Tag Archives: trust

This morning/afternoon.

Via RTÉ

RTÉ News has stepped up its commitment to trusted journalism and has become certified with the global Journalism Trust Initiative Mark.

The Journalism Trust Initiative was developed by Reporters Without Borders and aims to promote trustworthy journalism and news sources, helping in the battle against disinformation.

RTÉ News is one of a dozen media outlets leading the way globally as JTI certified media organisations, alongside the French national public service television broadcaster France TV, the Swiss Broadcasting Corporation and the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation.

Meanwhile….

…Jon Williams, Director of RTÉ News & Current Affairs says:

“The Journalism Trust Initiative aims to make it easier for audiences to identify trustworthy journalism by creating a common set of standards for news organisations around trust and transparency. A benchmark of quality and independence, awarded by independent auditors. In the same way that when you see the Q Mark Irish flag on a product, you know it’s been produced in Ireland, the JTI standard means you know you can trust a news organisation’s journalism.”

Um.

Pause.

*cold, merciless stare*

FIGHT!

Harry Browne, lecturer at the School of Media at Dublin Institute of Technology 

In Village magazine…

DIT lecturer Harry Browne writes:

…media (like healthcare) have a capitalism problem, and that everything from fake news to clickbait to inadequate investigative resources to Denis O’Brien flows from that basic source. But you don’t have to agree with me and name the underlying problem as capitalism to understand that there are structural causes for crises such as the one that erupted recently over Government ‘advertorial’.

“I believe the Government is attempting to exploit the difficulties many local and regional titles are facing to promote their party interests”, said no less a media critic than Fianna Fáil’s Timmy Dooley, the party’s spokesman on communications. (How sweetly old-fashioned that word ‘communications’ can sound as it grapples with the changing world.)

Media literacy, if it is to be of any use, has to do more than implore us to look for the little ‘special feature’ tag on the top of a piece of paid corporate or government puffery, then to regard the ‘journalism’ below with due scepticism.

It must mean understanding ‘the difficulties’ for all journalism that operates in the current market, especially one in which technological change has accelerated existing trends toward blurred lines, and in which advertisers have alternatives to local and regional newspapers when it comes to reaching eyeballs.

If the most poignant aspect of that brief, quickly snowed-under ‘Ireland 2040’ crisis was the image of the Taoiseach issuing guidelines for labelling advertorial content – guidelines of which the most callow intern in a local newsroom should surely already be aware – we shouldn’t lose sight of the fact that media have been operating at the edges of such guidelines for decades, for the benefit of advertisers looking to buy a little ersatz editorial credibility. How can this fail to be a lesson about how fragile, at best, any such credibility has become ?

As the media may or may not have told you, global research shows trust in media is in tatters – media are less trusted than governments, NGOs, businesses – and Irish people are at the mistrustful end of the distribution. In this context, media literacy can hardly consist of legacy media saying ‘trust us, not them’.

What can be done ? (Yes, short of getting rid of capitalism.) Anyone who has worked in a newsroom knows what a frightening prospect it would be to try to earn the public’s trust with transparency and accountability about our editorial practices.

On a daily basis, contingent and incomplete information is transformed into definitive statements of ringing certitude. That’s one sausage factory we don’t want you to see inside, especially since the work often consists of sticking our label on someone else’s meat.

The irony is that the technology often over-simplistically blamed for creating the journalism crisis has long offered tools for remarkable transparency, tools that most journalists have chosen to use only in limited ways…

 

Read in full: Capitalisteracy (Harry Browne, Village)

Earlier: The Great Irish Fake-Off

Two years ago, assistant researcher at UCLA’s Earth Planetary and Space Science Program Melanie Barboni from Switzerland installed a hummingbird feeder outside the window of her office.

Since then, she’s collected over 200 new feathered friends and earned herself an on-campus nickname. She sez:

This is cheesy, but I have seen them help people. They make my life happy. Having a crappy day? Who cares — there are hummingbirds around…Having a good day? Hummingbirds make it better. …My dearest dream as a child was to see hummingbirds. Imagine my joy when I found out that my next job assignment would bring me to Los Angeles, where hummingbirds live year-round.

laughingsquid

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From the recent Edelman Trust Barometer; former Press Ombudsman John Horgan at the Leveson inquiry in 2012

Further to the recent ‘Edelman Trust Barometer’…

Which shows trust in Irish media is at its lowest point since the poll was first taken 17 years ago…

Former Irish Times journalist, former Dublin City University professor, former Labour TD and senator and Ireland’s first press ombudsman John Horgan writes in today’s Irish Times:

Here, the review of the 2009 [Defamation] Act by Minister for Justice Frances Fitzgerald will include, not only the effects of the Act itself in relation to defamation proceedings, but the functions, powers, and effectiveness of the Press Council and the Press Ombudsman.

