Republican News · Thursday 11 October 2001

The death of Martin O'Hagan and the decline of journalism

BY JOHN O'LEARY

For The Sunday Independent, the outside world is merely a backdrop, plundered for a news catalyst that will nominally function as a basis for the anti-Sinn FÈin story

The late Martin O'Hagan was a distinguished journalist who worked for The Sunday World, a tabloid newspaper in the Independent Group, the largest and most successful in Ireland. Martin O'Hagan built up a reputation as a conscientious investigative journalist. He specialised in coverage of loyalist paramilitary groups and published evidence of their responsibility for sectarian killings, drug dealing and connections to prominent unionist politicians.

O'Hagan was also a prominent member of the National Union of Journalists and a socialist. He was no friend of Sinn Fein, or of the IRA. In fact he was a former member of the neo-unionist Workers Party, until expelled in the late 1980's for having 'disruptive attitude' (in other words a questioning mind). Reportedly, also, he was questioned and cleared by the IRA of suspicion that he was an RUC informer.

Martin O'Hagan was independent minded, worked for the Independent Group and believed in using facts to back up a good story. Members of the LVF, the loyalist group he reported on, shot him on September 28th, on his way home from the pub with his wife. O'Hagan had been used as a source in a TV documentary and book by Sean MacPhilemy, called The Committee. Mac Philamy alleged that LVF members and other loyalist assassins were linked with prominent members of the Unionist Party. An English jury backed up Martin O'Hagan's integrity as a journalist when Unionist leader, David Trimble, gave unsuccessful testimony attempting to rubbish O' Hagan and the story.

The flagship newspaper of the Independent Group in Ireland is the Sunday Independent. It carried news of Martin O'Hagan's death on its front-page on 30 September. The Headline for the piece written by Jody Corcoran, was Martin O'Hagan 1950-2001, Murder is Murder is Murder.

There was another victim of murder in the piece, the basic tenets of journalism.

The piece opened "Sinn FÈin is clearly feeling the pressure". The rest of the piece was about Sinn Fein and the IRA, a Sunday Independent opinion poll, and Osama Bin Ladin. Martin O'Hagan's name made it into the 469-word piece after 462 words in the last paragraph (alongside his "Widow and children," who were wheeled in to endorse Jody Corcoran's sentiments). There was no mention of the people who pulled the trigger on Martin O'Hagan.

Martin O'Hagan was an afterthought.

Corcoran used the still warm body of a dead colleague to pursue the Sunday Independent's crusade against Sinn FÈin.

This piece might make people wonder if this is a new low. There have been many lows in a newspaper which vilified John Hume for meeting Gerry Adams, Mary Robinson for shaking Gerry Adams' hand, Michael D Higgins for ending broadcasting censorship and which is being accused by a previous crime correspondent of bullying and harassment - the editor, Aongus Fanning, is currently 'on leave' after allegedly assaulting a reporter.

A more interesting question might be: how is it that this newspaper has become so divorced from reality, from ordinary human decency, from an even passing reference to the facts of the story?

Martin O'Hagan was not the first Independent Group journalist to be shot. Veronica Guerin was The Sunday Independent's crime correspondent, shot in the course of reporting activities of major crime figures in Dublin. Like O'Hagan, she was shot by the people she reported on. The similarity does not end there. Guerin stood out in the Independent because she got close to the story and she believed in using facts to back it up. She did not rely on handouts from the establishment and their servants. O'Hagan was like that. The majority of journalists in the Sunday Independent are not. They write stories that reflect the editorial line decided on those who own and control the paper. Many of them believe in the ideas they promote, Anne Harris, Eoghan Harris, Alan Ruddock, Eilish O'Hanlon, Professor Ronan Fanning and Conor Cruise O'Brien.

It's just that facts to back up what they write are few and far between.

The media and the facts

"Never let the facts get in the way of a good story." So goes the old clichÈ.

That there are media organisations and journalists, who present a point of view, is not regarded as a controversial observation. It is controversial to assert that there are 'pure' facts awaiting discovery by the diligent journo wending his way through life. A good journalist will have a good idea what is going on and will know where to look for the story and how to present it. A good journalist, however, will present facts before venturing an opinion.

The manner in which readers or viewers are influenced is difficult to pinpoint. Readers are not consciously reading and viewing in order to be convinced, they do so in order to find out more. Research suggests that 'agenda setting' in newspapers does not tell audiences what to think, so much as what to think about. The media has a tendency to inform people what is important or, to be more precise, what aspects of major events or problems the newspaper thinks it is important to have a view on. Usually, a relationship to events is suggested, so that evidence in the form of 'facts' is used to buttress whatever opinion the paper is developed.

A newspaper gives the impression that it is in the business of reporting on a series of events that make up the stories staring out at readers on every page. By such means, a newspaper may be in a position to exercise 'authority' over readers. It can influence their mental and political behaviour.

It is a moot point, however, whether a newspaper that is the house journal of a non-existent political party, The Sunday Independent, is capable of exercising such authority.

