Madam, - The pharisee at prayer, thanking God that he does not have the sinful ways of other men, is what came to mind on reading the piece last Saturday, by your Chief Political Correspondent on the tensions between the press and politicians - two sides of the same lie, if I might coin a phrase.
The unfortunate fact is that nowhere in the media - not in The Irish Times, not in our "public service broadcaster", and nowhere else that I know - is to be found the absolute respect for truth that alone is right and proper, and that alone is of real value.
Your breast may be raw with the sanctimonious beating you give it on the centrality to democracy of a free press, but the blackest bruising is that done to truth by that and other half-truths. The press freedom that democracy truly requires is the freedom - actually the duty - to tell the truth, but the truth is subverted utterly if it is seasoned, flavoured or spun with the sensationalist lie, the axe-grinding bending of fact, or the subtle omission of significant detail. Your mantra may be that an opinion piece must be entirely unfettered, but what more insidious falsehood can there be than that which is insinuated, somehow axiomatically, as the "factual" premise of an opinion?
More than once on your pages, on a single day, I have seen a verbatim account of what someone has said and an opinion column implying that he or she said something else entirely. You may see your particular disrespect for truth as infinitely more refined than the crudities of tabloidism, but respect for the truth, as far as I am concerned, is either absolute or absent. Is not starvation the safest course when the wholesome truth is lost among poisonous lies?
Surely, in the prevailing wind of contemporary society, freedom of the press "but straws the wheat and saves the chaff, with a most evil fan"? - Yours, etc,
FRANK FARRELL, Lakelands Close, Stillorgan, Co Dublin.