Editor under fire
Aengus Fanning brazenly used a front-page apology to the Lawlor family to boast about the size of his newspaper's readership. This disingenuous act speaks a great deal about the character of the Sunday Independent, and its editor, Aengus Fanning
It took some effrontery to turn an apology for the most grotesque and deliberate exploitation of a family tragedy in the recent memory of Irish journalism into a front-page promotional stunt. That is precisely what Aengus Fanning did in the Sunday Independent last Sunday in contriving to turn what, on the face of, appeared to be an abject apology for his newspaper's coverage the previous week of the death of Liam Lawlor, into an advertisement for the newspaper's claimed one million readership.
The "apology" conceded the coverage of the previous week was "wrong and inappropriate". It claimed, disingenuously, that the coverage was a "mistake". But it was not a "mistake". As they went to press, they knew they were smearing the name of Liam Lawlor on the basis of mere speculation, in a way they would not have dared had he still been alive. The woman in the car they said, quoting an unidentified Moscow police officer, was "likely to be a prostitute". They did not know whether she was a prostitute or not.
The "apology" claimed: "it was not our purpose to add to the grief and distress of a bereaved family". However, they were consciously indifferent to causing grief and distress to a bereaved family on the basis of what they knew was speculation, and what they should have known was thoroughly unreliable speculation (the same source was quoted as claiming, falsely, that Liam Lawlor and the woman had not known each other previously).
Worse than that, perhaps, it has now emerged that a close associate of Liam Lawlor, Pat Long, alerted the Sunday Independent newsroom on Saturday evening once the first editions of the newspaper had gone on sale, telling them that the woman in the car was not a prostitute but an interpreter who had travelled from Prague with Liam Lawlor. It may emerge that they deliberately dismissed this too, so as not to spoil a "good story", although it must be acknowledged that the line-editor who took this call now denies this information was imparted to him.
But the swagger and disingenuousness of the "apology" speaks more about the character of the newspaper that Aengus Fanning has helped to mould, than the recklessness of the coverage the previous week. There is, in the "apology", a scarcely concealed scorn for the outrage of the "little people" over previous Sunday's coverage. There is a brazen confidence that he can survive any temporary little squabble, knowing he has the enduring support of his patron and master, Mr Tony O'Reilly (alias, in the deferential press, "Dr" O'Reilly or "Sir" Anthony O'Reilly).
Aengus Fanning has good reason to feel impervious to such squalls. Mr/Dr/Sir O'Reilly has stood by him throughout other instances of disgrace. There was the bogus claim in 1993 to have secured the first "world exclusive" interview with Bishop Casey after he had fled Ireland; there was the Mary Ellen Synon embarrassment over the Paralympics and Travellers; the sustained, bitter campaign against the Northern Ireland peace process and multitudes of other ignominies – including the vindictive and comprehensively ignorant assault on the character and reputation of Proinsias de Rossa which ended up costing the newspaper well in excess of €1m. There was the nasty libel of Pat Kenny and his wife, and, more recently, the smear of a Muslim school in Cabra, Dublin.
And the reason for Fanning's arrogant confidence is that he has delivered an extraordinarily successful (in commercial terms) package which has become by far the most profitable horse in the O' Reilly stable – certainly the O'Reilly Irish stable. The mixture of sleaze, gossip, comment (reams of same), great business and sports and, occasionally, impressive breaking news coverage, propelled the sales of the Sunday Independent to 342,153 in 1997. The highest sale of any newspaper on the island of Ireland. In reaching that pinnacle, it was helped enormously by the demise of its long-time rival, the Sunday Press, which for decades had far outstripped the sale of the Sunday Independent. The demise of the Sunday Press added a massive 80,000 sales to the Sunday Independent. It was quite an achievement of marketing, packaging and editing for the Sunday Independent to have retained those disappointed Sunday Press purchasers: the profile of the two papers would have been very different, particularly in the latter years of the Sunday Press (more rural, older and more down-market).
Fanning was an unlikely choice as editor of the Sunday Independent. He succeeded the late Michael Hand. A fine writer and great raconteur, Hand had no expertise in marketing and did not have the drive to lift the sales and profitability of the Sunday Independent that O'Reilly required. In 1984 he was brutally removed and, to the surprise of almost everyone, probably including himself, Aengus Fanning, was appointed. The surprise was because Fanning's previous experience in journalism had been almost entirely as the Irish Independent's (and group's) agricultural correspondent.
He was born on April 22, 1944, the fourth of six children, and grew up in Tralee, Co Kerry. His father was a schoolteacher, but came from a newspaper background; the Fannings from Birr, Co Offaly, owned the Midland Tribune. It was there Aengus Fanning was first exposed to newspapers.
"I hung around the newspaper, went out in the vans with the reporters, pestering them with questions... I went to the courts and would sit there quietly and listen all day," he said in a 1993 interview with Ivor Kenny. "I absorbed an awful lot, without being conscious of it. I absorbed things through the pores of my skin that now seem second-nature."
School was the Christian Brothers in Tralee, then a Bachelor of Commerce at UCC. Then it was back to the Midland Tribune where his uncle gave him a job. The cub reporter seems mostly to have covered violent local hurling matches, deaths, weddings and court cases. "You learned some things, like getting the name, address and age right," he said in that 1993 interview – an ironic reflection given recent events. Five years later he joined Independent Newspapers, where, initially, he was "in awe". "I thought that everybody there must be good." That illusion was immediately destroyed by a senior editor ("there are no geniuses out there!"), and from there, life seemed easy.
"I couldn't believe the small amount of work I had to do," he said.
