Newspaper Watch: Mail vs Indo: the pot versus the kettle

A front page story in the Sunday Independent of 18 June described public dismay and "astonishment among ordinary people" as Terry Keane sold her story to Ireland on Sunday. The publication of her account of her affair with Charles Haughey, so soon after his death, was sure to "pile further agony upon the family" and was likely to lead to a "public backlash" against Ireland on Sunday.

The article even mentioned calls for a "boycott of the paper" and predicted a wave of outraged callers "venting their anger against the publication" on Liveline.

One only has to cast one's mind back to the Sunday Independent's infamous coverage of Liam Lawlor's death to see how hypocritical this moral outrage was.

Furthermore, a two-page account of Keane's relationship with Haughey had been carried in the Irish Independent of the previous day and the Sunday Independent itself carried a long piece by Liam Collins about the relationship, entitled "the secret affair that hooked the lovers like a drug".

Rather than concern for the Haughey family, it is much more likely that the attack on Terry Keane and Ireland on Sunday was motivated by long-standing animosity. Terry Keane's sale of the story of her affair to the Sunday Times in 1999 ended her long tenure as gossip columnist at the Sunday Independent and she has since frequently been the target of attacks in the paper. Independent Newspapers have also been engaged in a prolonged circulation war with Associated Newspapers, publishers of Ireland on Sunday, the Daily Mail and the Metro freesheet. The issue of the Sunday Independent which carried the attack on Keane also carried the latest in a regular sequence of articles gloating about the declining circulation of the Associated Newspapers' titles.

It is the remarkable similarity between Independent Newspapers and Associated Newspapers which makes their competition so virulent. Both are backed by equally wealthy and ambitious magnates. Forbes magazine lists Tony O'Reilly and Jonathan Harmsworth, Associated Newspapers boss, as joint holders of position 562 on the global rich-list. Both possess titles, although O'Reilly's "Sir" is relatively lowly compared to Harmsworth's "Viscount Rothermere". Their newspapers target identical market segments. The Wikipedia entry for the Daily Mail, describes it as "midway between the tabloid and broadsheet divide, covering much of the same celebrity ground as the tabloids but positioning itself as a more upmarket "middle class publication", a description which could apply equally well to the Sunday Independent. The Mail's notorious scaremongering about asylum seekers, crime and terrorism won't be unfamiliar to Independent readers either.

Given the similarity in content, Independent Newspapers often rely upon appeals to crude nationalism in attacking their rivals, emphasising their own "Irishness" against the Mail's "Britishness". So, for example, the Sunday Independent recently carried an article attacking the Daily Mail's "sneering, two-faced" coverage of Ken Loach's success in Cannes, and noted that the Mail has "a long history of virulent anti-Irishness". The article pointed out that the Mail's Irish edition had lauded the "Irish success", while the British edition had attacked the film's anti-Britishness. The Sunday Independent neglected to mention, however, that the "anti-Irish" article in the Mail, entitled "Why does Ken Loach hate his country so much?", was written by Ruth Dudley Edwards, a Sunday Independent columnist!