be a decisive battle in the war between Fianna Fail and the media. The winner would, in her own words, get to write the "national script".
A win for Beverley Cooper-Flynn, and the political establishment could feel it had tipped the struggle back in its own favour. A win for RTE and the upstart media would get even more cheeky.
With the stakes so high, it might have been expected that more of Ms Cooper-Flynn's political colleagues would have turned up in the courtroom to support her. That they were conspicuous only by their absence suggests they sensed this was the wrong terrain on which to fight such a crucial battle.
At least on matters to do with banking, tax avoidance and offshore schemes, a jury was more likely to take the word of a reporter such as Charlie Bird than of a Fianna Fail TD. When your former boss declines to answer some questions for fear of incriminating himself, you ought to expect the worst. Or, from the point of view of hard-edged journalism, the best.
Back in 1999, when she gave that lecture, Ms Cooper-Flynn advised journalists that they could still make "excellent contributions to society" by simply telling it as it is and getting to the bottom of stories. "Long may they continue doing this work," she added. Though she will not thank them for it, the jury in her trial has ensured they will do precisely that.