Stale Irish Times

alleepally

Ok, so here we are into Autumn and through the summer the Irish Times have trotted out the same boring features (paraphrased below)


"Summer Reading - Ireland's Top Writers give their recommendations for the perfect holiday read"

"Summer Memories - Ireland's most well known people tell of their memories of childhood"

blah de blah de blah.

Wish they would do more features which allow for reader's views instead like the Guardian does.

I just find it lately to be dull, dull, dull.

flogen

sounds like a paper with some pages to fill IMO!

flogen

Flukey

All papers and indeed other media can be like that during the Summer months. I wouldn't worry too much about it. There are other things to concern us and take our attention during the Summer too!

mike65

August is the cruelest month for newspaper editors! All the papers are filled with the lazy summer reading/summer schools/holliday breaks crap.

I rarely read the IT as its too lefty-bolshy from an editorial perspective though has some good liberal/liberatarian columists. I get the impression that media observers feel the paper is'nt really going anywhere under the current editor Emily O'Reilly.

Mike.

simu

mike65 wrote:

I rarely read the IT as its too lefty-bolshy from an editorial perspective though has some good liberal/liberatarian columists. I get the impression that media observers feel the paper is'nt really going anywhere under the current editor Emily O'Reilly.

Mike.

Ya mean Geraldine Kennedy?

As for those summer memories articles, didn't they do something very similar a few years ago, if not last year? That doesn't bother me all that much though because I read it more to keep in touch with news and to read the opinion columns than for the lifestyle articles.

Flukey

It's just typical silly season stuff! Less staff around, less news around and less readers around leads to that kind of thing.

grumpytrousers

At least the Times bother to have a column with the heading 'silly season'.

Admittedly it takes up only 1/10 of an inside page, and possibly should be a banner on page 1, but there you go...

article6

mike65 wrote:

I rarely read the IT as its too lefty-bolshy from an editorial perspective though has some good liberal/liberatarian columists.

Just stop reading the two middle pages. It did wonders for my blood pressure.

grumpytrousers

I find Mark Steyn gets me a-ragin'....mind you - if the idea of a columnist is to

a) get you thinking
b) constantly make you re-assess your own beliefs

isn't it a good job that oxygen thieving bellends (i don't mean that in a bad way!) like himself and Brig Gen Myers continue to churn out the goods all summer long!!!

monument

[sarcastic]My favour IT columnist is Kevin Myers. [/sarcastic]

AngelofFire

It beats that right wing rag the indo any day.

flogen

AngelofFire wrote:

It beats that right wing rag the indo any day.

lol, yeah, they're a bunch of Hitlers in the Indo..!

flogen

mike65

monument wrote:

[sarcastic]My favour IT columnist is Kevin Myers. [/sarcastic]

I'm a fan...esp when he pissed off BMW Ireland and they threatened to pull thier advertising, resulting in a groveling appology from Conor Brady.

Mike.

ps simu, yes I meant Geraldine Kennedy.

Flukey

Every paper has its slants. You read each one with that in mind. You'll get the main points on any story from any of the papers. They may present them slightly differently, but you can ignore that if you are looking for the details of what happened rather than why they think it happened. We get the Indo and I can read it with that in mind. Some of their stuff is good, like their sports reporting. You can't put too much of a political slant on a match report!

sceptre

AngelofFire wrote:

It beats that right wing rag the indo any day.

Nothing to do with being a "right wing rag" but the Indo is a pretty crappy newspaper anyway

tadgher

Flukey wrote:

Every paper has its slants.

Does anyone get the feeling that G Kennedy is making an effort to change the Irish Times's one? She decided to pay for the columns of that Steyn person, and now I see she's paying some market fundamentalist to write on a Saturday.

Once a PD, always a PD?

Hairy Homer

mike65 wrote:

I rarely read the IT as its too lefty-bolshy from an editorial perspective .

WHAAAATTTT???????

Get with the 21st century man!!!

That statement may have been true at one stage but at the moment it's utter nonsense, and indeed has been for some time.

The IT has taken a lurch to the right under that silly woman (Geraldine Kennedy) who was awarded the editor's chair some time ago and who has made it a haven for the nuttiest of Nutty Neocons such as Mark Steyn, and the rabid right-wing rantings of such as John Waters and Kevin Myers.

