Ruairi Quinn - internet is now one of two major threats to the media

Ellis Dee · 03-02-2012 04:24PM

The Internet is a medium, and companies that were big in newspapers, magazines, radio and other traditional media long ago have, to varying degrees, recognised its potential and developed their presence in it. Steam engines were once the cat's whiskers, and then the internal combustion engine came along. It's called progress, development, technological evolution ...:rolleyes::rolleyes:

Ruari Quinn is talking through his hole (not for the first time) when he rabbits on about accountability. If the Government have never been able to make the small handful of people who own and run the media accountable and curb their influence on politics, the economy and, especially, politicians, he is pissing against the wind if he thinks he, the Government or indeed anyone will ever be able to shut up the multitudes of us who could never have their voices heard in any medium until the Internet came along. What chance would I have had even as recently as 20 years ago of having a letter containing some mild criticism of the kiddy-fiddler church published in the Indo, or the Irish Times, for example?:cool:

Quinn is as stupid as a buggy-whip manufacturer trying to ban the car industry. What he and Labour should do instead is develop a really good web site and allow everyone to have their say on it. That way he and his party may even find themselves gaining something they most desperately need - fresh ideas!:)

Brendog · 03-02-2012 04:28PM

Anonymous Back stabbers

Clearly Rick rolled numerous times...

ToxicPaddy · 03-02-2012 04:38PM

I think its amazing how much a bunch of short sighted idiots Labour have shown themselves to be lately..

If you look at Ireland, who are the major employers in this country??

Google, Facebook, Ebay, Amazon, Paypal, LinkedIn etc. These companies exist because of the Internet. How many millions of people use the Internet everyday?

Newspapers have been around for years and like all industries they need to adapt to changing times. If they can't they die. Simple as that. There is no reason a newspaper can't offer an online presence that's as good as a hardcopy. If anything it should reduce their costs as no longer do they need to print or distribute anything.

The same journalists can write the same articles, same photographers publish the same photos etc.

If this idiot spent his time promoting the idea of more online media, encouraging companies to build a better higher quality of online presence, the it would attract more readers, better quality articles, get a better feedback on articles etc.

If the internet is soooooo bad, howcome almost every politician has a website? Why? Because the current and future generations are and will use it more and more to do things like catch up on the news, express their opinions etc.

If this dinosaur is incapable of comprehending this, I think its time he retires with his generous pension and let someone who knows what they are talking about take over.

Idiots like this in power are one of the main reasons our government is the joke it is..

Duggy747 · 03-02-2012 04:40PM

Labour - The party that doesn't like people using this baffling thing called the internet.

They're like some sort of over-protective parent that saw a news report about the dangers of the internet and decided to set fire to the family computer to protect their kids.

Does anybody in Labour actually have any...........ANY............iota of an idea of what the internet actually is and what it's used for? Is it just a big scary thing to throw random legislation at and hope it goes away?

Anyways, I prefer the internet for my news source since any misinformation is duely open to be corrected by somebody else rather than a print media downgrading itself to sensationalism and downright bullshìt to be more entertaining than factual and newsworthy.

StephenHendry · 03-02-2012 04:42PM

shocking comment from ruairi quinn. it seems his party went back in time the last few weeks with him and sherlock attacking the internet, social media etc.

token101 · 03-02-2012 04:56PM

And this guy is the Minister for Education? He'll have us back using f***ing abacuses next the bald Luddite clown.

rasper · 03-02-2012 05:02PM

Don't forget these comments are from a class of people that have to take a Facebook course at the tax payers expense naturally , and also remember pat rabbitt saying " people were on the email to me straight away" a few weeks ago , knowledge economy

bleg · 03-02-2012 06:13PM

Remember this come next election lads.

Dempsey · 03-02-2012 06:28PM

Basically, the traditional media outlets are dying and the government are watching their tax income from this sector fall so they are trying to come up with a way to prop up the traditional media so they can have more influence and easily tax it or they'll want a way to regulate the internet more for their own benefit.

Ash.J.Williams · 03-02-2012 06:36PM

Considering RTE have been acting like a Orwellian propaganda machine lately i think we can declare traditional media as untrustworthy as the web.

the purple tin · 03-02-2012 06:43PM

Ruairi Quinn is a major threat to my patience :mad:.

