research

chewy

some mailed indymedia asking this question

"hi i am a first year economics and sociology student in u.l and and for an
assignment i need to find out what the irish independants reputed ideological
position is! it would be of great help to me if you could of any help"

now whenever someon post a question like that on these boards some shout lazy journalist... research it yourself...

but _how_ would you go about researching it...

find books on media in ireland (very few ).
ask the indo itself?

DMC

Yes.. it would be hard to know... as you said.

For me, it would be whatever the whim of the day is.... I'd say pro-Fine Gael in the 80's.. and post-Haughey Fianna Fail. They utterly dismissed Michael Noonan at the last election. But I wouldnt take that as gospel, but they are centrist.

Probably the best person to ask would be the clerk at Sir AJF O'Reilly's polling station.

flogen

Researching something like this would be pretty tough alright and there are no easy ways to do it if you want to do it properly.
If they're looking for their ideology over the last few years then the easiest thing to do is go through their archives and note stuff like a) what stories they cover/don't cover b) how much space they tend to give to stories in comparison with rivals and c) how balanced is the story (how many sources do they have and from what side of the fence, if any, are they taken from?).
There's a fair bit more to it than that too, and reading through the archives of other newspapers is vital so you know what the Independent has and hasn't covered and you get to understand the goings on of each day better.

thats where I'd start, anyway!

flogen

chewy

well i was thinking get the infamous political compass... find the indo editorial position on the various questions they ask and fill in the form?

compare with international newspapers...?

thinker of quicker ways would be getting all todays papers and comparing the way stories are covered in each paper and decipher from there...

flogen

chewy wrote:

well i was thinking get the infamous political compass... find the indo editorial position on the various questions they ask and fill in the form?

compare with international newspapers...?

thinker of quicker ways would be getting all todays papers and comparing the way stories are covered in each paper and decipher from there...

I suppose the editorial would be as good a section as any to use, it is supposed to be the voice of the newspaper.
Chances are picking any day should give you a good idea of their ideology, but for a college project you'd be better off giving it a bit more depth, also looking at their comments on a huge range of topics would allow you to form a much more detailed analysis than just one or two incidents.

flogen

thror

flogen wrote:

Researching something like this would be pretty tough alright and there are no easy ways to do it if you want to do it properly.
If they're looking for their ideology over the last few years then the easiest thing to do is go through their archives and note stuff like a) what stories they cover/don't cover b) how much space they tend to give to stories in comparison with rivals and c) how balanced is the story (how many sources do they have and from what side of the fence, if any, are they taken from?).
There's a fair bit more to it than that too, and reading through the archives of other newspapers is vital so you know what the Independent has and hasn't covered and you get to understand the goings on of each day better.

thats where I'd start, anyway!

flogen

Yep you've hit the nail on the head there flogen.

I did an ideological analysis of the Indo, focussing on their approach to reporting of gay and lesbian issues. A lot of it is fairly embedded, so you have to make sure to take everything into consideration, even down to the smallest word. For instance, i noticed that a lot of the time gay issues were often placed beside stories about paedophilia - while any right minded person knows that neither are related - the two can be connected subconsciously. Ditto for the fact that some 'gay' stories were written by the Indos religious affairs correspondents, even though there was nothing religious in the subject matter of the stories.

A great resource is the archives on the Indo website www.unison.ie . Then when you find the dates that you need, you can find the articles more easily in the basement archives in UL.

If you want any more info about my research, just give me a PM!

chewy

you right flogen but i was trying to think of some way to put a limit on the research you could spend years on it...

as somebody else said theres no easy way to do it... but...

it was more a question of how to research then the actually the question... i'd pass on some of this to the student from ul but her email bounced


interesting stuff there thor too

flogen

yeah thor, quite interesting stuff alright.
I know what you mean chewy, you could spend forever at it and your approach would cut a lot of time out of it, I was just giving you an example of the research involved if you wanted to go deep into the topic, the editorial can only give you so much and there is also the perception readers have to each one. A reader expects an editorial to be opinionated, just like the comment pages but they may not expect to be mis-led in a news piece and so the resonance of bad reporting or subconsious things like thors examples can all create a bigger impact. Also a paper could have a very respectable editorial POV (the indo isn't going to tell people that it thinks homosexuality is a religious issue full stop) while in reality it has a less respectable position in practice...

anyway...

flogen

monument

DMC wrote:

but they are centrist.

They are certainly not centrist in economical terms – they lean a good bit to the right. I don’t read the Indo much any more (once or twice a week at most), but I have to say they are mostly conservative with a few more liberal voices shining through. In more media terms, they are becoming more and more sensationalist – red top like, and this was happening long before they went tabloid-size.

It wouldn’t do any harm in actually asking the Indo what their official ideological editorial position is, although they may give a politics-like answer.