Connect: Few people like journalists. Many people like individual journalists, of course - because either they know them personally, or are informed and/or amused by them, or simply because they agree with their views.
It's not important anyway: few people like politicians, lawyers, mechanics, builders, farmers, accountants, teachers, academics, bankers, consultants and auctioneers.
You could add property developers, business suits and dozens of others. (You'd have to add estate agents and ad-copywriters.) The public - and we are all each other's public for goods and services - knows the score. It's an exaggeration to say that everybody is ripping off everybody else but, in the market, people generally demand what the market will bear. Hence resentment is pervasive.
These have been a bad few years for the media. Events at such august outfits as the BBC (the Andrew Gilligan affair), the New York Times (the Jayson Blair and Judith Miller scandals), Le Monde (Mafia-like power machinations undermining its "watchdog of the establishment" role) and CBS (Dan Rather having to retract) and, of course, a recent row closer to home, have damaged journalism.
That's been the story in reasonably reputable outfits. Others have, let's face it, regularly been worse, publishing or broadcasting lies, bias, sensationalism, vulgarity, sleaze, sexism, racism, smears, character-assassinations and profitable tripe of all kinds. So, in Ireland, a press council now looms and most people will probably welcome the idea.
After all, if it prevents creeping Brit-style invasions of privacy of such people as DJ Carey, Charlie Bird and David Evans (aka U2's The Edge), or their relatives, it's got to be a good thing.
Well . . . maybe. The problem is that a press council will also be open to abuse by powerful forces in this society. Think of it this way: the primary function of media in a democracy is to hold power accountable to the public. Thus, from time to time, newspapers, TV and radio cause the collapse of corrupt governments and crooked private outfits. Furthermore, media cause, both fairly and unfairly, the ruination of powerful, often fame-hungry individuals. But media are collectively powerful too.
So, there's legal regulation to prevent the press and broadcast media going too far. Fine and dandy . . . except that the law, too, is a powerful institution which may require - and clearly does from time to time - a halt put to its gallop. This is the nub of the problem, is it not? Certainly, media require legal control, but is it not preferable that ethical self-control determines journalists' behaviour? Now, you could argue that such a notion is preachy, prissy and precious. Fair enough; but the alternative - to abuse the power of journalism, usually with the abject and disgraceful defence of "I was only following orders" - seems worse. It's not that journalists should be strangled by scrupulosity - we're all people, after all - but should be freer than they are to say "no".
I don't know who, for instance, was detailed to follow Charlie Bird. Somebody was, and you can imagine a young person trying to get a break in a cut-throat trade being happy to do so. Yet such an order arguably constitutes exploitation, and papers frequently make a hullabaloo when others engage in it. Maybe, on the other hand, Charlie was stalked by an experienced sleaze-hound.
Either way, it's a pretty grim and, it seems to me, monumentally boring way to earn a living. ("How was your day?" "Oh, I just skulked around after Charlie Bird, the RTÉ guy, hoping to find him with a new partner." "Wow, that's exciting!") Of course, papers will always find people to do objectionable stuff. Some cretins have hidden in trees and toilets for "celebrity" shots.
Anyway, the press council; its personnel, politics and powers remain vital questions. For today, however, let's consider another pressing and relevant point. Michael McDowell is the mooted council's central figure. The perceived need to establish such a body has reportedly come about as a "trade-off" for reform of the libel laws and has been boosted by invasions of privacy.
Yet it's unsurprising that invasions of privacy have proliferated under the entrepreneurial culture promoted by Progressive Democrats such as Michael McDowell. There is a link between such ideology and journalism: media outfits have been able to make profits selling sleazier journalism.
The same thing happened in 1980s' Thatcherite Britain. Back then press sleaze inevitably resulted as part of frenzied economic "deregulation". In a sense, profitable sleaze is in keeping with the dominant ideology of New Ireland. After all, it is important to realise that any society that so lionises such "Tiger" heroes as Denis O'Brien and Michael O'Leary can expect its media, like its bankers, developers and sundry suits, to seek to make profits from commoditising everything.
Clearly, junk journalism, like junk food, has its place, and the world would arguably be too austere without some of it. But the power wielded and perversions perpetrated by journalists are usually small beer beside the abuses, deliberate and accidental, manufactured by the truly powerful and truly wealthy and no press council will ever make it otherwise.