RTE axe The Mystery Train

The Irish media has covered Israel's wars on Lebanon and Gaza in a typical Western apalling way. 

Bono, that tribune of the people and scourge of the powerful, couldn't even manage a strong word or high-pitched whine about RTÉ's decision to axe Mystery Train when he phoned-in to the final night of John Kelly's programme. Indeed, apart from a little pseudo-pissed ingenuousness ("Are we on-air??!") and rambling memories of childbirth – his wife's, that is – Bono said nothing.

Contrast that with Elvis Costello, who used the same opportunity to denounce Radio One management's short-sightedness and ignorance of the show's internet audience. Moreover, his call provided the segue for Kelly to play the night's bitterest song, Costello's 'Radio Radio'. ("I wanna bite the hand that feeds me/ I wanna bite that hand so badly/ I want to make them wish they'd never seeeeen meee.")

If Kelly's bitterness was somewhat tempered by RTÉ's decision to stick him on Lyric FM in the afternoons from October, it nonetheless remains ever-more difficult to contest Costello's 28-year-old lyrical assertion that "the radio is in the hands of such a lot of fools/ tryin' to anaesthetise the way that you feel". Though perhaps "fools" is putting it kindly.

The state of resistance to such media idiocy is not encouraging. At the Dublin party to mark the close of business for Mystery Train (and yes, I was at it, calling both my objectivity and anti-social reputation into question), a speaker denounced the malign influence of "bean-counters" in cultural life and urged the assembled music and media people to display our defiance of their philistinism by, uh, buying the Irish Times.

The Palestine line

Meanwhile, the Irish Times, that bean-counters' bible, has underlined its basic superficiality and fealty to Western power with particularly appalling coverage of Israel's wars on Lebanon and Gaza.

Ireland's reputation for pro-Palestinian sympathies has long been considerably exaggerated, at least as far as our media are concerned. Nonetheless there have been times in the past, especially in 1990/91, when the Irish Times was notably more balanced on Middle East business than the English-speaking average – an average that is horribly skewed by the US press's knee-jerk Israeli bias.

A trace of the old balance remains in the form of Michael Jansen's analytical pieces, which show understanding of Arab perspectives. But the paper's editorials (eg 13 July, which called blandly for "international pressure... to scale down the tension" and excoriated Hamas and Hezbollah) and its main news pieces have been largely along lines of which Israel could scarcely complain.

At the time of writing, the war crimes are on a relatively small scale, with civilian deaths in the low three figures and no strikes on, say, Syria. The Irish Times, like RTÉ when Richard Crowley is not broadcasting, has been happy to frame Israel's activities with words and phrases such as "retaliation", "reprisal" and "response to the kidnapping of their soldiers", reserving most shock and horror, for example, for the Hezbollah strike on Haifa. Hezbollah and Hamas are, of course, "militants", who "vow to wage war", etc.

Ignorance is blitz

It can't be all bad. Such is the breadth, if not depth, of the coverage of this crisis that if you watch or listen to RTÉ long enough or wade through, say, Paul Gillespie's 'World View' column in the Irish Times, you'll find information and opinions that reflect more poorly on Israel. But you're more likely to come across another report on the pain endured by the families of the "kidnapped" Israelis ("prisoners of war" is surely a more apt label) than one on the deaths and atrocious conditions endured by thousands in Gaza and Beirut.

You're unlikely to find anything at all that reflects on the earlier "kidnappings" by Israel of people in Gaza and Lebanon, acts that are understood by most Arabs in the region to be the trigger for recent events. And you're also unlikely to hear anyone demolish Israeli spokesmen's bland lies about commitment to the "road map" for peace.

Irish elite media's largely sympathetic coverage of Israel obviously has nothing to do with a powerful Jewish lobby. Instead it is probably born of what might be called a "metropolitan bias" – a sense that Israelis are people like us – and of Ireland's increasing integration into an Anglo-American media and ideological sphere. But it also arises from simple, stupid ignorance, which leads newsrooms to default to the easiest rhetorical lines and the best PR. This column often knocks the internet, but it is an indispensable tool in times like these for those who want to escape mainstream journalism's ill-informed clichés.