Media

The government might tax all media - that means websites and radio too - in its campaign to fight our yawning debt. Angela Long considers the possibility.

In the rush to report the news as it happens, there's little time for considered comment and analysis. By Colin Murphy.

On World Press Freedom Day, we should be grateful for our licence,taken for granted, to say what we think. In Sri Lanka, it's not the case. Angela Long attends a thought-provoking lecture

A free press is something we enjoy in Ireland. According to world surveys, the Irish media is luxuriously unfettered by global standards. You might not be conscious of it, but robust criticism of government policies and personalities, the uncomplimentary analysis of Vincent Browne and others, is something that could not happen, unmolested, in many countries.

A MILDLY salacious scandal across the way brings up questions of privacy, prurience and media attitudes when their own ‘go rogue’. By Angela Long.

Andrew Marr, the lean and hyperactive BBC frontman, has a distinguished career in print and broadcast behind him. He’s also at the centre of a story both extraordinary and mundane. It’s extraordinary because he, a ‘serious journalist’, sought a gagging order from the British High Court on stories about him; and mundane because it is about that most common of misbehaviour, an extra-marital affair.

Paywalls are creeping in . The New York Times has one, the Vatican newspaper is building one, and Slovakian media are huddling behind one, en masse. Don't worry. Politico has no wall looming. Angela Long reports

Slovakia’s attempt to put all its mainstream print media behind the same paywall is an interesting experiment. The Slovakians are ensuring a level playing field for their competing news organisations. This is being done by a common front paywall – so once you’re inside, you can choose which digital news platform to read.

Our media loves to probe, analyse and criticise all Irish institutions - except itself, writes Angela Long

There’s sport in plenty, crime in spades, politics (if you’re with the broadsheets) by the acre.

But one thing the reader finds sparse in the Irish media is reporting on the media itself.

Arguably, this is a big miss: doesn’t the media, new or old, influence our lives and thinking down to the most minute degree?

But self-analysis – or navel-gazing, as detractors might label it – is few and far between.

The media campaign against Fianna Fáil in government amounted to a political movement of dissent, rather than an objective critique of policy, writes Desmond Fennell.

Ireland's press regulation system is quietly going about its business, like a submarine beneath the surface of the fractious media world, writes Angela Long

 There’s no great problems with press misbehaviour in our land, it would seem from the man who ‘polices’ it, the Press Ombudsman, John Horgan.

 Only two of 315 complaints he received last year were sufficiently intractable to go to the Press Council. Resolution of one kind or another settled most, while some complaints were found to have no substance.

RUPERT MURDOCH is used to winning. Sometimes the battle is long and expensive, but the aged dictator of News Corp has the stomach and the funds. And so again, in Britain, his outfit appears to have won its campaign to own 100 per cent of BSkyB.

The rider is that Sky News must be set up as a separate company. It will be taken out from under the BSkyB, and therefore NewsCorp, umbrellas, and function as an 'independent' entity.

The final nail in the coffin of quality newspaper the Sunday Tribune was hammered yesterday afternoon. Staff received letters from the examiner, Jim Luby, informing them that no buyer had been found for the troubled title, and it would not publish again.