Republican News · Thursday 1 November 2001

The witchhunt goes on

You cannot hope to bribe or twist,
Thank God,
The Sunday Independent journalist,
But seeing what the chap will do,
Unbribed,
There is no occasion to.

(Paraphrase of observation on British Imperialist journalism)

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An Phoblacht wrote a "carefully crafted attack" on the Sunday Independent (SI), says Eoghan Harris (SI, 21 October). This means that An Phoblacht assembled facts to back up our opinions - probably a novel approach in that paper's viewpoint. Harris responded again last week.

The author of the 11 October An Phoblacht article, John O'Leary, replies.

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The Sunday Independent used the death of NUJ member Martin O'Hagan to pursue its political vendetta against Sinn Féin. That is what Eoghan Harris ignores in his reply to my article. Harris picks out just one sentence with which to take issue. The rest of the "well crafted" points are ignored.

I wrote that newspapers do not necessarily represent readers' interests. Harris interprets this to mean readers "loath the politics" of the SI. Some may well do so, but it does not follow. Readers do not have ideological convictions as well honed as those of Harris and his colleagues. They are not consciously buying into a stridently anti-nationalist package. Most believe in the simple virtues: the reporting of facts and opinion backed up by facts. They assume that is what they are getting.

Most readers do not approach their newspaper with any political convictions at all. Readers (responding to marketing pressure) 'buy' into the SI's conception of what it is they need to know. The Sunday Independent encourages middle and upper class southerners not to empathise with unionism - as part of an overall right-wing package. When readers accept that, the SI is doing its job well.

Sunday Independent journalists do not research or critically cover loyalist sectarianism and its links to state forces - they have no "impressions and feelings" which could form a "moral background" that might be used to examine the facts of loyalist sectarianism.

The SI tries to legitimise and popularise anti-republican themes each week - the main one last week being that whatever the IRA did, it wasn't enough. The rest of the media are a bunch of 'suckers', taken in by clever propaganda (the sub-theme being that the SI, and presumably on this occasion, the DUP, knows best).

The coverage of the sectarian loyalist Holy Cross School protest against little children was another case in point. The SI covered this story (that has attracted worldwide interest) once - and only in order to try to blame republicans and to obscure placing the responsibility squarely with reactionary loyalist politics. The campaign of loyalist pipe bomb attacks on Catholics has not been covered at all. In these weeks the Sunday Independent's only goal, as ever, has been to point the finger at Sinn Féin. The only interest shown by the SI in the World Trade Centre attacks was the extent to which they could also implicate Sinn Féin in that.

The extraordinary SI front page piece on the LVF killing of Martin O'Hagan, who researched loyalist connections with unionist politicians and state forces, made no mention whatever of his killers.

Harris attacks RTE again on October 28. He no longer works there and is no longer in a position to attempt to control its output. He is, additionally, performing a service for Tony O'Reilly, who competes with RTE for advertising revenue. The more RTE can be undermined, the better it is for the monopoly position of the Independent.

Eoghan Harris likes working for censored monopolies. It was possible in RTE, when political censorship was law (one that Harris supported), and it is possible in the privately owned Sunday Independent. The continuity is in the deeply conservative anti-republican message.

Harris contradicts himself, not unusual for someone with such a cavalier approach to facts. On 9 October, Harris attacked RTE for not simply reporting facts. By 28 October, he is back in favour of "impressions or feelings" which provide "the moral background for the facts".

RTE is a conservative and anti-republican organisation, where unionists (even representatives of the UDA and UVF) are given an easy time and republicans a hard one. The problem for Colm Kenny, also in the Sunday Independent, on 28 October is that republicans are given the opportunity to speak at all. Kenny criticises RTE for allowing Gerry Adams to use his own words out of his own mouth. Kenny says RTE is a 'player' rather than a 'reporter'. Kenny's view is undermined in that he writes for a media organisation so obsessed with Sinn Fein that it cannot even report facts in relation to a colleague gunned down by loyalist assassins. Kenny makes the extraordinarily nonsensical statement that loyalist attacks on Catholics have not been covered "in order to be 'helpful' to the two governments". Maybe that is why his paper did not mention the fact that the LVF killed his colleague. Kenny would be better off criticising his employers and not witch-hunting former colleagues in RTE.

Legal censorship allows journalists to put words and phrases in the mouths of censored republicans - in the way that print media such as the SI continues to do. In legally uncensored broadcasting, however, all the 'hard questions' in the world have difficulty defeating the integrity of the spoken response. Harris recognised this in RTE in the 1980s and argued that journalists who oppose Sinn Féin must vigorously support censorship. He initiated a (short-lived) campaign among like-minded broadcasters. It came to a stop after Harris's secret document (the one Harris now quotes approvingly) was revealed in a Sunday newspaper - uncovering a cabal of anti-republican broadcasters, using RTE to build support for The Workers Party and to denigrate Sinn Féin.

After Harris's views were made public, he was exposed and eventually drifted out of RTE. He tells stories again now in the SI, fairy stories about the North.

Harris does not realize that even if impressions linger, facts will endure: the fact of children daily standing up to loyalist bullies, the facts uncovered by Martin O'Hagen, his death, the facts uncovered by Pat Finucane, his death, the RUC threats against Rosemary Nelson, her death, the re-telling of the facts around Bloody Sunday at the Saville Inquiry, the shoot-to-kill revelations, the emerging facts about British involvement in the Dublin-Monaghan bombings, the new questions about RUC foreknowledge of the O'Hagan assassination.

Other facts relating to the conflict will also endure. They do not prove that republicans are right or wrong. However, republicans face the facts, past, the present and future, with confidence.

Sunday Independent journalists do not research or critically cover the world of loyalist sectarianism and links to state forces - they have no "impressions and feelings" which could form a "moral background" that might be used to examine the facts of loyalist sectarianism. Nationalist victims are second-class news fodder at best - invisible to the media most of the time.

The political sectarianism of the Sunday Independent is an adjunct to the actual sectarianism of unionist politics. What a sad end for people who began their political life championing non-sectarian left-wing politics.

The role of Tony O'Reilly and the Sunday Independent today will be remembered in the same light as that of William Martin Murphy and the Irish Independent in 1913 and 1916 - as a right-wing pro-British newspaper that will go to any length to denigrate the right to national self-determination and, of course, to promote the business interests of its owner.