Newspaper Watch: The Mayhem of 'Bertiegate'

The story about payments to Bertie Ahern – dubbed "Bertiegate" by the Independent – dominated the newspapers after 21 September, when the Irish Times first reported the leaked information. In the following five days, every lead article of every Irish broadsheet focused on Bertiegate. It was the subject of 45 news stories, 26 opinion pieces and 9 editorial comments.

In the days following the leak, Ahern confirmed that he had received a payment, but said that the €50,000-100,000 figure reported in the Irish Times was "off the wall". He disputed the media's right to demand answers about the payments. Opposition politicians made predictable calls for more answers. Anonymous sources gave informal briefings which had all the hallmarks of government spin.

In the absence of information, the crisis was fuelled by self-fulfilling headlines about "mounting pressure" on Ahern. Virtually every editorial writer and columnist agreed that he had questions to answer. Although nobody suggested that Ahern was corrupt, many commentators argued that accepting payments which could create any perception of favouritism was improper. As the Sunday Independent's editorial put it, "taking undisclosed amounts of money from anyone while serving as a government minister is not acceptable".

Only two of the 26 opinion pieces differed markedly from the consensus. Eoghan Harris put forward the eccentric view that Bertiegate represented a battle between followers of Aristotle and followers of Plato. He warned that "if the Platonists in the media want Bertie's head, they will have to fight their way through a praetorian guard of the Irish people" – with himself in reserve. Vincent Browne, writing in the Sunday Business Post, argued that there would be "nothing wrong with Ahern accepting financial assistance from friends" and that the "phoney crisis" was diverting attention from "far more substantial" issues regarding certain payments to Fianna Fáil by property developers.

Although it would be nice to live in a society where the media ensured that holders of public office were rigorously insulated from private influences which might bias their decisions, we do not live in anything remotely approaching such a society. As Browne pointed out, the media outcry was completely disproportionate when compared to the lack of outrage at the routine payments of much larger sums to political parties.

Ahern claimed that the crisis had been the result of a "calculated" and "sinister" leak and several commentators speculated as to which of Ahern's political rivals might be behind it. But regardless of the source, the question remains as to why the entire media responded to the leak in such a uniformly disproportionate way and why every editorial explicitly rejected Ahern's right to privacy regarding his personal finances.

One of the few current issues that unites the media is opposition to the governement's proposed privacy law, a bill which will be debated during the current session of the Dáil. It has been widely reported that McDowell, the golden boy of newspaper proprietors, was forced by Fianna Fáil ministers to include this unpopular bill alongside his popular defamation bill. On Monday 25 September, in the midst of Bertiegate, the Irish Times and Independent simultaneously launched the latest salvo in the media campaign against this bill, publishing hostile opinion pieces. Were they trying to tell the Taoiseach something?p