It retains some of its traditional anti-clerical (anti-Catholic in reality) stance with the regular column by Mary O'Flaherty whinging on about what the nuns did to the poor and unwanted of society when the state didn't want to know back in the 50s.

But really Fintan O'Toole is the only 'wishy washy liberal' left to push the point of view of comfortable decent 'why can't the world be a nicer place?' middle-class middle-aged middle-of-the-road people (bow) for pandering to whom the paper is often criticised by its hard-line (if soft headed) rivals in the columns of Independent Newspapers.

Many of the old guard were cleared out of the Times when it 'restructured' a few years ago. Those that remain appear to have been browbeaten into not saying anything that might smack of dissent or lack of solidarity with the 'war on terrorism' viz Vincent Browne's column that said 'maybe not all Americans are utter bastards' which was trumpeted as the great U-turn, or Flip Flop as it's known now, on his position on Iraq.

It's now a supreme irony that even as the paper is being pilloried by the likes of yourself and that former fellow traveller of a communist terrorist organisation Eoghan Harris (talk about a flip flopper) for being the organ of mushy liberals who refuse to live in the real world (he was at it again last Sunday) it is in fact now an apologist for the worst excesses of American expansionism.

Read what Steyn and Waters had to say about the massacre in Beslan in Monday's paper.

A taster:

Steyn

' The reality is that the IRA and ETA and the ANC and any number of secessionist and nationalist movements all the way back to the American revolutionaries could have seized schoolhouses and shot all the children.

But they didn't. Because, if they had, there would have been widespread revulsion within the perpetrators' own communities. To put it at its most tactful, that doesn't seem to be an issue here.

So the particular character of this ‘insurgency’ [derives from] . . . well, let's see, what was the word missing from those three analyses of the Beslan massacre? Here's a clue: half the dead ‘Chechen separatists’ were not Chechens at all, but Arabs.

and he continues

Abdulrahman al-Rashed, the general manager of al-Arabiya Television, wrote a column in Asharq al-Awsat headlined, ‘The Painful Truth: All The World's Terrorists Are Muslims!’ ‘Our terrorist sons are an end-product of our corrupted culture,’ he wrote. This is true. But.. the question remains: So what? What are you going to do about it?

It should be remembered that al-Arabiya is one of the new channels established by the Americans in Iraq and doesn't suffer the same hassles as Al Jazeera--which has had its offices closed (again) this week by the new government of Iraq.

And Steyn's final point

What happened in one Russian schoolhouse is an abomination that has to be defeated, not merely regretted. But the only guys with any kind of plan are the Bush administration. Last Thursday, the President committed himself yet again to wholesale reform of the Muslim world.

To Mr Waters

In the horror of Beslan we see again the face of the enemy we first encountered three years ago. We look into his or her eyes and know that hatred grows, grievance festers, determination increases, the pitilessness has not waned.
.......
But still the silliness goes on. The real enemy, we are told, is our own leadership: George W. Bush, who is a stupid man, or Tony Blair, who is a liar.

.......
The force most threatening to the West today is not the fanaticism or the weaponry or the ingenuity of Islamism, but the simplistic sentiment of its own people, which, reducing the mystery of the human condition to a set of Pollyanna platitudes, reserves judgment and condemnation for those on its own side. This tendency arises from the belief that the world would be a nice place if everyone would just embrace the concepts of peace, love and understanding.

.......

We have seen in Spain how al-Qaeda was able to manipulate public sentiment to change a government; within a year, the same may have happened in the US and Britain.

........

The moral choice facing each of us who lives now in the protectorate of the US is not between peace and war, but between standing four square behind those who defend us, or joining those who, knowing they will be protected anyway, choose to abuse their freedom by spitting at those who would save their children's lives.

This forum is not the place to debate the points raised in these articles, namely that the Beslan massacre is the work of the Arab/Muslim world. Even as doubts are now raised that there were any Arabs at all at Beslan. The jury is still out on that one.

But there is no way on God's earth that you could call those columns (published in the same paper on the same day) as being representative of a 'lefty-bolshy' paper. It's not any more.

But by God we need one.

IMHO.

HH

grumpytrousers

Hairy Homer wrote:

WHAAAATTTT???????

