Who are the Media and what am I accusing them of?

Extract from a speech delivered by Rose Tuelo Brock, columnist with the Galway City Tribune, delivered at the Media Moves Conference, Galway, June 2007.

For me, the Media is made up of the reporting, investigating, the commenting and the opinion and analysis contingents. I acknowledge that the Media is represented by people belonging to a society and are therefore a product of the society in which they find themselves.

However, I still am of the opinion that it is the duty of the media to be objective, to allow itself to see right and wrong when either is done and to report with as little bias as possible.

Unfortunately, what does happen is that, things and factors that affect certain groups of people negatively are ignored, and therefore, no positive changes take place. In this way, the media is implicated in this negative discriminatory treatment of other people. At the same time, anything positive that might be done or achieved by these certain groups, are also often not reported, thus always seeing them in a negative colour, as it were.

The Opinion and Analysis part of the media tend to pick and choose according to what interests them but they seem to desist in challenging themselves to go deeper into things that affect other people. And, apart from some Prime Time programmes, investigative journalism seems to have died with Veronica Guerin or the Beef Tribunal in which the only person who came in for criticism was the journalist.

If it were that active, we would not have a case of an Irish man running several brothels and amassing riches from it, the short imprisonment he has got allows him to come out and wallow in the riches whilst the foreign girls destroyed by is business and left to rot in addiction. If he had been a foreigner would he have been left to run his business for so long? Where are the journalists to expose such activities? Is it because it is foreign girls who are being exploited and it is the home boys who are clever enough to make money from them? Why does the sex industry, which is so damaging of the girls, left to flourish like this?

See the speech in full in pdf here