Sunday newspapers are dictating the national agenda to the point where politicians were living from week to week waiting to see what the next Sunday headline would bring, said the Fianna Fail TD, Ms Beverley Cooper-Flynn, ail TD has said. She was speaking at the Humbert Summer School in Castlebar yesterday.
"It is my contention 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."
Ms Cooper-Flynn added that she was particularly irked by the developing trend towards opinion writing in certain Sunday newspapers above and beyond actual factual reporting of news stories.
"What I object to is all of those articles by individuals who mean nothing to me, outlining their opinions on issues, when the opinions of you and I are just as valid.
"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," she said.
The time had come for people in public life to simply stand up to "empty blather" masquerading as political comment and name it for what it was.
"Shallow and superficial observation is being given a hearing it does not deserve, and politicians who allow themselves to be led by the nose are simply contributing to their own decline."
On the whole, however, she said, she believed that journalists made excellent contributions to society through setting out the facts, telling it as it was and getting to the bottom of stories. "Long may they continue doing this work," she added.