Get with the 21st century man!!!

That statement may have been true at one stage but at the moment it's utter nonsense, and indeed has been for some time.

The IT has taken a lurch to the right under that silly woman (Geraldine Kennedy) who was awarded the editor's chair some time ago and who has made it a haven for the nuttiest of Nutty Neocons such as Mark Steyn, and the rabid right-wing rantings of such as John Waters and Kevin Myers.

It retains some of its traditional anti-clerical (anti-Catholic in reality) stance with the regular column by Mary O'Flaherty whinging on about what the nuns did to the poor and unwanted of society when the state didn't want to know back in the 50s.

But really Fintan O'Toole is the only 'wishy washy liberal' left to push the point of view of comfortable decent 'why can't the world be a nicer place?' middle-class middle-aged middle-of-the-road people (bow) for pandering to whom the paper is often criticised by its hard-line (if soft headed) rivals in the columns of Independent Newspapers.

Many of the old guard were cleared out of the Times when it 'restructured' a few years ago. Those that remain appear to have been browbeaten into not saying anything that might smack of dissent or lack of solidarity with the 'war on terrorism' viz Vincent Browne's column that said 'maybe not all Americans are utter bastards' which was trumpeted as the great U-turn, or Flip Flop as it's known now, on his position on Iraq.

It's now a supreme irony that even as the paper is being pilloried by the likes of yourself and that former fellow traveller of a communist terrorist organisation Eoghan Harris (talk about a flip flopper) for being the organ of mushy liberals who refuse to live in the real world (he was at it again last Sunday) it is in fact now an apologist for the worst excesses of American expansionism.

Read what Steyn and Waters had to say about the massacre in Beslan in Monday's paper.

A taster:

Steyn


and he continues



It should be remembered that al-Arabiya is one of the new channels established by the Americans in Iraq and doesn't suffer the same hassles as Al Jazeera--which has had its offices closed (again) this week by the new government of Iraq.

And Steyn's final point




To Mr Waters




This forum is not the place to debate the points raised in these articles, namely that the Beslan massacre is the work of the Arab/Muslim world. Even as doubts are now raised that there were any Arabs at all at Beslan. The jury is still out on that one.

But there is no way on God's earth that you could call those columns (published in the same paper on the same day) as being representative of a 'lefty-bolshy' paper. It's not any more.

But by God we need one.

IMHO.

HH

Christ on a bike.

somebody who actually *reads* John Waters...

My aunt was visiting last night and mentioned JW and said she didn't agree with him. I said I coudln't comment on any piece he'd written for the Times EVER as I'd never made it past the third paragraph without losing the will to live.

Turgid thesauraus driven prose delivered with the kind of panache that (were they posessed of the gift of speech) slugs would call 'laboured', chippendale suites would call 'wooden' and proctologists would have no hesitation in labelling as 'utter ****'.

erm -i'm referring to JWs writing there. not my own. although...yeah-di-yeah

mike65

Okay I'm out of touch with the geo-political stance of the IT, maybe I should start reading it again. BTW there's not much point in quoting out of context,
I'd prefere to read the whole article. The bits you include are'nt so outrageous really the only bit I'd quibble with is the idea Bush has a plan.

Mike.

Hairy Homer

mike65 wrote:

Okay I'm out of touch with the geo-political stance of the IT, maybe I should start reading it again. BTW there's not much point in quoting out of context,
I'd prefere to read the whole article. The bits you include are'nt so outrageous really the only bit I'd quibble with is the idea Bush has a plan.

Mike.

Well, Mike, I did helpfully give you links to the full articles so that you can read them in their entirety (click on the authors' names in my first post) You will need a subscription to Ireland.com, however, or you can try and get hold of yesterday's Times. .

I would actually find plenty with which to quibble in those articles, but this is a media thread. The only point I want to make here is that they are from a very pro-'War on Terrorism' viewpoint and that this is becoming commonplace in the IT, not that the poor old IT gets much credit for it.

What hacks me off is that so many of these right-wing types like to criticise the 'liberal left-wing press' [What liberal left-wing press?] for its supposed take on things before carefully debunking the arguments that they themeselves have presumed to make on their opponents' behalf. (See Waters' column for a classic example)

This is lazy shoddy journalism - actually it's not journalism at all, it's polemics - which purports to be balanced but is in fact false debate. It presents the writer with a facile argument, that no opponent has made, so that the writer can then appear to demolish an inferior intellect from a great height. It's gutless and insults the intelligence of the reader.

