In a recent lecture on the role of the media, Minister for Justice Michael McDowell seemed to move dramatically outside his neo-liberal persona, arguing that the common good is inadequately served by drifts within our current media model. "Opinion, ideas and free speech," he declared, "are not mere commodities."
Interestingly, in rejecting the idea that public debate could be left to the free market, the Minister sought to lean his argument on a rather flimsy legal/constitutional structure. Media owners who enter the Irish media market "from within or without", he said, must do so in a way that accepts certain constitutional duties.
But in a detailed analysis in the current issue of Village magazine, Vincent Browne points out that the "constitutional duties" adumbrated by the Minister do not exist.
There is no duty imposed on the media to educate public opinion; no duty to uphold the constitutional rights of the citizen to protection of privacy and reputation; no duty to protect freedom of expression. These are duties not of the media but of the State.
In advancing his developing view of the role of media in society, then, McDowell was engaging in two rather telling evasions. Firstly, he was avoiding the implications of his analysis for himself and other legislators, or at least suggesting that their role could be reduced to that of enforcers of constitutional "duties".
Secondly, he seemed to duck responsibility for staking out a convincing vision for the relationship that exists between media and this society. To be fair, such a vision was implicit in his remarks. He effectively despatched the idea, long promulgated by assiduous vested interests - sometimes with McDowell as backing vocalist - that a media marketplace will willy nilly arrive at an approximation of healthy democratic discourse. He described as "an effective oligopoly" the media's function in providing an arena for public debate.
"Whoever controls media content, in large measure controls our democratic debate and, in effect, the workings of our democracy."
This has been axiomatic for two decades. Although creeping closer to the conclusion that the State must intervene to ensure that media tendencies do not result in an erosion of democracy, the Minister backed away from intervention or regulation in the area of private media ownership.
Instead, he engaged in a form of fudge, emphasising the distinct role of public service broadcasting, which, he stressed, "does not have to adopt a close, seamless relationship with the journalism of the print media" but "can and should be different and original". He stressed two important points about the evolving culture of media: that media are bad at holding other media accountable; and that journalists and other media operatives increasingly see their role as political players and agenda-setters.
This tendency, he argued, makes it all the more vital for public service broadcasting to maintain a different model of public discussion. But this too, he believes, is starting to slip. "There are signs that a minority of journalists and programme makers have decided they want to be political players, that their legal obligations of impartiality and objectivity are boring, outdated, style-cramping counsels of perfection," he said. What the Minister was saying, without saying it, is that in a changing and largely uncontrollable media marketplace, RTÉ must be subject to different standards, and possibly different rules. He was also implicitly saying that the more worrying the drifts in other media contexts, the greater the imperative to ensure that the national broadcaster provides an alternative model.
In short, he was rehashing the content of John Lloyd's 2004 book, What the Media Are Doing to Our Politics, written in the wake of the Hutton inquiry into the suicide of the scientist David Kelly after his exposure as the source of an intelligence leak to a BBC journalist.
Lloyd's analysis pinned down a syndrome scratched at by other commentators, his central thesis being that, in their pursuit of sensation and intrigue, media are leading the way in the debasement of democracy. "We should demand of our media - and have a right to demand of the publicly-funded media - that they seek to counteract the anomie and indifference to politics which they proclaim by seeking to tell the complex truth and by examining their role in creating situations they affect to deplore," he wrote. There is an obvious problem in transplanting Lloyd's analysis over here.
The BBC - the starting and finishing point of his journey - is solely funded by the licence fee, whereas RTÉ operates by a twin-funding mechanism: licence fees and advertising garnered from a marketplace in which the national broadcaster competes with privately-owned media. Michael McDowell has flown his kite, but now he needs to untangle its string. Does he believe RTÉ should be subject to particular controls in relation to its journalistic functions and that these should be legally enforceable? And does he now or soon intend to do anything about it?