Media

La vie en rose at the Ireland AM set; local tensions on Eircom League Weekly; the Flash Families splurge out of boredom; and the cast of Pride and Joy struggle to keep their home. By Dermot Bolger

Susan McReynolds could be that new voice which Radio One desperately needs. She is bright, polished, but just that bit prissy. Perhaps it's the scripts but there is a hint of that sugary, goody-two-shoes about her that has gone in John Creedon. But she's new to the schedule as a substitute for Marian Finucane on Saturday mornings. She has promise but the material with which she had to deal on 15 July, would have challenged a Terry Wogan or a Gerry Ryan.

For three consecutive days, the situation in Lebanon made frontpage headlines in the Irish Times. On Thursday 13 July "Israel promises 'severe response' to Hizbullah" was the headline. The following day it read "Hizbullah retaliates with rocket attack on Haifa". Then, on Saturday, the story was "Hizbullah leader vows 'open war' on Israel". The trifling matter of the Israeli state's massive act of military aggression against a foreign country didn't make the headlines.

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

I never got to meet Yasser Arafat. And I regret that, especially given the way he was treated towards the end of his life. I talked to him by telephone: once when he was in Camp David, and on another occasion when he was under siege in his compound in the West Bank. We put together plans for me to visit Palestine on a few occasions, but the demands of the process here at home meant that each trip had to be aborted because it coincided with some crisis or other in the Irish peace process or in the Middle East.

The stories are still around, even three years down the line. It happened at four in the afternoon, just as the stock exchange markets were winding up for the day. The computer screens fizzled all at once. The traffic lights went dead. The subways came to a standstill. Elevators stopped between floors. Air conditioners kicked off. Bank vaults thudded shut. The hospital life-support machines kicked into emergency overdrive.

While the BBC examined the days leading up to the London bombings last July and spoke to survivors of the bus bombing, Channel 4 superbly recreated the terror of one night of the Blitz

McDowell had nothing to say about the implications of the judgement, whether he thought it was right, whether he had anticipated it, whether the courts had been wrong in the earlier case which had found a 1935 act, or part of that act, unconstitutional. Nothing about the dangers facing children from sex abusers and what might be done to protect them. Just about himself and how right he had been all along.

Michael McDowell's simultaneous presentation of a new defamation bill and a new privacy bill was greeted with mixed reactions by the newspaper industry.

Sometimes the media fails to connect the dots between stories.