The following is the full text of the speech given by Ombudsman and Information Commissioner Emily O’Reilly to journalism students at the University of Limerick on Tuesday, February 23. Here her speech here.
To access the Ombudsman's website click here and to access the Information Commissioner's site click here.
Read The Irish Times article about the story here.
“Thank you for the invitation here this afternoon. The topic is Investigating Issues in Irish Journalism and I was invited to talk about some issues that I may have investigated as Ombudsman.
However I have taken the liberty of instead talking about some issues that are immensely relevant to Irish society, if not global society,and asking if they are being given the mainstream coverage that they deserve.
I am talking primarily about the IT revolution and its implications but also about the place of what we consider to be traditional journalism in an era where everyone with a mobile phone can hitch a ride on that professional title. I will also talk about the disappearance of privacy and our lemming like acquiescence in that disappearance.
I was recently invited to join the International Advisory Board of the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University, where I once was a Nieman Fellow and so I have begun to observe the nail-biting angst in the journalistic community over there about these matters.
So, I'd like to begin by asking if any of you know what the following are: a Biritech; a Rhapsode; a Roddermadam; a Toesher; a Breakerboy; a Soda Jerk; or a Drysalter.
Now before you get anxious, I should say that I had no idea either what any of them were until I Googled "defunct professions" and hundreds of them emerged. Once upon a time, all of them, - from the Breakerboys who plucked
impurities from lumps of coal, to the Toeshers who scavenged for goods in London's sewers, had economic and professional relevance, until new technologies and other factors consigned them to oblivion.
I think you can see where I'm going on this. As you sit here in UL, absorbing lectures in media law, and Local Government, and court reporting and a myriad other course modules, I suspect many of you are secretly praying that the world and Mr Jobs and Mr Google and Mr Facebook and Mr Twitter might just slow down long enough for you to secure a good old fashioned job as a journalist. Will you be able to knock a long term living out of it, or will the members of this class emerge as the Biritechs and Rhapsodes of the early 21st century.
None of this is historically new. The parchment manufacturers of the middle ages probably chewed their nails in equal anxiety when the Chinese began to manufacture cheap paper. The development of the Gutenberg press put paid to many forms of employment and activity based on people's need to know what was happening around them without having anything put into their hands to read from. The primary historical parallel is this however; the late 20th century development of the internet is, arguably, as seismic in its impact as was the invention of paper, of the alphabet, of writing and of the Gutenberg press. The closest parallel is probably the latter cueing as it did a great democratisation of knowledge, the same claim that is made for the internet, although one must be careful not to confuse knowledge with information.
I can't think of any recent generation of journalists that has faced such a challenge in attempting to maintain role and relevance. The distinctiveness of journalism as a professional category is rapidly disappearing. Last year, in a three day seminar supposedly on journalism, in the Anaheim School of Journalism in Southern California, the word journalism was not uttered once. The word's very etymology points to its increasing obsolescence; coming from the Latin and later the French word for day, or daily. In the land of the Tweet, that day has now shrivelled to hours and minutes and seconds. The news cycle no longer pauses for breath. A recent cartoon in a US newspaper, had a bewildered academic handing out the Pulitzer ~Prize for Tweeting. Step forward Senator Boyle...
Perhaps the new model of journalist will be that described recently on CNN by Pete Cashmore, a social media evangelist and founder of the Mashable blog on that subject. Cashmore said, 'The value of a life led in public is most obvious to those seeking employment. Working in media, I frequently find myself talking to journalists who now possess a distribution channel entirely separate from their publication.
"With thousands of Twitter followers and hundreds of Facebook friends, these writers are building large audiences for their personal brands that make them a valuable asset to employers.
"As he tweets out his latest story to his 1.1 million Twitter followers, does David Pogue need the New York Times, or does the New York Times, need David Pogue?" To which I suppose one answer is, well as long as the Times is handing out his pay cheque, Mr Pogue needs it more, but I think we get his drift.
I note that at least one Irish journalist, RTE's Mark Little, has embraced this new mode of working and has taken time out of RTE to build on it. Many other journalists, even the permanent and pensionable ones, are also creating Blogs and Twitter accounts, arguably giving added value to their
publications. How one turns any of this into hard cash is another proposition, and not just for individual Bloggers and Tweeters but for the collective mainstream media.
Side by side with the slow fade of traditional journalism, is the slow fade of the concept of privacy. The over riding impulse of the Facebook revolution - it seems to me - is to subsume the private into the public, as we are encouraged to buy into ever more fiendish ways of plugging our
individual selves into the "network". A British academic recently reflected that it may soon become impossible to take a legal action for breach of privacy because the concept itself is so rapidly becoming meaningless. Ask any teenager who has splattered their most private thought, intimate pictures, et al, across their Facebook page.
That word's etymology, from the Latin privare - to deprive - in the sense of distancing oneself from the world or depriving the world of you, also points to its own in-built obsolescence. I would submit, that in this year 2010, in countries that are both wealthy and technologically advanced, the only things that we can truly keep private are our thoughts. The CEO of Facebook, Mark Zukerberg, put it rather more succinctly last month, "Privacy is dead; get over it."Public sharing, he insisted, is the new "social norm".
