Media

FC Barcelona is one of the most successful football clubs in the world and, although like most of the big football clubs around the world. Unlike almost all of the major Premiership clubs elsewhere in Europe, FC Barcelona is not owned by an oligarch or even by a cabal of oligarchs, is owned by its 175,000 members who each pay an annual membership fee of around €200. It is a not-for-profit organisation; nobody gets paid dividends, although the players are among the richest in the world. BY Vincent Browne.

Why has Pat Rabbitte failed to act on the issue of concentration of media ownership? By Vincent Browne. 

Last year, the businessman Denis O'Brien addressed the proper role of the owner/controller of a media enterprise, saying that the owner/controller should act "at an appropriate distance from editorial matters" and should be aware of "the responsibility that rests with media owners not to interfere with editorial content”.

Last week, we published a piece, The true value of John Waters, which speculated as to the possible value, in cold hard cash, of controversial opinion columns to a newspaper website’s bottom line.

The Irish newspaper industry has realised there's easy money to be made from declaring war on its own online readership. By David Johnson.

Stop me if you've heard this one, "What's black and white and red all over?"

If you answered, "The Irish newspaper industry, which is only scarleh after yet another humiliating fiasco in which they displayed an appalling ignorance and lack of understanding over the basic concepts of the internet," then well done, gold star for you.

The Irish Times reported an untrue story on its front page about Irish pro-Palestinian activists - then reported it again and again. The Press Ombudsman shrugged his shoulders, and the Press Council couldn’t be bothered. The Dervish affair tells a worrying story about the state of our press, and about the failure of Ireland’s much-vaunted “independent” form of press regulation. Harry Browne reports

Arguably, it is in its role in the continuing subjugation of women that the media is at its most insidious. By Vincent Browne.

There is more to the publication of the topless photographs of Kate Middleton than the breach of her privacy or the hilarity of a long-time dedicated porn pusher, Richard Desmond, finding a principle here, or Independent News and Media (INM), publisher of the Sunday Independent and the Sunday World, suspending an editor on ethical grounds.

Given his interference in editorial matters in INM, in contradiction of the principles he himself has enunciated, Denis O’Brien is not a fit person to be allowed control the country’s second most powerful media enterprise. By Vincent Browne. (Updated: Denis O’Brien’s two letters and my response to the first can be read below.)

The extraordinary influence of Rupert Murdoch on British politics, exercised for decades through close oversight of his News International newspapers, is over. By Brian McNair. 

The Leveson inquiry is a club matter, in which a member has caused such extraordinary public embarrassment he must be black-balled, so that nothing changes. By John Pilger.

RTÉ is in the throes of a nervous breakdown - and it is hardly surprising. The Fr Kevin Reynolds debacle, the threat of further libel suits arising from the Mission to Prey fiasco, the station's financial crisis and the prospect of more scandals on the way would unsettle even a Catholic bishop.