Media

I've always liked Judy Miller. I have often wondered what Waugh or Thackeray would have made of the Fourth Estate's Becky Sharp.

Readers should always look between the lines of any story published by our profit-seeking media and ask why it was it published before accepting the 'facts' allegedly reported in it, advises Eoin Ó Murchú

Journalists tendancy to panic and not to educate itself has meant that the coverage in bird flu has deteriorated as the week's go on.

Early deadlines, big stakes and their corporate masters often determine the content of newspapers, as the false reporting of the circumstances of Liam Lawlor's death highlight. By Conor Brady

But for his California tan and penchant for casual clothing, my 85-year-old father, with his flyaway white hair, sparkling blue eyes and wiry torso astride short, bowed legs, could easily be mistaken on Dublin's streets for the Irish farmer he is directly descended from. His parents emigrated from Connaught in the late 1800's and ended up in Boston where they met at a Hibernian dance. I wonder if what drew them together on that faraway foreign shore was that they were born and raised in rural townlands in neighbouring counties.

Dermot Bolger looks at the great, the graphic and the gratuitous on the box this week

On Friday, Rachael English lined up the ingredients for Five Seven Live with great ease: the change of mind of the witness in the Sophie Toscan du Plantier case; vets across the EU meeting in Brussels to discuss avian flu; Shell not bowing to pressure for the offshore thingamajig; poor Charlie Bird horrified in Muzaffarabad (and so would you be); bad water in Ennis (again); the regional papers, sports, farm news, traffic and news and Derek Davis; George Bush's aides engineering a press conference for him (and getting caught) and the blond Bond (no, he's still a man).

The Minister for Education, Mary Hanafin, made an intriguing admission recently. Commenting on figures showing that the numbers of students attending non fee-paying schools in Dublin had plummeted, the Minister said that the drift to private education could be directly traced to the decision to abolish university fees a decade ago. Many parents who in the past would have put money aside for their children's university, were instead now spending that money on private education, she said.

This week two freesheets, Metro and Herald Am arrived on the media scene.  

Have you read the one about the senior IRA activist – apparently a good friend of mine – who is now into picking up prostitutes at the back of Belfast City Hall? Or what about my relative who has allegedly turned his back on republicanism over the recent initiatives by the IRA? Or what about the republican women who used to undress in front of their bed room windows to distract British soldiers on foot patrol who were then easily shot by IRA snipers?