So, Britain's ailing Daily Express, once the healthy organ of Lord Beaverbrook, is now another organ of Richard Desmond, the publisher of OK!, Nude Wives, Asian Babes and Big Ones. The Express title is Desmond's biggest one yet, and to rescue it, presumably, he will look to the celebrity-worshipping formula of OK!, rather than to the raunchier elements of his other publications. We'll see.
Not that Richard Desmond's manoeuvres should greatly concern Irish newspaper readers, except that in buying Express Newspapers, he also acquires Britain's Daily Star and half of the Irish Star, jointly owned by Independent Newspapers. Though it didn't issue an invitation, it means the Indo group, once the most Catholic media outfit in Ireland, now finds itself in bed with a porn baron. Even William Martin Murphy, who must be spinning like Max Clifford on speed, couldn't have organised a lockout of multimillionaire Desmond.
While Desmond's purchase of a declining mid-market tabloid is not as alarming as if, say, Larry Flint had bought the New York Times, the emergence of a porn baron as a national newspaper proprietor marks a chapter in British media history and at least a second footnote in ours. The sex industry, it seems, is so profitable that it is generating a new breed of publisher. In Ireland, Mike Hogan, publisher of In Dublin, made sufficient loot, a significant amount of it based on "escort agency" and "massage parlour" ads, to be able to buy Magill magazine.
Well, business is business in the cut-throat world of publishing, and while Desmond's bid to become a major player testifies to the current power of porn and celebrity, it doesn't mean that we ought to hanker for a return to the days of the likes of Beaverbrook. After all, he told Britain's first Royal Commission on the Press that he ran the Daily Express "merely for the purpose of making propaganda and with no other motive". There's brazen! Like much of what he published, it wasn't strictly true, of course. Just as Richard Desmond is, Beaverbrook was in it for the money too, even if he felt less need to seek the respectability which the new proprietor craves.
Anyway, the big picture - the centrefold, if you wish - is not just that the sex industry is generating sufficient profits to redraw the profile of publishers. Clearly, that says much about contemporary culture. But what's more disquieting and, ultimately, of far greater significance is that, to big international media outfits, Ireland, like the rest of the world, is merely a market to be serviced and exploited. Technology, globalisation and market economics have ensured that native media in small economies are under pressure.
It's not just the newspaper industry. Indeed, if anything, the pressure is even more intense in television, where the digital revolution threatens to annihilate the native scene. Within a few years we can expect scores of channels to become available and almost all of them will originate outside of the State. The marketing aggression, low cover prices and appeals to prurience of many British papers on sale may turn out to be tactics in a mere skirmish as the coming media war practically goes nuclear.
Renewed regulation will undoubtedly be demanded and perhaps even tried. But as the Internet has shown, it is impossible to regulate vast areas of contemporary media. Other new technologies, such as digitisation, are equally certain to be subversive of regulating in the old style. The British, at least, appear to accept this, and 10 days from now their Culture Secretary Chris Smith is due to publish a White Paper which is being flagged as a blueprint for the next "broadcasting revolution". Inevitably, it will have major consequences for Ireland.
We've all been hearing for some time now that homes of the future will have a superscreen showing all the products beamed to it by different forms of electronic media. Perhaps they will. Certainly, leaks suggest that the British White Paper will treat all electronic media, including the Net, telecommunications and traditional broadcasting as merely different channels of one multimedia world. As happened a couple of generations ago in retailing, an electronic supermarket, it seems, will displace the discrete providers of the past.
To regulate the new supermarket, the British government is expected to set up a new super-regulator to replace the array of existing bodies which control electronic media. Naturally, the BBC does not want its governors included under the authority of any new jumbo outfit. After all, it used to be the jumbo outfit. With Britain's media-conscious Blair government sure to be wary of straying off-side with the BBC before a general election, the White Paper can be expected to show a characteristic fudge on this issue.
Nowadays, the relationship between governments and media is so important to governments that the relationship between the public and the media is excessively mediated by politicians' concerns. Hence the armies of state-employed Max Cliffords, spinning, leaking, massaging, hectoring and effectively propagandising. But when the crew with the clout decide the time is right, besting even the Beeb will be only a matter of time.