Some of the major issues for the Fitzgerald review, on the basis of a decade’s experience of our own system, could therefore usefully include the following:

– Should participation in the Press Council be effectively further incentivised for all non-broadcast media [freesheets, the online publishing activities of broadcasters, perhaps even bloggers] who see not just editorial but commercial and legal advantages in adherence to an effective body dedicated to the maintenance of professional standards?

– Should the Press Ombudsman and the Press Council – including their invaluable mediation service – be given enhanced legal standing, acceptable to the newspapers and journalists, so that they become a more frequent and effective final destination for dispute resolution, instead of an alternative route?

– Should media play their own part in this, and in enhancing the public acceptability of their voluntary system, by helping to develop, perhaps in consultation with the Press Council, more effective, and perhaps more generous, remedies for, and responses to, reasonable complaints from people whose reputations have been unfairly impugned?

– Should this also include – as a powerful implicit acknowledgment of every individual’s right to freedom of expression – more frequent offers, in appropriate circumstances, of the right of reply?

Just because these are all complex issues for public policy does not mean that they should be shirked. Now is as good a time as any to address them.

Falling trust in Irish media needs to be addressed (John Horgan, The Irish Times)

Meanwhile…

From the vaults…

In January 2012, Tom and Sally Fitzgerald made a complaint to the Press Council about the apology, which they claimed was in breach of the Code of Practice for Newspapers and Magazines.

The Press Ombudsman, John Horgan held that the newspaper, in publishing the apology, had failed to take into account the feelings of Kate Fitzgerald’s grieving parents and, following publication, failed to take sufficient remedial action to resolve their complaint.

A further claim that The Irish Times had breached the Code of Practice by failing to investigate, prior to editing, the truth or accuracy of the statements in Kate’s article was rejected by Mr Horgan, as being out of time on the basis that the article the subject of the apology had been published more than three months previously.

On appeal, the Press Council found that this latter decision was an administrative one, from which there was no appeal. Sally Ann Fitzgerald, from a newspaper family, found this decision inexplicable.

Five Years After (Broadsheet, August 23, 2016)

John Horgan’s Appearance At Leveson (Broadsheet, July 17, 2012)

trust

The latest ‘Trust Barometer 2015’ by global PR giant Edelman.

if you can believe a global PR giant.

*gruble*

John Gallen writes:

“Some pointers: Irish people are now the least trusting people of all countries measured (no Greece on this). The measure is that of trust in “government, business, the media and NGOs”.Goverment remains the least trusted at 26%, despite a +5% points increase on last year. NGOs are the most trusted despite falling 10 percentage points to 48%. Business is at 38% (down 3% points) and the media is down 3% points year on year (but is down 11% points since 2013).”

FIGHT!

View slide presentation here

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Hundreds of distressed borrowers — including businessman Bill Cullen (above) — have ploughed their assets into a single private trust in a bid to prevent lenders repossessing their properties.

Land and buildings belonging to at least 600 developers, businessmen, and farmers have all been put into this trust since word about it began to spread late last year.

They are hoping the courts and lenders will be unable to get at the assets because of the ancient and complex trust laws.

 

Debtors protect assets in private trust (Vincent Ryan and Conor Ryan, Irish Examiner)

Is this kosher?

Legal Coffee Drinker writes:

Under Section 59 of the Bankruptcy Act 1988, the trustee on bankruptcy has power to unwind certain earlier transactions by the bankrupt in order to recover assets for the estate.
The transactions which may be set aside are transactions made by the bankrupt as a gift or at an undervalue. These would include payments or transfers into trusts (including family trusts)
All such transactions made within the two years prior to the bankruptcy can be set aside.
They can also be set aside if made between two and five years prior to the bankruptcy petition, where the bankrupt was insolvent at the time of making them. Insolvent means unable to pay his debts.
The two year period in Section 59 is to be extended to three years by the new Personal Insolvency Bill.
In addition, and irrespective of any bankruptcy order, under Section 74 (3) of the Land and Conveyancing Law Reform Act 2009, any conveyance of land made with the intention of defrauding a creditor (i.e. avoiding paying a debt to that creditor) may be set aside by the creditor on application to the court.
So if land has been transferred into a family trust in a situation where there are substantial creditors, the creditor may apply under Section 74(3) to have the transfer set aside even where the debtor has not been declared bankrupt.

(Leon Farrell/Photocall Ireland)