General General · 03-02-2012 06:47PM

Old duffer, full of sh!t, moaning on about the way things seem to be going downhill, completely irrelevant views on the future, needs to lose a bit of weight & stop pretending that he is something other than a gravy train chancer.

Lone Stone · 03-02-2012 07:01PM

right, i actually voted for these fools and now i want to get them out of power. wtf is happening in this country i wouldnt be surprised if they tried to remove access to the internet.

Stiffler2 · 03-02-2012 07:13PM

O $hit. The internet is killing news media !
Expect FG To bring in a new crapta law allowing media companies to censor social news on the internet so.

04-02-2012 01:36AM

I was speaking to someone this evening who believes that what Ruairi Quinn proposes is a good thing. He made numerous reasons for why it should be implemented, raise the level of reporting standards, more informative and honest reporting, etc, etc...

Now let's be honest here folks this is about nothing other than control. By restricting access to the Internet and imposing restrictive rules upon it allows the government to effectively filter what we can see. Much like China, Quinn and his cohorts want to be able to restrict negative news stories concerning them being available to read. How many of our politicians can with a simple phone call have a story in a national publication hushed up? How many editors will make a quiet call to their friend in the dail to let them know of a story in them or in some cases just dump a story.

At this stage RTE seems to exists solely to tell us what a great job our elected representatives are doing. Listening to people like Joe Duffy toe the company line about how we should all shut up and pay our taxes is sickening.

PseudoFamous · 04-02-2012 01:41AM

blue5000 wrote: »

minister@education.gov.ie

have fun spamming him up with new media rubbish

Oh, god, how funny would his face be if he logged on to his official email address to find some rogue internites had signed him up to dozens of hardcore fetish newsletters?

tfitzgerald · 04-02-2012 01:41AM

This whole thread should be emailed to the prick anyone know his email adress

K-9 · 04-02-2012 03:28AM

tfitzgerald wrote: »

This whole thread should be emailed to the prick anyone know his email adress

I'd say these are the type of comments he's getting at!

Got to laugh at the accuracy comments, if somebody thinks a comment on a site like this is inaccurate, you wont be long waiting to be told!

FinnLizzy · 04-02-2012 04:55AM

Right, like the rest of you, I was going into a fit of rage reading the quotes in the OP. I'm willing to give Mr. Quinn the benefit of the doubt and quote the entire part of the article regarding the media:

ONLINE MEDIA must be “prepared to embrace the same levels of accountability as traditional media”, the Minister for Education has told University of Limerick journalism students.

Ruairí Quinn said yesterday he would be worried if traditional media, such as newspapers, were to collapse against the threat of online and social media.

“The internet is now one of two major threats to the media, especially and essentially newspapers. Should all citizens worry about this? Would it really matter if the traditional press were to collapse under the strain, would the gap be filled by online media or social media? . . .

“I personally think it would matter very much. I say this in spite of the shortcomings in the traditional media. Some of these have been dramatically exposed in the Leveson inquiry in Britain.”

Mr Quinn said the strengths of traditional media were its “high degree of reliability, accuracy, authority and a willingness to accommodate different points of view”.

One of the big problems with the internet, he remarked, was that “its inhabitants are unaccountable and live in cyberspace. . . a playground for anonymous back-stabbers”.

Mr Quinn also said he would like to see “a discussion about how the powers of the Press Council and Press Ombudsman might be strengthened” and “how their remit be extended to cover online media”.

Part of the media’s job was to hold the most powerful in society to account but it must also “accept an appropriate level of accountability themselves”. Because the Defamation Act had removed huge financial risks for newspapers in printing apologies, he would like to see more printed where they were deserved.

“Where are the apologies? It’s inevitable the media make mistakes, the miracle is that they get so many things right under the time pressures in which they now have to operate. Why then, are there still so few admissions of mistakes . . . So few apologies by the media?

“What you get more often than not is something called a clarification. It’s always at the bottom of the page and written in deadpan English. So, if politicians are to be more frank with their admissions and their apologies, why not also the media? Done properly, this will enhance the media’s reputation rather than, as some would appear to think, damage it even more than the original error.”

From what I read, he may be trying to make a valid point, but expressing it so SO badly! And he is forgetting the fact that online sources are FAR more accountable than print media. What he should have been commenting on is flaming and hate speech, which is rampant in 'cyberspace'.

