SOCIETY "runs the risk that the gap between education and media will be filled by a tide of technological innovation that swamps our efforts to understand, let alone master it," the political scientist and broadcaster Prof Brian Farrell has said.
Prof Farrell was giving the inaugural National Council for Educational Awards Christina Murphy Lecture at the Rotunda Hospital in Dublin. He said Christina Murphy had been "a first-rate journalist. She could just as easily have become a first-class professor of education and what a presence in the groves of academe! Instead she preferred to have a foot in both camps."
He said that set beside the Information Technology revolution, "the current concerns about the content of the media strike me as almost trivial". However, the "vulgarisation of the print and broadcast media" based on a give them what they want" appeal to readers and viewers was a problem. Too often this amounted to an excuse by media proprietors to "give them what sells".
This "becomes an imperative for those working in the media. It affects their values, their expectations and their behaviour. Because there is a certain incestuous quality in the media (stories go from a paper to a broadcast and back again) the virus, once contracted, cannot be contained. It touches all the players in the media market-place."
Prof Farrell said this philosophy had infected broadsheet newspapers as well as tabloids, public service as well as commercial broadcasting.
It was there in the "TV quiz shows, the prurient concentration on personality stories, the detailed description - often accompanied by large pictures - of violent crime, the reduction in parliamentary reporting, the confusion of comment and news and a hundred other examples."
He said questions about why these changes had occurred were wider societal questions. "Why do so many look for this kind of communication commodity? What has happened to make sleaze acceptable to families? What about standards?"
He noted that "those who are most critical of the declining standards of media in Ireland today usually occupy positions that place them strategically to play an important role as mediators and interpreters in this transactional process". Such people might also examine their own responsibility for the drop in standards: "To what extent have they been left behind because of their failure to take `popular culture' seriously?"
He said that as various sources of authority in Irish society saw their influence declining, "they might relate it to their failure to pay attention to both the structures and content of mass culture, and in particular youth culture".
Prof Farrell stressed the importance of media studies. He urged that attention be paid to the centralisation of media ownership and power. He cited the way major sporting events were being taken over by pay-as-you-view television as an example of "the ominous tip of a looming media monopoly".
Among those in the audience were Christina Murphy's husband, Mr Dermot Mullane, with their son, Eric; the deputy leader of Fianna Fail, Mrs Mary O'Rourke; a former editor of The Irish Times, Mr Douglas Gageby; the president of the Association of Secondary Teachers Ireland, Mr John Mulcahy; the chairwoman of the National Council for Educational Awards, Dr Mary Upton, and its acting director, Mr Seamus Puirsell; the president of the Union of Students in Ireland, Mr Colman Byrne; the chief executive officer of Tipperary VEC, Mr Luke Murtagh; the editor of the Irish Times "Education and Living" supplement, Ms Ella Shanahan; and the head of education services in The Irish Times, Ms Sile Sheehy.