Media:The appearance of Mapping Irish Media: Critical Explorations is to be welcomed, if for no other reason than that there is a dearth of good writing on media issues in Ireland.
And, despite the editors' list of the recent publications, books and journals, as well as radio and television programmes, a sort of a potted history of engagement with media studies, the fact is that today there is only one journal, the intermittent Irish Communications Review, and the occasional book. We are still waiting for histories of our national newspapers, though it is believed histories of The Irish Times and the Irish Independent are in the publishing pipeline.
There is no programme on RTÉ or TV3 or on any radio station within the state that offers an analysis of the media. While some programmes will review the media, Soundbyte, off air some years now, was the last radio programme to critically engage with media issues. Where media columns exist in the press they are always more about marketing and advertising. For all these reasons this collection is welcome.
As with any collection of essays, one looks for the unifying factor, and as hard as one might try, it is hard to find. One possibility is that all the contributors, bar one, have an academic link to the School of Media at DCU, either as staff or as researchers, former researchers or graduates. This is a rather monocular view of the world of media scholarship, as it excludes work being done in a range of other institutions. There is little about Northern Ireland and little from the regions, and some areas of media activity not studied specifically in DCU are not included.
The greatest problem, however, with this collection is the inclusion in media studies of journalism along with the usual range of media studies areas, reality TV, soap operas and film.
The editors make the extraordinary statement that: "Journalism, the core content of most current affairs media until the end of the 19th century, had gradually been supplemented - some would argue supplanted - both by the spread of new technologies (film, radio, television, the internet) - and by the accentuation of commercial pressures, which have in turn led to increasing concentration of ownership and to a blurring of traditional divisions between information and entertainment".
Having more or less announced the death by technology of journalism, the editors then proceed to say: "Nonetheless, journalism as such has, although its parameters are now more contested, retained a reasonably central role in media production".
There is, of course, a crisis for journalism, which the authors rightly identify with the concentration of ownership, but one might also view the appearance of new technologies as offering new platforms for good journalism. The authors seem to have confused the platform with the content. The technology is neutral, the content is different and much of the content on the four technologies mentioned is journalistic. As for the distinction between information and entertainment, well, journalism has historically blended the two.
WHAT THE AUTHORS might be suggesting is that one, entertainment, is now dominant, but that case is not made. Of course journalism is a contested area, its claims to objectivity are constantly being challenged, its role within society is also, rightly, under constant scrutiny, though maybe not quite as much as it should be in this country.
This reviewer would hardly be the first to suggest that the study of journalism is best suited to the humanities, to history and English rather than media studies, and that disciplines such as philosophy and politics better define journalism's relationship to democracy and society.
With that caveat concerning the place of journalism within media studies, what about the collection on offer? It is a mixed bag. With some pieces one is left feeling they have been out there for some time and are reworked conference papers. Others are written in that rather turgid academese that grants more importance to a well placed citation than to clarity.
Other pieces are very good and original. Patrick Kinsella's piece on the representation of violence in Northern Ireland on our television screens brings to the piece the sensibilities of the scholar and the practitioner. Mark O'Brien's essay on the changing face of crime reporting in Ireland is an original work that compares the under reporting of crime in Ireland in the first half of the 20th century, up until the 1960s, with the current situation and tells us that Ireland still has a low crime rate in comparison with our EU partners, despite the impression given in the media.
Farrel Corcoran looks at Irish television in a global context, while John Horgan, Paul McNamara and John O'Sullivan bring together all the recent developments in Irish journalism in a very useful, though dense essay that might have benefited by being developed into two pieces.
Aphra Kerr writing on the media used by Polish immigrants is exploring an area that will come under increased academic scrutiny. She has some surprising findings, though it would have been interesting to know more about the content of the Polish language media in Ireland and whether it reflects Polish domestic politics.
As always with a collection such as this one looks at what is not included. There is no essay on documentary, which is surprising given the growth in the popularity of the genre, with the likes of Michael Moore, but also the increased presence of home-grown documentaries on Irish television screens. Standards in journalism is an equally surprising omission.
The essay by Horgan, McNamara and O'Sullivan contains a short section on the troubled history of libel reform and press regulation, but nothing on standards or ethics. O'Brien's piece on crime reporting does allude to some issues that could have been developed, especially the role of the British press in Ireland and its impact on our press culture. There is also nothing on that growth area in the media, public relations.
Surprisingly, given the announcement of the death of journalism there is no essay on so-called citizen journalism.
However, it is easy to look for and find omissions. We should be grateful to DCU's School of Media for giving us this collection . It's likely to prove useful for students of media for some time to come.
Michael Foley is a lecturer in journalism at the Dublin Institute of Technology
Mapping Irish Media: Critical Explorations Edited by John Horgan, Barbara O'Connor and Helena Sheehan University College Dublin Press, 304pp. €25