Waters, for example, implies that the only argument of the dissenters to the war is that Bush is an idiot.

That's not the argument. I do think Bush is an idiot but the arguments against the war go much deeper than that. And I'm quite cabable of making them myself. It's not like I need Waters to tell me what my own arguments should be.

Here's a thought, staying within the limits (just) of this thread:

Both those articles to which I have referred and linked use arguments that are based on the unquestioning assumption that outside Arab Islamic hands were at fault for the massacre in Beslan. At the time of writing there is no evidence for this, other than 'reports' made by soldiers at the scene and no bodies or identities have been produced to verify these claims. Even the Russian press is growing skeptical.

If it transpires that this was an action ( a horrible, unjustifiable and utterly repugnant action) that was wholly confined to the local conflict in the Caucasus, it will be interesting to see what will be the response by the paper, or the two columnists who have tried to present it in a different context.

Holding of breath not recommended.

mike65

Hairy Homer wrote:

[What liberal left-wing press?]

Buy the Sunday Tribune or the Grauniad in the week.

Hairy Homer wrote:

If it transpires that this was an action ( a horrible, unjustifiable and utterly repugnant action) that was wholly confined to the local conflict in the Caucasus, it will be interesting to see what will be the response by the paper, or the two columnists who have tried to present it in a different context.

Holding of breath not recommended.

Well dubious even groundless speculational is'nt excatly rare in the media (of any colour)

Mike.

Hairy Homer

mike65 wrote:

Buy the Sunday Tribune or the Grauniad in the week.



Well dubious even groundless speculational is'nt excatly rare in the media (of any colour)

Mike.

So the only Irish liberal left-wing paper you can think of is the Sunday Tribune, which is on life support and has perhaps the smallest circulation of any of the Sunday papers.

I do buy and read it every week (like you couldn't tell) but it's not been the same since Eamon McCann stopped contributing his caustic sports column.

Presumably, as a good Trot, they couldn't afford him. :-)

article6

RE Mark Steyn and John Waters... in fairness, they contribute a total of two articles a week, out of about 20 opinion pieces in the newspaper, leaving out editorials. And neither of them could be described as reasonable.

Perhaps they were chosen for the "Myers Factor"; that is, to get right-on Irish Times readers worked up and to let them exercise their left-liberal prejudices about "dumb conservatives" without lowering themselves to buying the Indo?

Oh... and Hairy Homer: Kevin Myers and John Waters were writing for the Times before Geraldine Kennedy became editor.

As for the Indo being a "right-wing rag", they have Cruiser and Sam Smyth, don't they? The Indo can be at least as balanced as the Times. And you don't know how much it hurts me to say that.

Hairy Homer

article6 wrote:

RE Mark Steyn and John Waters... in fairness, they contribute a total of two articles a week, out of about 20 opinion pieces in the newspaper, leaving out editorials. And neither of them could be described as reasonable.

Perhaps they were chosen for the "Myers Factor"; that is, to get right-on Irish Times readers worked up and to let them exercise their left-liberal prejudices about "dumb conservatives" without lowering themselves to buying the Indo?

If it was just Myers I could accept that argument. But the combined forces of Steyn, Waters and Myers all writing on the same subject and making the same points (world Islamic fascism murders kids in Beslan/anybody who votes against Bush or Blair is playing into their hands and is a traitor) on consecutive days is actually causing this 'right-on left liberal etc etc' to consider not making the IT a compulsory daily purchase. And judging by the sliding circulation figures, which they printed last week, I wouldn't be alone.

article6 wrote:

Oh... and Hairy Homer: Kevin Myers and John Waters were writing for the Times before Geraldine Kennedy became editor.

I know that. But their rabid right-wing spoutings have become more of the norm than the exception over the last while. Where are all the liberal lefties that the right wingers keep sprouting about?

Harris in the Sindo three days ago was ranting on about the left-wing establishment of the Times/RTE . (Can't find the quote on the Web)

A couple of weeks ago, the Sunday Times had a quote from Eamon Delaney, editor of the new Magill, to the effect that his new organ would challenge the lefty-liberal media consensus that so annoys people and instead give the public the wholesome 'America is great/So is Israel/the market will make you free' rhetoric as an alternative.

