Hierarchy of (in)tolerance
Why does journalism appear to consider itself a secular pursuit? Is this syndrome especially a feature of Irish journalism and, if so, why? Writing in the foreword to the annual report of the Catholic Communications Office, Archbishop Sean Brady of Armagh, and Primate of All Ireland, strongly criticised, without naming names, several Irish Sunday newspapers, and urged his flock to use consumer power to effect change in the media. Catholics, he said, should be careful about buying newspapers that continually offend their moral and religious values, and should, in particular, review their purchase of certain Sunday newspapers if these continue to ridicule and undermine religious belief. Such acts of discretion, he urged, might lead to "a fairer and more representative secular Sunday media in Ireland".
He remarked also on the unrepresentative nature of journalism and on the particular scarcity of opinion-writing from a religious perspective. It is "peculiar", he said, that more people in the media do not reflect the overall values of the population in relation to family, faith, religious practice and community. In this regard, he again turned his focus on Sunday newspapers which, he noted, are utterly out of kilter with the lives of their readers, many of whom will have attended some form of religious worship before picking up the Sunday paper.
The archbishop raised an interesting question but did not extend his argument sufficiently. Perhaps he wished to emphasise his perception of a particular anomaly in relation to the Sabbath, but the phenomena he describes are by no means confined to Sunday newspapers.
They affect all media, including broadcast media and so-called quality daily newspapers. The reason is fairly simple: media are not democratic. I don't simply mean that the internal operation of media is not a democratic process – it isn't – but that media, for all journalism's claims to act as a bulwark of democracy, are not all that bothered about democratic values. In Western societies, media is business, of course, but that is a secondary issue, since it should be possible for media to operate to commercial principles and still manage to approximately reach the basic democratic requirement. The real problem has to do with the culture of journalism, which is a far more monolithic entity than is ever acknowledged by journalists. Journalism is a kind of cultural club, in which the members respond to an unwritten set of prescriptions relating to the purpose and character of the profession. Journalism is, for example, supposed to be a "progressive" profession, which means that it is governed by a fundamental, indeed fundamentalist, opposition to traditional ideas. To call oneself a journalist and not subscribe to "progressive" principles is to invite suspicion and hostility from other journalists.
In Ireland, this culture is especially virulent because of the historical role of Catholicism as a moral police force, which brings all the "progressive" instincts of journalists to the fore. There are, of course, journalists who regularly deviate from the orthodoxies, but they are a minority and generally must operate from outside the cultural heart of the profession. They work from home, rarely socialise with other journalists and often do not think of themselves as journalists at all.
Brady is certainly correct in his impression that Irish journalism is deeply hostile to Catholicism. But it would be a mistake to believe that journalism is opposed to religious practice or belief. In fact, there is an unwritten "hierarchy of tolerance", by which journalists accord respect to believers on the basis of an assortment of factors, including historical victimhood and opposition to Christianity. Thus, despite the misleading impression conveyed by a sandstorm of allegations to the contrary, Muslims are almost invariably accorded enormous respect. Jews likewise, except where they are in conflict with Muslims, in which case their historical victimhood meets a higher trump. Christians come way down, though of course in Ireland Protestants are higher than Catholics, who prop up the hierarchy of (in)tolerance.