Roy Greenslade is, by his own admission, a pariah in English journalism. That's because the former editor of the Daily Mirror has presumed to question the quality of English newspaper reporting on Northern Ireland.
On Monday as part of Feile an Phobail he gave a talk entitled 'A Failure to Report' and it was good.
Until the late 1960s, Greenslade maintains, the north of Ireland didn't exist for British journalism. When the Troubles erupted the British popular press weighed in with their usual broad brush – catch the drama, ignore the context. Greenslade remembers working on the Daily Mail and hearing an editor bawl down the phone to a Belfast-based reporter: "How high are the flames?"
Professor Greenslade (he now teaches journalism at London City University) identifies three phases in British reporting on Northern Ireland since the early 1970s.
First there was the cowboys and indians phase. On one side were ranged the British army, RUC and UDR; on the other, a savage terrorist threat to the state.
This gradually became the piggy in the middle phase. This time Britain was cast as referee, struggling to keep two warring tribes apart, with the loyalist tribe (reactive violence) not nearly as bad as the republican tribe (the source of violence).
The third phase – piggy wants out – is the present one. It began, Greenslade believes, when Peter Brooke announced that Britain had no selfish strategic interest in remaining in Northern Ireland. Until this point, the British government and media had worked in harmony. With phase three discord began. Unlike the British government, the British popular press has no enthusiasm for moves towards Irish unity.
Not everyone accepts Greenslade's analysis. For one thing, the British government's wish to stop being piggy in the middle is not necessarily the same as the British government's wish to withdraw from its role in Irish affairs.
And if you remember Tony Blair's words when he first visited here as British Prime Minister – that he was a unionist and that he did not believe anyone in his audience would live to see a united Ireland – you may wonder whether this man really heads up a government with British withdrawal in mind.
But where Greenslade is correct is in his 'failure to report' thesis and the failure wasn't confined to the British press or to matters political. For decades the unionist media in Northern Ireland, including the BBC, ignored Irish culture in all its manifestations.
No Irish speaker, no Irish music devotee, no gaelic games enthusiast would have dreamed of turning to the BBC in Belfast for a word or note or match report – it was on Radio Eireann you got that kind of thing. And if you lived in the likes of Omagh or Derry or Enniskillen, you wouldn't have turned to the local unionist newspaper for news or analysis of things Irish either. Not a word, not a note, not a kick or puck.
These days things are a lot better. Unionist newspapers throughout the north report on gaelic games. Likewise the BBC provides considerable if not generous room for gaelic sport and other manifestations of Irish culture.
That's good, because media coverage has massive importance for how we see culture, society, politics. Most of us have never met Gerry Adams or Ian Paisley or Tony Blair or George Bush but we all have firm opinions about them. What we tend to forget is that our thinking about these men and the world in general is shaped to a great degree by the way the media report them to us or, as Greenslade underlines, don't report them.
The former Mirror man is sharp in his criticism of the British press for failing to present Britain as a major protagonist in the conflict. Unfortunately, that's still the case. You'll search British newspapers long and hard before you come across an article which places ultimate responsibility for our present mess on the British government. Why so? Because if an idea is not reported and written about, given space on the airwaves, it's harder to take that idea seriously.
One key example: an overwhelming majority of the Irish people and almost 50% of the people in the north are nationalist – that is, they want Irish unity. Yet you won't hear debates on the BBC, read reports in southern newspapers or hear phone-ins that give serious consideration to the practicalities of Irish unity. If you ask why not, you'll be told: "Because it might upset the unionists."
That's a lie. The topic is avoided because, if it were aired seriously and consistently, it might grow as a real prospect in people's thinking.
And that would never do.
