The idea appears to have taken hold that what was wrong with the publication of the allegation that Liam Lawlor was with a prostitute when he died was that this allegation was false, writes John Waters
One is tempted to wonder if public outrage might have been less exercised had the story turned out to be true. And, if so, what does that tell us about the public and its outrage? The real offence was that this story was published at all. The misreporting was appalling, but anyone can make a mistake and journalism makes mistakes all the time.
Several of the editors and publishers of newspapers which carried the story have apologised to the Lawlor family for the pain and distress caused to them. But such pain and distress would have been even greater had the story been true. Doesn't journalism have a responsibility in this regard also? The NUJ code of conduct, the sole ethical framework available to journalists, says that only considerations involving the public interest can be invoked to justify intrusion into private grief and distress.
Since Liam Lawlor no longer held any public office, no such justification was possible for the publication of any details other than the stark facts. But the untold story of these events is that, arising from a long war of attrition, the NUJ code of conduct no longer has a role in Irish journalism other than as a quasi-satirical document depicting a lost innocence.
We tend to see such developments as cultural shifts, but fundamentally they arise from the altered role of the relationship between journalism and media organisations. There was a time when journalists occupied positions within media organisations first and foremost as members of their profession - bearing witness to a commonly-held moral vision of society and a code of ethics - the code of conduct - governing the everyday interpretation of this.
The commercial potential of material they offered to their organisations was not a consideration journalists generally concerned themselves with.
Nowadays, because of competitive pressures and the increasing trend towards short-term contracts, journalists are conditioned to see themselves more as salespersons handling "product", or entertainers providing diversion, than as custodians of the public interest. They judge themselves not on the execution of a public duty but by the same criteria as the marketing people who once sprinted through the newsroom in fear of the ridicule of scribes.
Journalism is no longer a trade offered on certain terms to employers, but a franchise held by media organisations and loaned back to journalists. Indeed, in a sense, there is no "journalism", only individual journalists, each seeking to outdo the others in serving the commercial interests of his employers.
And while it may seem facile to blame the Brits, there can be no doubt that much of the downward pressure on journalistic standards here has resulted from the climate of competition between indigenous papers and British imports.
Media restraint is today achieved principally by the limits of public tolerance, and some media organisations are working hard to demolish this impediment.
A few years ago I was the plaintiff in a defamation action against one of Rupert Murdoch's newspapers, the Sunday Times. At various junctures, my lawyers sought to invoke journalistic ethics as laid down in the NUJ code of conduct, and, each time, defence lawyers jumped to their feet to demand that the jury be asked to leave the room lest they hear anything of these "irrelevant" and "arbitrary" principles. The only pertinent standards, these lawyers argued, were those the public was prepared to accept.
Journalism was no longer entitled to dictate the values of the media, except in so far as, in doing so, it echoed the commercial ambitions of media moguls. Indeed, it became obvious during what was clearly, from the Sunday Times's perspective, an unwinnable case, that one of the newspaper's principal objectives in fighting it was to test the capacity of the jury system to resist a wholesale attack on journalistic values.
Even more extraordinary was that this obvious subtext was ignored by most journalists reporting the trial for other media organisations. In any other context, such an attempt to undermine existing values would have been newsworthy, but here it was not referred to. No journalist outlined for the benefit of the public the impossibility of the Sunday Times winning the libel action, given the untruthfulness and indefensibility of what had been published.
No commentator sought to analyse the significance of the newspaper's tactics. Indeed, all national newspapers except one - the Sunday Independent - failed to publish a key piece of evidence, revealed on day one of the trial, which made it obvious that, on all existing criteria, the action should never have been contested. What shocked me more than that many colleagues clearly wished me to fail to defend myself against lies and unwarranted intrusion was that most journalists seemed to want Murdoch to succeed in making journalism answerable only to the basest instincts of the public square.