And that, of course, will have ramifications for public service broadcasting, which, in the digital age, will face new pressures. Already, we see the difficulties facing RTE (and education and health and, in truth, all of the public service) from the Government's love-in with commercial ideology. Excessive regulation of broadcasting - remember Section 31, for instance - has clear dangers.
But if you want to see what no regulation leads to, look at the Internet, where, though a tiny minority of excellence exists, it is quantitatively swamped by rubbish, pap and porn.
Well, as Richard Desmond could tell you, that's what punters want. It's what the public is interested in and never mind that old, elitist, nannyish nonsense about the "public interest". Public service broadcasting has always been notoriously difficult to define anyway (generally it's defined by a negative - the market's failure to provide programming that aims at more than profit). But defining public service broadcasting in the digital age will prove more contentious than before.
Then again, there's evidence to suggest that fewer people now give a toss about the matter. No surprise in that, I suppose, given that younger people are growing up in the ratings-dominated world of today's TV. Severed from the values of earlier generations, many, it appears, not only see nothing repugnant in the theatrical rudeness of Anne Robinson telling contestants to take a hike because they are "the weakest link" but actually praise her boorishness. Welcome to the Colosseum of bad manners - public service is so tame beside prat TV.
How Irish media will react to the forces of the future ought to be one of the future media's biggest running stories. (Ironically - considering the news about the Express - Mike Hogan's first Magill editor, Emily O'Reilly recognised this but resigned when the sources of her publisher's income were revealed.) Sure, the media on the media risks becoming petty and even incestuous. But the industry is now such a Goliath in contemporary culture that it, almost as much as any institution to which it plays watchdog, requires to be watchdog-ed itself.
It would be preferable if this were done by the self-regulation of an ethical media, instead of by law, which cannot be agenda free either. However, through invasions of privacy, distortion, smears, xenophobia and all the rest, elements of the media reinforce the law's and the public's view that the media is irresponsible. Sleaze is pursued not just in the legitimate, but in the shameless pursuit of profit and with a hypocrisy which pretends that the goals of the media industry and the goals of journalism must be synonymous.
Even to point out this invites accusations of prissiness and snobbery, usually from the lapdog hacks of big business. Though that's an old row, it won't go away, you know. A newer row, however, is the issue of cross-media ownership. Richard Desmond, like so many of the publishers he seeks to emulate, is not merely a print bloke. He also owns "Television X: The Fantasy Channel". With Rupert Murdoch as the archetype, cross-media ownership is the aim for all fantasising media magnates.
Naturally, it all leads to concentration of ownership and a less diverse range of voices on the issues which count most. It's nothing personal, of course - just business . . . and politics . . . and economics . . . and, all in all, Beaverbrooking with hypocrisy replacing brazenness. In reality, Independent Newspapers is the only Irish media outfit big enough even to aspire to world media's premier division. RTE, for instance, is no more than a niche channel - a TG4 - beside the big broadcasting outfits.
Professor John Horgan of DCU, whose forthcoming book Irish Media: A Critical History 1922-2000 will be published next spring, says: "The future will inevitably see increasing concentration in media generally. As the indigenous media become more centralised and profitable, they will, in turn, present increasingly attractive take-over targets for predators, both Irish and foreign."
He adds, however, that "new media and digitisation are the unknown factors" and stresses that "developments in this area are producing a new emphasis, not so much on content or even control, but on ownership of the electronic pathways through which the new digitised media reach the public. The paradox here is that a hugely increased technological capacity may actually co-exist with restrictions on diversity, based on commercial imperatives."
And there you have it. The new media technology looks set to serve capital first and people second. It seems that the more it changes, the more it stays the same. The cultural, social and political implications are profound. It's only restating the obvious to point out that as concentration of cross-media ownership hardens, politicians will worry more and more about crossing the big players. But given that, in their own interests, moguls do not want that message circulated or broadcast, the obvious needs to be stated more than ever because it's a big one that the next generation may never read or hear at all.