THE DISTINCTIVENESS of journalism as a profession is rapidly disappearing and no other generation of journalists has faced such a challenge in maintaining their role and relevance.
That is the view of Ombudsman and Information Commissioner Emily O’Reilly, who told journalism students at the University of Limerick yesterday: “Good journalists need to stand apart, to observe the consensus and see if it stands up to hard scrutiny and to call it if it doesn’t.”
She said journalists failed to hold power to account in Ireland during the boom “but I’m not sure if the public was crying out for power to be held to account during that period either”.
She said: “There is an appetite now for horror stories about someone’s seven-course meal in the Dubai Hilton, but there was a cosiness back then.”
The words “horse” and “bolted” came to mind with the media’s new enthusiasm for the Freedom of Information Act. “From a time, at the height of the boom, when I could count the number of FOI-related stories in the media on the fingers of one hand in any given month, they now stream out in multiples on a daily basis.”
On recent news stories obtained through FOI requests, Ms O’Reilly said: “I have no doubt that all of this will have had a cleansing effect and that higher standards will now apply.”
But she added: “The mistakes made during the boom, the extravagances perpetrated, were there to be revealed as the boom – to quote a former public figure – ‘became boomier’. Who went trawling then?”
She said: “In truth, I don’t blame the media altogether for the relative lack of interest in the seamier side of those halcyon days . . . who cared if a Minister bathed in asses’ milk at taxpayers expense, if the same taxpayers were also splashing about in the their very own milky baths.
“Yet, there were journalists who went against the cosy consensus ... who did their homework, who forecast the collapsing pyramid scheme . . . and put up with the derision heaped upon them at the time. They truly were doing the State some service even if the State was singularly ungrateful.”
Ms O’Reilly also criticised the move towards “supercharged social networking” through websites like Facebook. She said: “The overriding impulse of the Facebook revolution, it seems to me, is to subsume the private into the public, as we are encouraged to buy into ever more fiendish ways of plugging our individual selves into the ‘network’.”
