Whats up with irish times leniency towards gvt

nadir

Over the past couple of years, I have been awed by the Irish Times reporting which seems extremely biased in favor of supporting the government.
Be it reporting on the property situation or any of the various scandals that have transgressed. Sometimes I feel even RTE provide more fair analysis...
This article http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/weekend/2011/0115/1224287558065.html , kind of pushed me the posting this, I just don't get it. How can they write such a soft article, as if none of this was his fault, how about a rewrite regarding treason instead!
What is this, state controlled media? :pac:

nadir

whoops in hindsight, i posted this in teh wrong forum, apologies

macannrb

I could be wrong, but i remember my old English teacher saying that traditionally the Irish times is a FF newspaper, and the Irish Independent is a FG. Since its coming up to election time, maybe the slants are being revived

I have noticed the same patern over the last year too.

But RTE seems to believe the word of the government far more then anyone else. I think sometimes there's a sense of group think in Irish journalism (except for Morgan Kelly:D) and going to the foreign papers website, or the BBC, can side step this a bit

Sand

I dont see the article as being exceptionally soft to be honest. Its not an incoherent ranting and raving tirade but you can those on this forum anytime you want.

maninasia

'It was impossible not to feel a surge of sympathy for a proud, good man so publicly tethered to a time bomb.'

Yawn..incompetent..unqualified for his posts...arrogant...and possibly more. Wasn't he the finance minister for some of the boom years too?

Cookie_Monster

same with property articles, cos they make so much from property advertising. They'll never say how bad it is and always write up property, no matter how bad everyone else knows it is.

Racaraghaidh

I don't agree, the Irish Times is hardly ever positive about the government in my opinion. They seem to take a haughty condescending attitude to all parties, they have very little belief in any of them.
The IT has historically been a pro-british newspaper while the independent were for FG and the press for FF. If the times were leaning towards any party it would be labour, but that's simply due to it's prominent left wing columnists such as Fintin O Toole

davepatr07

The 2nd and 3rd paragraph there is praise for Cowan's message at the press conference...

http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/opinion/2011/0117/1224287680133.html

later12

nadir wrote: »

Over the past couple of years, I have been awed by the Irish Times reporting which seems extremely biased in favor of supporting the government [...]What is this, state controlled media? :pac:

No, it's simply a political feature. It's not very different to an opinion piece.

It isn't, in the journalistic sense, a news article.

If the IT were to run a headline akin to 'Deficit Demolished, Sovereign Investors Rejoice', that would be a lie, if it were to run a headline like 'Cowen is best of a bad lot' as a news piece, that would be biased (and probably a lie).

But this article is neither factually untrue nor biased.

macannrb wrote:

I could be wrong, but i remember my old English teacher saying that traditionally the Irish times is a FF newspaper, and the Irish Independent is a FG. Since its coming up to election time, maybe the slants are being revived

I don't think the IT have a particular agenda that would be very different to either FF or FG, but if anything the IT would traditionally have been pro Fine Gael or PD and the Indo would be more a FF paper.