By now, hundreds of thousands of Irish people have seen the comments made by veteran Irish Times reporter Kitty Holland on BBC Northern Ireland’s “The View” programme last week. For the few that have not, here they are:
Irish Times journalist Kitty Holland says the Irish media "were right" to not publish the full comments of Ryan Casey, boyfriend of murdered 23-year-old Ashling Murphy, claiming that his remarks were "incitement to hatred" and that it wouldn't be "helpful" to share them.#gript pic.twitter.com/2Pjc71Eyhy
— gript (@griptmedia) December 1, 2023
In the aftermath of those comments, Ms. Holland has been at the centre of a storm of online criticism, though this criticism has been entirely – and dutifully – ignored by our colleagues in the rest of the media. When it comes to their own, and members of the press club in good standing, Irish journalists can generally be relied upon to adopt the see no evil, hear no evil posture – which is largely why media errors generally only receive major cross-platform coverage when committed by upstart outsider publications with no business in the very serious and rarified business of Irish journalism.
Of course, Ms. Holland did not make an error, per se, here. She simply offered a view of the world which is both widespread and dominant within Irish journalism: That it is the duty of the responsible journalist to report news with an eye to the impact of that news on public opinion. Further, that it is the duty of a responsible journalist not only to keep such an eye on how news might impact public opinion, but to actively place a thumb on the scale of public opinion to tilt that opinion in a particular way.
This mindset was elaborated upon further in a conversation this reporter had with Ms. Holland’s colleague, Colm Keena, at the tail end of last week: That conversation formed the basis of the report Mr Keena wrote about Gript Media’s own widely reported error last week. Keena was particularly interested – separate to our well ventilated mistake – in Gript’s decision, on the afternoon of November 24th, to correctly report that the alleged perpetrator of that afternoon’s stabbing attack was an Algerian national.
Keena’s attitude, to be fair, was less baldly stated than Kitty Holland on the BBC: He posed the question to me as to whether journalists have a duty not to report something which might “inflame” public opinion, if in the alternative, one could wait and put the something into a broader context. It is not an unfair question.
At the same time, however, he had no difficulty with the reporting of the fact that one of the heroes of that same afternoon was a Brazilian national: Surely, I said in response, the same principle applies: If the public have a right to know that a Brazilian man was a hero, then they have an identical right to know that an Algerian man was the (alleged) villain? In fairness to Keena, it should be noted he was posing questions to me for a report, rather than elaborating on the record about his own views, but he did not dispute that he and I have a philosophical difference over this question.
The problem with this attitude, your correspondent would argue, is not necessarily about how two outlets might make a different decision in respect to one individual story or decision – like mentioning an attacker’s nationality. On any one story, or decision, two people might come to a different conclusion in good faith.
The bigger problem is how this kind of attitude, outlined baldly by Ms. Holland and by implication by Mr. Keena, seeps and broadens in definition into every aspect of a journalist’s work: In the case of reporting the attacker’s nationality on November 24th, that event was subsequently followed by a riot in the capital. Mr. Keena’s question as to whether this outlet’s reporting contributed to the occurrence of that riot is a fair one. (The answer, for the record, that I gave to Keena is that it’s irrelevant: If a fact is a fact and causes people to riot, then that is a politician’s problem, not that of a reporter. The media, in a free society, is not an instrument for maintaining public order and should not permit itself to be used as such.)
But the riot is an extreme case of the kind which the media loves, when justifying such censorship. Hard cases, as they say, make bad law. And those making that argument would probably rather you forget that in the case of Kitty Holland, and Ryan Casey, there was no riot, and there was no identifiable risk of a riot.
Nevertheless, in that case, she baldly argues in the video above, Casey’s comments were suppressed by some outlets – the majority, in fact – because “they were not helpful, frankly”. Which poses a basic question: Helpful to who?
There is no doubt, I think, that Mr. Casey’s comments were not helpful to the political class: After all, they specifically linked policy decisions taken by politicians to the fact that the perpetrator of one of the most shocking crimes of recent history was in the country to commit the crime in the first place. Mr. Casey is explicitly not – despite Holland’s other comments – some kind of far-right helper who sought to “incite hatred”. He is simply a young man who aired his honest opinion in a court of law.
So, who was the media “helping” in suppressing those comments? The only reasonable answer is that it was seeking to aid the political class, by suppressing something unhelpful to it.
One of the problems fundamentally, I believe, is that we have a media that sees itself as part of the political and ruling class, rather than separate to it and in opposition to it. Thus, anti-immigrations sentiments – for example – are taken as anti-media sentiments, since the media has invested itself so thoroughly in advancing the political narrative of the main parties around immigration. Ryan Casey’s comments were not only not helpful to Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael: They were also not especially helpful to the credibility of the media itself.
It is for this reason that the transparent and overt hostility of our competitors is something of a point of pride for this publication: We are certainly not, as last week proved, immune from errors, even big ones. But we are, I’m confident in writing, largely immune from the media groupthink that results in so many mistakes of both the factual and analytic kind elsewhere. That is because unlike Kitty Holland, and too many of our colleagues, we do not believe we have a duty to be “helpful” to anybody other than our readers.
The problem is not with an individual journalist: On the occasions we’ve met, this reporter has always found Kitty Holland to be an engaging, warm, and decent person. The problem is the mindset. A mindset that is, increasingly, at odds with the public on a growing range of issues.