He worked as a reporter. "In those days you had to have about 20 years experience under your belt before you'd be trusted with an important story. Bill Shine was news editor of the Evening Herald and changed a lot of that, he wanted young people".
After four years he was made agricultural correspondent of the Independent Group. That position was more glamorous than it was previously because, in the 1970s, Ireland had just joined the European Community, and the primary focus of our membership was the benefits accruing from the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP). He developed an expertise and an élan and was probably the best agricultural correspondent around at the time, which was no small distinction. "The EEC was like an oil-well in the middle of Europe – all you had to do was to go over there and get the money and bring it back." In 1982 he was plucked into an editorial position on the Irish Independent by the then editor Aidan Pender (the predecessor of the recently retired Vincent Doyle), as news-analysis editor (responsible for the news analysis and comment on the editorial page). Then two years later still he was in the saddle in the Sunday Independent.
In that 1993 interview with Ivor Kenny he revealed his editorial philosophy: "If three or four papers out of 15 are successful and the others are not, they might say they're not driven by the market, they have some higher vocation: to serve the public interest or some pompous stuff like that. That's how they feel good about themselves. Fair enough, if that's how they want to explain the world. It's a grand excuse for relative failure... I think we live or die by the market, it will always win through."
He set about assembling a diverse team of editorial executives around him. Chief and by far the most important of these was Anne Harris, who had come over from being editor of the women's fashion and cosmetics magazine, Image. She had been married to Eoghan Harris, a secret but significant member of the Workers Party (previously Sinn Féin the Workers Party, previously Official Sinn Féin). He was deeply ideological, although the ideology by then had begun to spin from Stalinism to what has become rabid neo-conservatism. Anne Harris appears to have been the back seat passenger on that ideological roller-coaster, which propelled herself and her estranged husband into extraordinary changes of direction and allegiances, a propulsion which probably has not yet come to a standstill. Neither does she seem to have left the back seat of her estranged husband's rollercoaster, for he appears to remain a critical influence on her and, through her, on the Sunday Independent. Some insiders in Independent Newspapers claim Harris is the effective real editor of the newspaper, driving its anti-nationalist line and its neo-conservative orientation.
Anne Harris had started out as a hardline Official Sinn Féin adherent, at a time when the party still favoured violence and State monopolies. She wrote an infamous column for Hibernia magazine in 1972 scorning the critics of the Aldershot atrocity, where the Official IRA had murdered six cleaning women and a priest in an attack on the parachute regiment, in the immediate aftermath of Bloody Sunday.
But the stint in Image magazine had caused her to abandon all that. She appeared to embrace the more lavish extremes of consumerism and around that time seems to have been introduced to "society" to which she took with enthusiasm.
But whatever was her ideological trajectory, she became the key editorial figure in Aengus Fanning's Sunday Independent. She commissioned and rewrote the gossip column, the defining feature of the newspaper when fronted by Terry Keane. It viciously intruded on the private lives of its subjects, with a tone that was mocking, disparaging, demeaning and which caused much hurt to its victims.
Journalists of real quality were recruited. David Walsh, the best sports writer around, came over from the Sunday Tribune. The late Mick Doyle was recruited as combative rugby commentator. Later, Shane Ross became business editor and he has produced the liveliest and best informed business section in any newspaper here. The oddest recruit was Gene Kerrigan, perhaps the best writer in Irish journalism but whose politics and disposition are precisely what the rest of the newspaper purports to loathe. He has been given the influential back page, now that gossip has been deemed passé.
Willie Kealy was recruited as news editor and did credibly. Jody Corcoran, who is in the teeth of the current controversy over the coverage of Liam Lawlor's death, did some excellent investigative work, although he was caught out on the Seamus Brennan/Aer Rianta story.
Others of note that came on board included Eamon Dunphy, Anthony Cronin, Conor Cruise O'Brien (occasionally, on loan from the Irish Independent) and Colm Toibín.
"I found him (Fanning) really wonderful as an employer and editor and it was a time when freelances were not treated very well elsewhere," says Colm Toibín. "He was very good about money, making sure you were paid enough and on time; he always made sure that my pieces were not cut or changed. In the two or three phone calls we had each week, he could be wildly entertaining and funny – he loves the phone – then offer you a long stream of consciousness about the many matters on his mind" Although he's known for his short temper (he physically assaulted a senior editorial executive in one newsroom fracas), Fanning is said to be good company. He loves cricket and jazz, enjoys conversation and argument.
The ideological tone delivered by the Harris duo has had a cruel edge. Perceived adversaries of the newspaper (but more especially of Mr/Dr/Sir O'Reilly) were/are targeted in the Fifth Column, an innovation seemingly introduced precisely for that purpose. Vulnerable minority groups have also been targeted. In 1996, polemicist Mary Ellen Synon described Travellers as living "a life worse than the beasts, for beasts at least, are guided by wholesome instinct. Traveller life is without the ennobling intellect of man or the steadying instinct of animals". Four years later, she described the Paralympics as "perverse and "grotesque", and that sport was not "about finding someone who can wobble his way around a track in a wheelchair or who can swim from one end of a pool by Braille".
But a decline has crept in. From the high of 342,153 in 1997, the sales have dropped progressively to 291,036, a decline of 51,117 (15 per cent). This has come about in part because of the onslaught on the Sunday market unleashed by London's Associated Newspapers through Ireland on Sunday, but only partly that. The Sunday Independent has lost its edge (including – crucially? – "the Keane Edge"). Aengus Fanning is now less of an asset to Mr/Dr/Sir O'Reilly. And the cocky arrogance on display with the "apology" of Sunday 30 October may not be sustained for much longer.
When he goes as editor, Aengus Fanning will leave some legacy. p