I note the ever encroaching destruction of our own private space and observe the benign manner in which it is peddled. To some, it's an Orwellian encroachment on that sacred space which is the private, to others it's a "fun", enlightened, socially progressive way of "keeping in touch."
Thus we have Google Latitude, which allows you to see "where your friends are", and the rather more controversial Google Buzz, which I have to say, I can't quite get my head around but which has been criticised for an overly zealous approach towards sharing your Buzz with people you might not wish to share it with.
One woman in the US, a victim of domestic violence, found herself inadvertently sharing her Buzz with her ex abuser husband. Google has since come out with all sorts of new privacy settings but to me, that is largely meaningless. Telling the Genie to behave herself while she's walking the streets, falls rather short of putting her back in the bottle. And meanwhile Google vans , cars and very strange tricyles, stalk the earth, webcamming our homes or whatever it is they do, for the purposes of Google Street View. Faces, number plates etc, are blanked out, but hey, if you spot an inappropriate usage of Street View, just let them know!
If the marketing of all of this super charged social networking innovation, were a movie, it would be pure Disneyland, all pink and frothy and fun and winsome, overlaid with the sound track from Bambi. One happy young Irish journalist, who Tweets and Facebooks and shares very much of her personal space with the rest of the world described what she and others do as "curating our lives", lending what to some is an inexplicable, narcissistic impulse to implode one's own privacy, a certain high end, arch, artistic overlay that simultaneously excuses it and challenges the aesthetics and modern sensibility of its luddite critics.
On a personal level, when I observe Google Latitude and Google Buzz, and noting the Godsend it must be to the Security and Intelligence forces of the world, I don't see Bambi, I see I Robot interlaced with the sound track of
1984.
Imagine the following as a line from either of those movies. "A phone is no longer a phone; it is your alter ego. It does not think as well as you do, but it has a better memory. It has a more accurate idea of where you are, it can take pictures better than we can remember things."
Now those, what to me, are intensely creepy lines, don't come from I Robot, but from the mouth of Mr Eric Schmidt, the CEO of Google, talking recently about the latest mobile phone innovation and urging his technological peers on to even more fiendishly imaginative ways of morphing humans into walking talking, software applications.
What jars is the outward face of a happy, clappy I'd like to teach the World to Sing public marketing of social networking - even that description manipulates - with the certain knowledge of its potential, less benign use by
everyone from peddlers of T shirts to adolescents, to the aforementioned intelligence services, in order to exert ever more control over our individual selves, depriving us even further of that sacred puddle of privacy.
As I see it, we are being led largely by the commercial exploitation of the highly competitive and intense needs of adolescents to hunt and socialise in packs, into a world where the rest of us - unwittingly and unwillingly - are also being hunted down.
What emotions would you feel,for example, as the Google car draws up into your street? Is the impulse to give it a merry wave or chase after it with a blowtorch and angle grinder?
Perhaps it depends on what age you are. My kids would wave, I'd be reaching for the torch. I do realise that I am middle aged and that when I was your age, and indeed much older, I was still tapping my stories on to a type writer, making copies with grubby carbon paper, and researching ancient history by begging the Irish Times librarian to let me rifle through their old newspapers. I have to accept that whatever my take on the new reality is, it remains precisely that, the new reality, and to paraphrase Mr Facebook, I really do have to get over it.
But what interests me, ultimately, is what does all of this have to say about journalism. In a world where so much is now so visible, so directly accessible to so many, how does one assess, see relevance, coherence, how does one battle through the cacophony, the babble and do what most of us I
hope still consider to be the essence of public service journalism, which is, the holding of power to account?
A computer genius was telling a friend about his plans for the future; the computers, he said, will be faster, cleverer, more intuitive, etc. That's great, said his friend, and what are you doing about the humans?
So, let's apply that "what are you doing about the humans?" test to traditional journalism. The IT revolution has done away with much of the heavy lifting. You can summon up a myriad facts with a keystroke, secure every opinion under the sun on an issue in the same way, most politicians in the western world are subject to virtually 24 7 scrutiny, and legislation such as the FOI Act, are undoubtedly making decision makers more accountable, but is all of that, to use a hideous business term, actually securing better outcomes for the people that they serve and if it isn't, where is the space for journalism in effecting those better outcomes?
This meditation is ultimately all about belief, belief that there is still a space for independent, clear eyed, intelligent rigorous and purposeful journalism, and belief that that space include a public hungry for it.
The great American journalist, Walter Lippmann, once said that the function of the journalist was to interpret the decisions of the elite in a way that made them clearly understood by the masses.
I submit that there is something rather patronising in that, but nonetheless that has to be a continuing, core function of your profession.
In the year 2010, of course, it isn't just a handful of journalists working in traditional media who are interpreting the decisions of the elite. Anyone with a mobile can do it and have it blasted through cyberspace. So, when a significant political event happens, in addition to going to the usual websites, RTE, etc, I also, for example, log on to Politics i.e. A website, which, I have to say, occasionally beats the mainstream media to the breaking story.
