Connect: 'Teenage prostitute? . . . Teenage prostitute!" Excepting criminal perversions, it doesn't get much sleazier than that - especially when the alleged, eh, "client" is a 60-year-old man. Much of Irish print journalism (and some British papers too) stewed in the sewer last Sunday with coverage of Liam Lawlor's death. It was scurrilous. It's saddening to realise how ugly Irish journalism has become.
The Sunday Independent and Sunday Tribune have been the most denounced but the likely consequences for journalism overall are grim. Such scurrilous reporting strengthens the case of those opposed to - for dubious as well as understandable reasons - anything more than cosmetic reform of press laws.
After all, opponents of change can legitimately question why more freedom should be accorded to editors and journalists seeing as the press routinely abuses the freedoms it already has. Coverage of the former Fianna Fáil TD Liam Lawlor's death seemed grotesquely exploitative of the fact that you can't libel the dead.
It's difficult to counter the argument that journalists would abuse additional freedoms. When circulation figures and profits for the proprietor and shareholders become too determining, you can expect trash journalism. It's always been so and always will be. It's sad, however, to see journalists undermining journalism for their own career ambitions and their proprietors' wallets.
Perhaps nobody should be too high-minded about journalism - mistakes, as in every walk of life, are inevitable - but the constant appeal to readers' prurience helps to strangle the decent, valuable stuff. These arguments have been made in this space before but surely now enough readers can see through the vile and debasing games played by too many newspapers.
Under such circumstances, it seemed gratuitous that in this newspaper on Tuesday the former president of Dublin City University, Danny O'Hare, should call for performance- related pay in third- level colleges. Already, the universities, like newspapers, are competing for finite funds. Encouraging increased, arguably manic internal competition, is certain to lead to dubious research.
Indeed, the risk of falsified research, like falsified journalism, increases hugely. And who is to measure the quality of "performance"? How can political influences be curtailed? Prof Colin MacCabe wrote in the Observer last March that "future ages will look back with astonishment and contempt at the amount of wasted labour in the production of unread academic work".
He's right. Yet young academics hoping for advancement remain doomed to produce short-term work for unread journals. Quantity matters more than quality. On the other hand, too many young journalists hoping for advancement are expected to produce short-term sensationalism - sex, crime, violence - to appeal to readers' prurience.
The result of it all is that neither academic nor journalist has much allegiance to anybody other than themselves and their bosses. That's the saddest part of it and society further atomises. A great deal of journalism - though not all - has been corrupted by the prevailing frenzy, and if Danny O'Hare's recommendations are adopted, academia will accelerate in the same direction.
There is, of course, the problem of underperforming academics - the "dead wood" sometimes referred to by those who would lead. Should an institution just suffer them? That seems unfair, as they exploit the conditions of their employment. But such people are very few and proportionately as likely to be in leadership positions as in positions vulnerable to power.
It's ironic that the day O'Hare's article was published The Irish Times carried a report about a Yale University anthropology professor whose contract has not been renewed. David Graeber is acknowledged as "one of the brightest minds in his field". He is, however, "anti-war" and has been arrested during anti-globalisation protests.
Graeber's bosses - few of whom, it appears, are fit to tie his shoelaces - are still prepared to deny him a job. Professors around the world are writing letters on Graeber's behalf but the Yale powers - and the row is all about crude political power - are resisting.
Excessively centralising power in any institution - including newspapers and universities - simply encourages bullying. It also encourages inappropriately linear thinking wherein the objective becomes to please the boss. But in matters such as education or journalism, pleasing the boss must always be a by-product, albeit an understandably desired one. It must never be the central aim, because the primary duty must be towards students and the public.
The better bosses will, in any case, see such a central aim as their own aim. They may disagree with an individual's methods and they have, of course, the right to censure them. But attempts to form workers in their own images - this sometimes passes as "leadership" when in fact it's utterly regressive - are doomed to fail. That's why pay-for-performance is an ugly suggestion.
The "performance" - already often objectionable - would inevitably degenerate. As you find in newspapers and other outfits, cabals would compete with increasing bitterness for power. The whole shebang would become even more political than it already is and foulness would flourish, like it did in journalism around the death of Liam Lawlor.