Placing politics

The Irish Times has shifted to the right, where as the Guardian has been more "serious mainstream" recently.

 

"Is shopping the new religion?" "Is celebrity a career option?" "Is your credit card limit a target?" "Are you working to pay the childminder?" These poster lines from the latest Irish Times ad campaign have something in common apart from the sense that they are aimed primarily at women, and from the fact that the observations about social change they imply already sounded banal in the late 1990s when other people started tossing them around.

The other common characteristic in this concerted pitch for business from the leading representative of Ireland's Fourth Estate is that the adverts have little or nothing to do with politics or public life, but focus on the atomised behaviour of (presumably bourgeois) individuals. Their targets are consumers, not citizens.

It's just a thought, but perhaps this priority has something to do with the paper's inability to find space to cover the trial of the Catholic Worker defendants accused of damaging a US navy plane at Shannon, even when a former UN assistant general-secretary was testifying in it.

Whether these posters constitute an effective ad campaign is another question entirely. Meejit's 10-year-old daughter professes herself puzzled by the Irish Times ads, and especially by the intended attraction of the punchline: "We look at life. You live it." Since this is, after all, an effort to get you to read the newspaper, she reckons it's really saying: "We look at life. You should look at us looking at life." And when you put it that way, she can think of better things to do with her time.

How right you are

By now it is a truism bordering on banality that The Irish Times has shifted to the political (or apolitical) right. Perhaps the only people who wouldn't freely acknowledge as much are editor Geraldine Kennedy, her more timid minions, and some of the Sunday Independent hacks whose only working hypothesis is that Ireland is in thrall to tyrannical left-wing political correctness, resisted only by the brave, ahem, Sunday Independent.

Across the Irish Sea there is another bastion of liberalism that has recently decided (in conjunction with a new format) that as long as it has that reputation, it needn't actually do anything much to justify it. As the Guardian's editor Alan Rusbridger said in a recent, slightly opaque declaration to the insider-y Press Gazette: "If I had to choose between occupying a niche on the left or being nearer the centre, whether you display that through your news reporting or your comment or both, I'm more comfortable saying this an upmarket, serious mainstream newspaper. There's more potential for growth there than taking comfort in political positioning." (It's funny how when editors speak it always seems to need editing.)

The latest exhibit of the Guardian's "serious mainstream" tendencies comes from Emma Brockes. Fresh from a hatchet job on Gore Vidal, the intrepid interviewer took on another revered old man of the left, Noam Chomsky. From the headlines on down, last week's piece ("The greatest intellectual?") was petulant and distorting of Chomsky's record, and it ended with an implication that Chomsky (famously and thoroughly ascetic) is a "hypocrite" because his wife may own a share portfolio. (This was deemed a more important topic than Iraq, which went unmentioned.)

What journalists deliver

Brockes, in fairness, didn't ask Chomsky his views on shopping-as-religion or his credit-card limit. Still, this hostility to the left and its values is the underlying media environment, notably in a flurry of industrial-relations trouble.

In the media value-system, maximising your income is something you do legitimately with your share portfolio (unless you're Mrs Chomsky) or your rental properties, but not in solidarity with your colleagues against the depredations of bosses trying to squeeze more productivity out of your time.

The Irish Independent's shock-horror compound headline about An Post workers ("Overtime can double wages; Two-day pay for one worked; Bonus for being on holiday") was a sickening exercise in contempt for employees who do useful work without ripping off consumers, and whose opportunities to supplement their low pay don't include the generous expenses-regime of, say, an Indo journalist.

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