Three Thousand Versts of Loneliness

This might be the most bizarre media story for a while.  Informed readers were not expecting to peruse a copy of the Sunday Tribune yesterday, but a paper sporting its masthead did appear in newsagents.  The southern Irish publication has entered receivership and it will not be printed for the next few weeks at least. So what exactly was this doppelgänger?  It was a special edition of the rival Irish Mail on Sunday, "designed for" Tribune readers!  Talk about kicking someone when they're down! The Mail's editor launches a circuitous and highly unconvincing argument about keeping people in the newspaper buying habit.  It strikes me that the exercise was nothing so much as a print media adoption of 'phishing' techniques popularised on the internet.   There's certainly not much in the way of industry solidarity for a paper fallen on hard times.    

Hold the presses! Shadow Secretary of State for Northern Ireland, Owen Paterson, has held a meeting . Over at Slugger Mick Fealty gets precious about the genesis of this 'story'. Conall McDevitt hails its exposition as a triumph of new media. Let me enter one slight note of dissent. This is far from a triumph of new media. On the contrary, it is a prime example of a non-story which gets picked up by mainstream outlets, between tentative thumb and forefinger, simply because it has been given a mischievous interpretation by a journalist acting in his capacity as a blogger. The thinking, roughly stated, is 'oh maybe this is significant, we'll mention it, leave out the scurrilous insinuations for safety's sake and append some extraneous detail'. It's actually an example of new media perpetuating bad journalism.

My latest contribution to the Belfast Telegraph comment pages argues that Peter Robinson's failure to respond quickly to Cardinal Daly's passing was an error of judgement indicative of a larger problem. The two First Ministers are failing to provide the leadership which Northern Ireland needs. Cardinal Daly's passing should have marked a period of loss and reflection across the community. It's a pity that the First Minister Peter Robinson, rather than setting the appropriate tone, took two-and-a-half days to respond to the churchman's death. When Mr Robinson finally released a statement it struck a petulant note, hitting out at the media before touching fleetingly upon the life and works of the cardinal. Doubtless Mr Robinson had had a stressful week. His party remains engaged in an endless wrangle with Sinn Féin over the devolution of policing and justice powers, the Executive is still on shaky ground and his wife Iris was forced to retire from politics after a ...

In today's Belfast Telegraph, I argue that sympathy for Iris Robinson's depression should not obscure the unpleasant reality of her politics. Even by the DUP's standards, Mrs Robinson's politics comprise an unpleasant concoction of bigotries, seasoned with a predictable dash of ethno-religious fanaticism. This unpalatable dish is served up with a sizeable side-dollop of spite, epitomised by Iris's triumphant nine-finger salute which taunted Tory MPs after DUP votes had secured a Government victory on 42-day detention, or by her serial "unparliamentary" harassment of the Health Minister, Ulster Unionist Michael McGimpsey, for which she attracted official censure. It is possible, of course, to elicit human sympathy for Robinson in light of the mental illness which has forced her to step back from her duties. Perhaps the condition might even permit a kinder interpretation of the extremity of some of her outbursts. But the sum total of hatred and intolerance ...