OPINION:JUST BEFORE 8am on Monday last on RTÉ Radio 1's Morning Irelandthere was a promo for an item on "propaganda radio", to be featured on the Ryan Tubridyprogramme. I didn't hear that later programme but I am fairly certain the item was not a critique of RTÉ. But it could well have been, for RTÉ, like the rest of the media, is mostly caught in the role of a propagandist for an ideology that regards the prevailing market economy, with its massive inequalities of income, power and status, as immutable, writes VINCENT BROWNE
Far from the media holding the power nexus accountable, it is part of the power nexus itself and, by God, the media is playing its part magnificently in the debate on how to resolve our economic crisis.
On that same Morning Ireland,there was an interview with Ed Walsh, a former president of the University of Limerick. The interviewer began the segment with the following question:
“You have been very strong on the need to face up to our problems in the past, what do you think when you hear those politicians who have commented since this report came out [rising voice] ‘It’s only a menu of choices, it will be up to Government to decide in the end’?”
A reactionary response was nicely set up (no doubt unwittingly) and Ed Walsh rose to the challenge. He said: “The McCarthy report is the most encouraging thing to have happened in the last year . . . We have gone on an expenditure splurge in the last decade which is totally unsustainable.”
He went on to defend the proposed cut of 5 per cent in social welfare payments; he claimed there was “huge” social welfare fraud; he expressed alarm over the farmers’ protest at Cavan on Sunday and continued: “We can expect to have more protests, more attacks of the lowest kind. If the Government do not hold their position, if they do not act on the McCarthy report, not any choose and pick report [I assume he meant “pick and choose].”
All of this was not alone unchallenged by the interviewer but interspersed with facilitatory questions that prompted further remarks along similar lines. (Incidentally, the interviewer is one of the most respected members of her profession in RTÉ.)
This newspaper in its editorial on the McCarthy report on Friday expressed a mild reservation with the McCarthy report recommendations: "The resulting discomfort should be felt in degrees from the top down, rather than from the bottom up." But the thrust of the editorial was supportive. It said: "The report . . . challenges mindsets and preconceptions at a time when there are very few other options." Characteristically, the Sunday Independentwent overboard. It led with a shock-horror report with the headline: "Ministers aiming to sabotage Bord Snip". Its editorial claimed: "The McCarthy report challenges every sector of society to play its part in that recovery and it was not surprising that its publication should generate such instant hostility."
The media, almost en masse, has been cheerleading a report that amounts to the most explicit demand for even deeper inequality and injustice in this society, as the means of resolving what is, obviously, a major crisis.
Of course we have got to stop borrowing at the rate of €450 million a week and we have got to cut back significantly on our spending. But there is another way of looking at this and one such way which is to see this as a communal problem.
In a news bulletin broadcast later on RTÉ on Monday there was a report that 42,365 new cars were registered in the first six months of 2009. RTÉ, predictably, focused on how this figure represented a “drastic” decline on figures for previous years. But isn’t the extraordinary feature of this that as many as 42,365 new cars were registered here at a time of such grave national crisis? Say, the cost of each car, on average, was €15,000, we are talking about €635 million, in six months, around €1 billion in a full year (car sales drop off in the second half of the year). Now, if as a society we are in trouble and we need to make savings, wouldn’t you think we might start with savings on new cars?
But because of an ideological blind spot, the prevailing view is that this has nothing to do with the Government’s finances. But, as a society, shouldn’t we be talking first about cutting out luxuries, like new cars and fancy kitchens and Brown Thomas handbags, and pricey clothes, and expensive wines and gadgets, and all that fashion stuff, before we talk about cutting welfare payments to people whose lives are distressed by loss of jobs, high mortgages and negative equity and those whose lives have been devastated all along by the inequalities that pervade here (the 22nd most unequal society among the 29 most developed in the world, according to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development)?
Is the media, including our public service broadcaster, so caught in an ideological trap to be incapable of challenging all that pernicious orthodoxy?