Wow!!!! Looks like he's found a niche!!!!

Mike65 gave two examples of leftie papers. The Tribune - which is one of the smaller Irish papers - and the Guardian, whose circulation is dwarfed in the British broadsheet market by that of the Torygraph. Not to mention all the tabloids. Oh, he could have mentioned the Phoenix, which is run on a shoestring and has a circulation to match.

The fact is that the mass media is overwhelmingly right-wing, yet many of its columnists bleat about the 'consensus' of the 'leftie liberals' that make up the 'establishment'. Which is utter bollox. It's like telling kids about the Bogie Man. Sooner or later the kids wise up and tell you to piss off dad. But there are adults out there who seem to think that the 'media' is a monolithic left-wing thought police.

Kids have more sense.

article6 wrote:

As for the Indo being a "right-wing rag", they have Cruiser and Sam Smyth, don't they? The Indo can be at least as balanced as the Times. And you don't know how much it hurts me to say that.

I wouldn't know because I never buy the bumroll. I sometimes see the SINDO which does my spleen enough damage for a week.

article6

Hairy Homer wrote:

I know that. But their rabid right-wing spoutings have become more of the norm than the exception over the last while. Where are all the liberal lefties that the right wingers keep sprouting about?

"The norm than the exception"? This is still the same IT we're talking about, right?

Vincent Browne, Fintan O'Toole, Garret Fitzgerald. I could go on. If I stick to my figure of 20 'comment' articles a week, I would say if you combine guests and journalists, about 13 would be from a broadly Leftist view. There are exceptions - the blowhards already mentioned, the Unionist who writes on Thursdays (I think), etc. But when you combine the opinion pieces, and contributors like Lara Marlowe and Conor O'Clery, the overall skew is strongly anti-American foreign policy, and to a lesser extent Leftist and liberal on domestic policy.

Hairy Homer wrote:

Mike65 gave two examples of leftie papers. The Tribune - which is one of the smaller Irish papers - and the Guardian, whose circulation is dwarfed in the British broadsheet market by that of the Torygraph. Not to mention all the tabloids. Oh, he could have mentioned the Phoenix, which is run on a shoestring and has a circulation to match.

True - I don't disagree that there is a Right-wing bias in most of the media; all I'm saying is that there is a Left-wing bias in the Times. (I don't consider the Phoenix to hold any bias towards the Left, though - they have exposed politicians and activists of all hues for what they are.)

Hairy Homer wrote:

I wouldn't know because I never buy the bumroll. I sometimes see the SINDO which does my spleen enough damage for a week.

I get it for free, so at least I'm not lining Tony's pockets. And besides, officially, I only read it for the chess.

grumpytrousers

I get it for free, so at least I'm not lining Tony's pockets.

*ahem* it's 'Sir Anthony' to you, mate...

regarding Steyn, Myarse and Waterzzzz in general, it's the positioning of Steyns venomous bilge in the 'news' section that gets my goat. I mean - fine, he is certainly more than entitled to his opinion, and part of me thinks he doesn't believe half what he writes, rather he knows there's a steady paycheck involved...

If they put him on the Op/Ed page it wouldn't be too bad...i mean, there's a tacit 'You Don't Have To Agree With Anything On This Page' about that part of the paper...but the 'news' pages should be kept pretty much 'opinion' free.

And if that means Conor O'Clery has to move his (as stated Anti Dubya) stuff on a saturday, then so be it...

tadgher

Hairy Homer wrote:

this 'right-on left liberal etc etc' to consider not making the IT a compulsory daily purchase. And judging by the sliding circulation figures, which they printed last week, I wouldn't be alone.

I bought the Irish Times for the last ten years, but when they started paying Mark Steyn to publish his trash, I became an occasional purchaser.

The problem I have with Steyn is not his opinions, it's that he's just a political hack. At least Myers is capable of coming out with unorthodox opinions - Steyn is just a Republican Party propagandist. Also, his facetious, ad hominem style makes me want to gag.

If only the Guardian would produce a few pages of Irish news, and hire Tom Humphries to write about GAA!