One of my favourite trends in marketing is where companies that produce a harmful product seek credit from politicians and society for railing against the dangers of that harmful product. You know the stuff of which I speak: “Drink Aware” ads paid for by the alcohol industry; “Gambling aware” ads published with money donated by Paddy Power; that sort of thing.
Today RTÉ launches Clarity, a new strand of coverage, in which our journalism will counter the deliberate manipulation of facts and distorted video and digital content to challenge false and fake news.
It will help to equip you, the reader, the listener, the follower, the viewer, with accurate and impartial facts so you can judge for yourselves where the real story is.
I do not propose, in this article, to go through a lengthy list of incidents over the years where RTE has been guilty of providing the Irish public with something less than a fully rounded and thoroughly researched version of the truth, but suffice to say that if I was the organisation behind Mission to Prey, then I would be more hesitant to proclaim myself the final arbiter of fake versus real news. We all get it wrong sometimes.
In any case, that’s hardly the point. Fake News is real, but that’s not the point either. I can even give you examples of the kind of thing RTE is officially talking about, and that still wouldn’t be the point. For example, this kind of nonsense slop is a constant, these days, on Elon Musk’s version of twitter:
Why is that not the point? Well, because if you are dumb enough, or sufficiently uninformed, to believe that the President of Ireland can unilaterally “put corrupt Irish politicians on trial” (as 15,000 people who “liked” that tweet apparently may be) then nothing RTE can do or say is likely to get you to cop on, is it?
No, the point is that RTE is entirely unwilling to talk about what the news is.
The bigger story with a tweet like the above is not that its contents are absolute nonsense, though they are. The bigger story is that there are so many tens of thousands of people in Ireland, and beyond our shores, desperate to believe that the contents are true. In fact, I would argue that people are not sharing tweets like that one because they believe them to be literally true, but because those tweets reflect a public sentiment that RTE is entirely committed to ensuring never sees the light of day.
If you are in RTE, or one of the myriad news outlets in this country now funded by the taxpayer to “combat fake news”, then for you journalism is just a long slog through fake and hyperbolic tweets to patiently inform people that “the President can’t do that” or “this isn’t actually happening”. It is an excuse not to understand the sentiment behind the slop, and to write it all off as if slop only comes in one direction.
What do I mean by “slop”? I mean nonsense that reflects the world as we might wish it to be rather than the world as it is.
And, under that (I think reasonable) definition, who is a greater producer of slop than the Irish media?
For example, is “Conor McGregor is going to round up corrupt Irish politicians” any more or less slop than RTE’s speciality: The national conversation about something RTE has decided is important? Last week, for example, Ben Scallan of this parish was invited onto RTE to discuss “toxic masculinity”, which is something that RTE has decided exists, or has, more accurately, wished into existence.
Is there any evidence that the overwhelming majority – or even a significant minority – of Irish men display a masculinity that is “toxic”? The answer is that there is so little evidence for this that RTE had to base their conversation on a fictional (and very good, admittedly) TV drama. But a fantasy is no less a fantasy because it is spoken soberly by Katie Hannon on prime time television than it is if spoken by some dweeb on twitter.
And the reasoning is the same: You believe Conor McGregor will put politicians on trial because your worldview needs you to believe such a thing might happen. And you believe lots of men might be toxic because your worldview needs you to believe such a thing might happen.
It was the same, you will recall, after the murder of Ashling Murphy. Then we were all forced to sit through endless RTE debates about how “Irish men needed to do better”. It was the same after the entirely fake scandal about teachers in a Carlow school allegedly being troubled by the shape of female bottoms while students were wearing leggings. And this is just in one area.
You could add to that all sorts of other slop: RTE’s perennial insistence that diversity is a strength, or its endless coverage of the grievances of elite feminist women over the number of vagina-owners sitting at cabinet. Or its firm commitment, enshrined in RTE policy, to only ever cover one side of the Climate Change debate.
If “fake news” is simply people wishing narratives into existence, then RTE is Ireland’s single greatest producer of the stuff. And now it wants to police it.
It is, as Sarah says on this week’s podcast, the equivalent of Mike Tyson setting up a commission against violence to women.