Jesus Wept · 04-02-2012 05:20AM

The Gubberment prefer to stab people in the front rather than with anonymity, there dacent like that.

Yakult · 04-02-2012 05:27AM

'we can't grasp it, so let's block it'

PseudoFamous · 04-02-2012 11:59AM

FinnLizzy wrote: »

What he should have been commenting on is flaming and hate speech, which is rampant in 'cyberspace'.

Why? Its clear as day labour have some sort of agenda (i.e., they're being bribed) with this internet blocking lark they're lipflapping about. Free speech is a package deal, you get everything, not just the parts you like.

blue5000 · 04-02-2012 02:49PM

tfitzgerald wrote: »

This whole thread should be emailed to the prick anyone know his email adress

No 17 page 2

Solair · 04-02-2012 03:07PM

The printing press was a threat to the town crying business. The radio was a threat to the newspaper business. Television was a threat to the movie newsreel business and ultimately wiped it out. The internet is just the latest shift in communications technology.

Saying that the internet should be regulated is a bit like saying that conversations in the pub should be regulated or that you should regulate the ocean's waves.

The technology is there, it is not going away and it will change a lot of long-established paradigms. "The Media" is always changing. It's not something you can even easily define.

All tight regulation of the internet would do is make Ireland look like some kind of oppressive state like China and drive web servers off shore.

Does the Minister not realise that the internet is an amorphous network of interconnected computers that really does not have a single physical location. Attempting to censor or regulate it is pretty much technologically impossible. Even China can't do it with the full force of a high-tech dictatorship!

The history of regulation of the media in Ireland is very scary when you look into the past. We had book bannings, censorship based on religious view and generally no concept of freedom of communication until relatively recently. That being said, our nearest neighbour, the UK was no great model for that either. They had absolutely no tolerance of commercial broadcasting and also banned movies e.g. Life of Brian etc for similarly weird reasons.

The question is very simple:

Does Ireland want to be a centre of innovation, R&D and development of the internet and the online media industries?

Or, does it rather want to suit the interests of various status-quo vested interest in the local media outlets and lobbyists from abroad and hamstring Irish internet companies and frighten off inward investors?

I think that Ireland, being a small and very open economy, should be a champion of internet freedom, not an innovator in trying to control the web!

It's a futile exercise and it can really only bring the state negative news coverage abroad and do serious damage.

An example of this kind of inward-looking, out-of-touch idiotic legislation was the recent tweak to the defamation / liable laws which defined an offense of blasphemy.

What exactly did that achieve? OK, nobody will probably ever be prosecuted under this particular piece of legislation. So, it's basically pointless. However, it did an incalculable amount of damage to Ireland's reputation abroad. Instead of being seen as a bastion of freedom of expression, a good place to base yourself for academic research etc, our Government suddenly threw us into a situation where we were being compared with socially backwards oppressive states and rekindling the old freakishly conservative, oppressed image of Ireland of old!

It is very easy to send out a message that Ireland's a religiously conservative, backwards place where you can't say boo to a priest even if that's not true. However, it is MUCH more difficult and takes decades to disprove this and undo the damage that that idiotic legislation did.

The Government needs to cop on a bit and start putting the actual national interest ahead of nonsense like this.

Personally, I think the goodwill that Ireland gets from things like regularly being close to the top of the international press freedom index is worth a LOT more to the country than cozying up to an dying group of media moguls.

DeVore · 14-02-2012 05:07AM

Someone was asking for their email addresses??

Be polite, make your points and state that you would like to meet to discuss your issues in person. You are a voter, they have to respect that cos they know FF didnt and look what happened there.

For my sins I'm put forward as the head of this particular corner of this "genie" and I like being out of that bottle and I aint going back in any time soon Mr Quinn. Not without a fight.

Nodin · 14-02-2012 09:05AM

Mr Quinn said the strengths of traditional media were its “high degree of reliability, accuracy, authority and a willingness to accommodate different points of view”.

That's odd, because I'm fairly sure that the Nyberg report pointed out the combination of Government and media "cheerleading" during the boom years which led to our current day troubles.

(O, and Sam Smyth.)

Ruairi Quinn - internet is now one of two major threats to the media

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