When a big event happens, such as George Lee's resignation from Fine Gael or Willie O'Dea's resignation as Minister, the website will host every opinion under the sun about the event and while it's all very entertaining, is it possible that the instantaneousness of the reporting and comment, the sheer volume of directly contradictory opinions, is simply replacing one form of ignorance with another? Is one any better informed when deluged with every last drop of opinionated spittle, than one was in the olden days when sources of information were severely restricted?
This is where that journalistic space comes in. Websites, particularly those where opinion is submitted anonymously, are largely immune to bias or special interest control. Politics. I.e. may well get a scoop precisely because a party apparatchik is taking advantage of an anonymity not afforded in the by-lined mainstream.
In the midst of the noise, of the shrieking, of the loud, loud voices clamouring to be heard, most of us still want to go to that authentic place that we trust, the reporter, the editorial writer, the newspaper, - in whatever media they are to be found - to secure a view of the facts that one can trust.
So while I can read a hundred wildly entertaining and opinionated takes on what happened to Willie O'Dea, I will still turn to someone - with a name - who has built up their reputation for accuracy and balance over many years, and who is indeed, capable of interpreting the decisions of the elite - or at least through the prism of my own unconscious prejudice.
Last week, a senior Vatican official called on Ireland to start producing a better, more educated class of priest, or at least that's what I understood him to have said. Now, apart from the fact that I suspect that the senior Vatican official, may be slightly missing the point about what's been going on here, I think his instruction could equally be applied to journalism. Anyone who secures a place on a journalism course - given the competition - must be pretty bright, but it's how you choose to engage that brightness and intelligence that will define your place and effectiveness in this job.
In the 24 / 7 world of noise that is the modern news cycle, an effective journalist must be rigorous in their reporting, must rise above the pressures imposed by the demands of the instant and must bring a standard of knowledge and analysis to their work that will cut through the babble and force the reading, listening, watching public to pay attention.
Just last week, I heard probably a dozen differing accounts about what Ryanair CEO Michael O'Leary is up to in relation to the enigmatic Hangar 6 in Dublin Airport. I don't think that anyone, other than Mr O'Leary, holds the key to unlocking that one, but the reporters I paid attention to, were those who had researched the past statements and actions of all of the actors in this little drama, and then attempted, without apparent bias, to draw the threads together and make a reasonably informed analysis of what was going on. The voices too soon out of the traps skewed the story in ways that did little service to the public interests that are in play in this saga, not least the three hundred unemployed workers, agonising about their futures and those of their families and wanting simply to hear the truth.
But I want now to say a word about an issue more directly related to my current work - Freedom of Information. In the last year, as the economy went on a slide, the volume of FOI requests for public records, increased enormously. From a time, at the height of the boom, when I could count the number of FOI related stories in the media on the fingers of one hand in any given month, they now stream out in multiples on a daily basis.
Last year I called it the Shane Ross effect. It was Senator Ross and his colleague Nick Webb who dug deep into the entrails of Fas, through FOI, and produced the results they did - the effective holding to account of Fas management and Board.
Taking their cue, many other reporters began similar digs in other public bodies and Government Departments whereupon varying degrees of extravagance were unearthed. The former Ceann Comhairle, John O'Donoghue was effectively forced to resign because of the endeavours of a Sunday Tribune reporter in relation to Mr O'Donoghue's travel and expenses.
I have no doubt that all of this will have had a cleansing effect, and that higher standards will now apply, yet the words horse and bolted nevertheless come to mind when I witness the new media enthusiasm for the FOI Act.
The mistakes made during the boom, the extravagances perpetrated were there to be revealed as the boom, to quote a former public figure, became boomier. Who went trawling then?
In truth, I don't blame the media altogether for the relative lack of interest in the seamier side of those halcyon days. Extravagance can be clearly seen only if contrasted with penny pinching and penury. Who cared if a Minister bathed in Asses' milk at taxpayers expense, if the same taxpayers were also splashing about in the their very own milky baths. Lavish meals appear as such now only because a two course early bird dinner in the local Italian has become the new touchstone of luxury.
Yet, there were journalists who went against the cosy consensus nonetheless, who did their homework, who forecast the collapsing Pyramid scheme that was the property bubble, and put up with the derision heaped upon them at the time. They truly were doing the State some service even if the State was singularly ungrateful.
Good journalists need to stand apart, to observe the consensus and see if it stands up to hard scrutiny and to call it if it doesn't.
In conclusion I would like to draw your attention to another hat that I wear, that of Commissioner for Environmental Information, the Office I hold arising out of Ireland's adoption of the EU Directive on access to information on the environment.
The regulations were enacted a number of years ago, yet so far there is precious little usage of the access right either by the public or by the media. This is partly because of unfamiliarity with the regulations, and also a lack of awareness of how they differ in scope from the provisions of the FOI act. Each exemption for example, is subject to a public interest test, and the range of bodies covered is much greater than in FOI. Given the supposed great public interest in the environment, I think the media might do well to examine this access route to information and begin to use
it.”
ENDS
No comments:
Post a Comment