Harris's hypocritical balancing act

Writing in the Sunday Business Post on 16 July, Pat Leahy claimed that, according to "senior government sources", relations between Fianna Fáil and Tony O'Reilly were "non-existent" after the government had failed to respond adequately to lobbying by Independent Newspapers executives. However, Leahy took pains to point out that "there is no evidence or suggestion that the editorial coverage or reporting in any of the group's newspapers was or is affected by corporate relations". Nevertheless, several recent editorial decisions have, by coincidence no doubt, targeted Fianna Fáil.

On Sunday 30 July, the Sunday Independent's frontpage headline declared: "Revealed: how Ahern plans to buy election". The only evidence presented to substantiate this bold headline was a government memorandum, apparently seen by the paper, which detailed plans to lift peak-time restrictions on the country's Free Travel Scheme, a reform which would cost a pittance in terms of government spending. Indeed the article was so short of substance that large chunks of it were copied – word for word – from an opinion piece by Alan Ruddock on page 24 of the same paper. Bizzarely, Ruddock's piece more or less openly advocated the buying of the election through the abolition of stamp duty – "political and economic sense" which "will be rewarded".

In the same edition, Eoghan Harris criticised RTÉ for a lack of balance in their coverage of the war in Lebanon. According to Harris, none of the panelists on the previous week's Sunday Show had spoken for Israel. Nor would an Israeli embassy spokesperson have done – Irish citizens who could make Israel's case where required "for balance". In the aftermath of an IRA atrocity, as Harris used to teach researchers in RTÉ, "balance was not bringing on Ian Paisley from the other side to denounce it. Balance was bringing in Father Faul from our side to do so."

This lecture on "balance" was unintentionally hilarious. For a start, the previous week's news coverage of the Lebanon in the Sunday Independent had consisted of two articles by members of the far-right Freedom Institute, two articles syndicated from the British Telegraph and "analysis" pieces by Harris himself and Ruth Dudley Edwards – utterly unbalanced in more ways than one.

On a more sinister note, in his time at RTÉ Harris was a vocal champion of Section 31, which banned Sinn Féin from the airwaves between 1971 and 1993. In this context, the decision about who to wheel out to denounce IRA atrocities is not even remotely related to "balance".

The concept of journalistic balance is frequently used by editors to frame issues as a binary debate between two polls within the narrow confines of what they consider respectable opinion. During the troubles the balance was between Nationalist and Unionist denunciations of the IRA, in Iraq it is between the naked imperialism of Charles Krauthammer and the imperialism by diplomacy advocated by liberal commentators.

In Lebanon, despite the sternest efforts of editors, the growing mountain of corpses is profoundly unbalanced. In the face of these uncomfortable facts, Harris suggested the reporters working amid the death and destruction of Lebanon are failing to see the "big picture" and that "this fact should not be lost on the editors of Robert Fisk and Fergal Keane's emotional reports". Maybe they can weed out the unbalanced facts. p