Tag Archives: Village

The August issue of Village magazine is out now

Village is unashamedly Leftist. Its agenda is equality of outcome, sustainability and accountability.

These are all driven by the overarching goal of treating people as equals.

The right labours freedom to the detriment of equality, tending to fixate on the provision of choices rather than on how in practice those choices are exercised.

The non-ideological, non-visionary parties of the pragmatic centre hold little appeal for Village.

Depressingly, with a signal in June that it wants to go into coalition with Fianna Fáil or Fine Gael, Sinn Féin has signalled its immediate destination is that pragmatic centre.

For fourteen years Village has tried to champion parties taking egalitarian stances but it’s been difficult.

Our left has been – and let’s be blunt – remains a disaster, a let-down. That is not an accident.

For historical reasons most Irish people, though they have a weakness for leftist rhetoric, are conservative and property-fetishising with a limited sense of the common good.

Many are viscerally hostile to an agenda of treating people equally….

Editorial, Village magazine

FIGHT!

Our Hopeless Left (Village)

Village

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

Terenure College, Dublin

In The Village magazine.

Gemma O’Doherty reports that several former pupils of Terenue College have come forward claiming they were sexually and physically abused in the 1960s and 1970s.

Ms O’Doherty writes:

Terenure College is one of a growing number of fee-paying Irish schools who may have to confront decades-old abuse in the coming years, as survivors gain the courage to come forward and seek redress and compensation.

The financial implications for private colleges which find themselves exposed to historic claims could prove catastrophic. Some may face the prospect of having to sell off valuable chunks of their campus or even closure.

But many victims believe the time has come to blow the whistle, regardless of the consequences.

They say their ‘alma maters’ should no longer be allowed to hide from the dark secrets of their past, which have shattered so many lives.

[One said:] “As a survivor of the violence and sexual abuse at Terenure, it saddens me to think that success on the rugby pitch was put ahead of child protection.

“When past pupils admire with pride the trophy cabinet in the college containing the Leinster Schools cups, they should be aware that they were won at the expense of innocent boys whose lives were destroyed by perverts disguised in brown Carmelite habits and grey suits.

“A few bad apples in the barrel yes, but nobody ever cast them out. Why not? The public, who subsidise private schools, have a right to know what happened. We can’t keep brushing abuse scandals under the carpet.“

Terror ‘Nure: Horrific physical and sexual violence was permitted, mostly by priests, in one of Dublin’s top private schools, though the Carmelite Order, led by Fr Richard Byrne, won’t say what it did to stop it, and if it alerted the Garda (Gemma O’Doherty, The Village)