John Seigenthaler, the founder of USA Today and close family friend of the Kennedy family, was the subject of allegations that he was directly involved in the assassination of both John F and Bobby Kennedy. The story appeared on the hugely popular Wikipedia website for over four months, and was completely false. Conor Brady reports
Dermot Bolger travels from Cork to Thailand and back to 'the city of eternal education' in his Christmas viewing
There has been some great radio comedy produced in Ireland over the last 20 years. Scrap Saturday, with Gerry Stembridge and Dermot Morgan, was brilliant. Stuart Carolan's Navan Man and Drunken Politician, formerly broadcast during Eamon Dunphy's stint hosting The Last Word on Today FM, were viciously funny and had an edge that simultaneously shocked and delighted.
Please try to bear with Meejit as, amid the Christmas cheer (and gloom), this column struggles to shape an intellectual framework that covers some of the notable media events and characters of the past year.
A year on from the tsunami there are some images burned into my mind. Images of death and horror on an industrial scale, mass graves, blank eyed children and a smell of rotting flesh which you can actually feel on your body. It was an event which was unparalleled in recent history and something any of us who were near any of the countries affected will never forget.
Conor Brady on the scandals and challenges that faced the Irish media in 2005
If Denis O'Brien is so confident that he did nothing untoward when winning the second mobile phone licence a decade ago then why was 2005 punctuated by legal challenges to the work of the Moriarty tribunal and public statements demanding its immediate conclusion?
Rich, thin royals wandering the earth, sheep trying to find their way in life, the Irish homeless in London and Gaelic stew were all part of Dermot Bolger's TV week
One of the most original, funny bits of radio to be heard at the moment is Kids Talk on Moncrieff on Newstalk 106 (Monday – Friday, 2.30pm – 4.30pm). It features the show's reporter, Henry McKean, traveling around schools in Dublin and interviewing children between the ages of eight and 10.
"You needed to be a Sinn Féin/IRA sympathiser to get on in Dublin journalism in the late eighties." This bare-faced, black-is-white untruth was spoken to Meejit recently by a person too young to know better, with a mind overstuffed by Myers/Harris paranoia.