Noel Doran, Editor of the Irish News, contemplates the risks and responsibilities of the editor’s desk - excerpt IV (The GAA and the Police).

…. see extract I, extract II, and extract III.

However, the greatest difficulty we faced over policing came not from any political party but through our relationship with an organisation for which is very special to me as an individual and to the Irish News as a paper, namely the GAA.

From partition onwards, the GAA had an official sanction, known as rule 21, which prevented any of its members from joining either the British army or the northern police force.

It was widely regarded as an anachronism, but, although there were a considerable number of people in the GAA who wanted to get rid of it, there were some others for whom the time never seemed to be quite right for movement. (more…)

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Noel Doran, Editor of the Irish News, contemplates the risks and responsibilities of the editors desk - excerpt III (The Patton Report and the Police).

…. see extract I and extract II.

The other side of the coin followed shortly afterward with the publication of the Patten report in September 1999 with its proposals for new policing structures.

Policing is the issue which absolutely goes to the heart of the matter in the north and there is never going to be a proper, fair and lasting settlement until it is resolved once and for all.

The nationalist relationship with the police force in the north, from the foundation of the state and due to a number of factors, some compelling and others quite debatable, ranged from the decidedly cool to the openly hostile. (more…)

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Noel Doran, Editor of the Irish News, contemplates the risks and responsibilities of the editors desk - excerpt II

…. see extract I

When the conflict was at its height in 1972, we had over 500 people murdered in the space of a single year, thousands more were injured or left homeless and further thousands were either imprisoned or interned without trial.

The big achievement for the Irish News was to produce a newspaper every night in the heart of Belfast with all this mayhem taking place, but, incredibly enough, the paper, together with the other titles in the city, also broke all existing circulation
records at the same time.

This was because the broadcasting structures of the day were not exactly sophisticated and people in all parts of the north needed their newspapers to provide even the most basic information about what going on.

As the troubles wore on, the full impact of the relentless expansion of radio and television services began to be felt, the level of violence decreased and people did not want to read about it in the same depth in any case.

The result was a sharp decline for all the papers, which in the case of the Irish News, which had suffered from a long-term lack of investment, could easily have proved terminal. (more…)

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Noel Doran, Editor of the Irish News, contemplates the risks and responsibilities of the editors desk - excerpt I (Intro and Presidential Election).

The Irish News, I’m pleased to say, is an all Ireland paper, available in every part of the island on the morning of publication, and we flatter ourselves that, in percentage terms, we have a larger audience in the Republic than the likes of the Irish Times and the Irish Independent do in the north.

Essentially though, we are and we always have been the voice of constitutional northern nationalism. We regard ourselves as being politically independent, we do not tell our readers who they should vote for, and, as we are older than any Irish political
party, north or south, we by tradition avoid endorsing any individual group, while reserving the right to highlight particular issues and to have our say in the course of any referendum.

What we do promote is the cause of peace and reconciliation. We do not believe that progress can be achieved either through coercion in any form or by asking unionists to be less unionist or nationalists to be less nationalist. We basically want to extend the hand of friendship in all directions and move forward in an inclusive way. (more…)

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I remember asking a colleague at UTV what code of ethics underpinned his journalism. And he made what then seemed to me to be an extraordinary remark.

He told me he worked out what way to behave from trying consistently to do the job well. To put what he said in a more abstract way, he thought that by aiming for excellence in his work, a set of principles was revealed to him, which, when put into effect, enabled him to perform to a higher standard.

And it just seemed to me he had got things back to front. The logical way of proceeding is that you develop your ethics first and then you apply it to what you do. Your principles inform your way of working, not the other way round.

By way of interest I then asked him what was this code he had learnt on the job.

Honesty came top of the list. A lack of bias, very important in Northern Ireland, came next. Cynicism about authority, he included, which we might interpret as a healthy scepticism about official statements. But compassion and sensitivity were also rated as key virtues.

For what I felt was a philosophically incoherent approach, it struck me as a remarkably robust and sensible set of ideas. Not only that, since he is one of the very best journalists I know, his strategy clearly worked in practice. But did it work in theory?

The answer is that it does. Whether he was conscious of it or not that my colleague’s approach chimed with the ideas of the philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre.

Contrary to many modern writers on ethics who believe in essence that you can generate values appropriate for everyday living from the comfort of your own armchair, MacIntyre, though he doesn’t put it this way, argues that by doing, you learn the right thing to do.

When you put it like that it should be everybody’s modus operandi. And as I’ve pointed out it’s what some people, like my colleague, already do.

But it’s not at all what many philosophers think we should be doing. Blame it on Descartes. He encouraged the belief that each of us is composed of a physical body and a disembodied mind. The body is subject to irrational impulses, desires and
emotions but the mind obeys the rules of logic and mathematics.

Descartes’ famous saying Cogito ergo sum: I think therefore I am, exemplifies the view that the body and its senses are not an accurate guide to reality. It’s only the mind that can guarantee truth.

It followed from this approach that pure reason divorced from the distorting influences of culture and personality became the key to developing new ethical principles. This conclusion took on greater significance as people increasingly lost their belief in God and their faith in the values that religion upheld.

The new approach rested greatly on the realisation that while people across times and across continents had radically different cultures, each shared the same ability to think in logically consistent ways.

The task then was to find principles, which compelled themselves to all, whatever their background because they were literally so reasonable.

To take two examples: Kant’s dictum: Only follow a rule if you’re happy that the rule be followed by everybody.

A modern influential philosopher John Rawls has another ingenious strategy. The veil of ignorance: devise rules of justice on the assumption that you don’t know what your place in society is: rich or poor, with a disability or without, young or old, male or
female.

These sort of ideas strike many people as (a) very clever and (b) as having the potential to produce suitable guides to life. The problem is that I don’t know many people if indeed anyone who lives by them.

So the search continues for a philosophical device to sort out good moral principles from bad. A kind of quality assurance machine for ethics. The difficulty is that we haven’t yet found such a device.

…continues

Extract from a paper presented by Jamie Delargy (Business Correspondent, UTV, Belfast) at the 11th Cleraun Media Conference (Oct 2006). See the presentation in full from the Cleraun website here.

Is an ethical journalist simply a competent journalist? will be the topic of a future Cleraun Media Forum, to take place in early 2007.

The hour long session (20.00 – 21.00 pm) is to be moderated by Jamie Delargy. (Venue: Cleraun University Centre, 90 Foster Avenue, Mount Merrion, Co. Dublin).

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Monday’s Muse.

If we have books on journalistic ethics, industry codes of practice, legal and regulatory environments, newsroom culture and graduate training, which of them is going to have the most impact on the conscience of a reporter?

Why, and why not?

The Ethical Journalist, Tony Harcup (University of Sheffield, UK) published 30th November 2006.

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