Newspapers do not represent readers' views

In one way The Sunday Independent is a classic example of how it is possible to be completely unrepresentative of an audience or readership and still thrive. It is also an example of the imperfection of media markets. Monopoly media players can dictate the structure of the market and media content. In its reporting of the Peace Process, Sinn FÈin and the IRA, The Sunday Independent doggedly pursues a political strategy. Journalists appear each week as spokespersons for an unwavering editorial line of hostility to Sinn FÈin or the IRA and whatever negativity in the news may be linked to them - hence the use of the death of Martin O'Hagan at the hands of loyalists. The fact that frequently, where it is measured, these views are diametrically opposite to the opinions of readers is not really a problem for the paper.

If The Sunday Independent perceives the news as 'good' for Sinn FÈin, the story is presented as a complex and confused event whose deeper and contrary meaning must be exposed. With Martin O'Hagan, the immediate cause is simply ignored.

In the case of the recurrent loyalist attacks on nationalist parents and children attempting to make their way to Ardoyne's Holy Cross school every morning, Eilish O'Hanlon (9 Sept) asserted that Sinn FÈin is equally as vile and offensive, only it are more adept at not revealing this trait publicly. The loyalists are honest if naÔve sectarians. 'The Provos' are devious versions of the same thing and this makes them the more to be feared than the actual people threatening little children every morning.

In the same edition, Alan Ruddock criticised Martin McGuinness because the latter was more aware of loyalist sectarian attacks than of republican ones. Thus Ruddock neatly sidestepped the evidence, typified by the Ardoyne events, indicating a concerted loyalist campaign of long standing against Catholics. Any loyalist would have an equal difficulty, since there is no evidence of a campaign of attacks on Protestants to recount. If it did exist, we can be sure that Ruddock would list the evidence in the starkest of terms.

Ronan Fanning, the Professor, referred to the "tribal" attempt by Catholics to walk to school in the morning and Alan Murray referred to "research" aimed at pinpointing "murders" carried out by "some of the IRA figures who have been identified walking with the children". Murray also valiantly attempted to find a "cause" of the sectarian anger of the loyalist protesters but, in contrast to chapter and verse accounts of the campaign against nationalists, could not come up with anything convincing. Thus was a story of the nature and meaning of brutal sectarianism obscured.

The following week, O'Hanlon, who writes about little else, returned to her theme, this time using the attack on the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon as her backdrop. She was joined this time by the old bruiser, Conor Cruise O'Brien, and the excitable pretender, Eoghan Harris. It would be an understatement to say that Harris makes wild accusations - he makes wild accusations wildly about everyone who has not travelled with him on life's path: RTE journalists (he worked there), Stalinists (he was one), Sinn FÈin (he was in it), the IRA (he supported it), the PLO (ditto). He accuses his 'radical chic' Irish Times/ RTE opponents of being "soft on Sinn FÈin, they hate America, Israel, unionists and women writers in the Sunday Independent - a gynophobia they share with the Taliban".

It is difficult to take seriously someone who once promoted massaging the news in a censored RTE (by writing "the public do not want the facts") now piously opining: "I wondered if RTE would ever return to being a reporter and stop being a player". Harris further undermines his case by attacking Robert Fisk, who he links with another bÍte noir, the harmless Fintan O'Toole of the Irish Times. This is ironic, given that the highly distinguished Fisk is used extensively in the daily Irish Independent as he is contracted to the Independent of London, also owned by Tony O'Reilly's Independent Group. The absence of Fisk's reports from the one-track minded Sunday Indo is noticeable.

Presumably, someone thinks this stuff linking the Taliban to the imaginary haters of "women writers in the Sunday Independent" entertaining. It is relevant to ask what is the purpose of this example of incontinent writing? Is it a fitting response to an event of the most major world significance?

The predictability of the criticism is such that the only interest in reading the material is in marvelling at the ingenuity (or lack of it) with which the anti Sinn FÈin theme is woven into the fabric of the vitriol. CCOB, Harris, O'Hanlon, the Professor, and the supporting cast essentially contribute the same article every week. The outside world is merely a backdrop, plundered for a news catalyst that will nominally function as a basis for the anti-Sinn FÈin story.

The complete absence of subtlety is an attempt to bully readers into submission, to place outside the pale of civilised discourse any rational consideration of what Vincent Browne recently termed "the mainstream media's indifference to the plight of northern nationalists".

It is important to point out that The Sunday Independent is not the only vehicle for anti-republican propaganda. A letter in the Irish News on 3 October compared two reports of the same incident, one in the Irish News, the other in the Irish Times by IT Security Correspondent, Jim Cusack. The Irish News carried an actuality report of an ugly fracas between loyalists and nationalists in North Belfast (also reported by An Phoblacht). The IT piece began "The violence flared after a local loyalist was kidnapped by the IRA...". (A letter in today's edition of An Phoblacht indicates some further observations on Jim Cusack's reports). Some analysts report the problem of the habit of 'security' and 'crime' correspondents lazily taking tid-bits from the RUC and the Special Branch and reporting these as fact. However, not all reporters in this field show this type of bias - so that shouldn't be thought of as the problem in itself.

Veronica Guerin and Martin O'Hagan didn't have this problem. But then again, that is a problem because they are dead. They are dead not because they are the same as the majority of their colleagues who reported this area, but because they were different. They were conscientious and truly independent minded.

Increasingly, as a result of this grisly attrition, the weight of bias, distortion and obeisance to the concerns of the establishment is growing in the media. It needs to be challenged. It should be challenged. Otherwise The Sunday Independent and the LVF will have won, and independent journalism will be dead.