It removed the chief executive and editor, installed one of its senior executives and a mid-ranking editor from the Evening Herald and set a new flight path intended to bring the newspaper downmarket, in an apparently final effort to save it.
Having driven the Tribune downmarket since it acquired a minority shareholding in the early 1990s, and with it effective control because of the loans it provided to keep the paper afloat, it has abandoned any pretence that the Tribune has any identity or aims separate from those of the Independent group.
Were the Tribune a broadcast outlet, the matter would have been referred to the Broadcasting Commission of Ireland (BCI), which regulates the licensing of radio and television stations. The print media, however, have no such regulatory body. Ownership is controlled only by the Competition Authority, which has proved slow to act against the increased concentration of ownership of newspapers in Ireland.
True, the BCI has scarcely distinguished itself, acquiescing to the land-grab of Irish radio and debasing the licensing system to the point where new licensees know they can ignore their more demanding programming commitments in order to grow cash cows with lean cost bases, before selling them off to either Denis O’Brien or Scottish Radio Holdings.
But at least with radio and television there is, in theory at least, a mechanism of accountability. Newspaper groups can accumulate titles at will and do what they like with them, even when that involves manifestly anti-competitive practices, as in Independent’s use of the Tribune (which loses about €60,000 a week) to restrict competition in the Sunday market.
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Such practices limit freedom of expression principally by distorting the market to the point where new titles are discouraged from entering the market and by narrowing the employment options of journalists. In the daily market, an effective duopoly exists in this respect, with almost no migration of journalists between the Irish Independent and The Irish Times.
A distorted market such as this engenders self-censorship, with the result that the interests of media owners become coterminous with those of media outlets. Nothing so brutish as a mechanism of direct intervention is required for the owners’ economic and social outlook to breathe freely through the pages of their newspapers, as they have done in Ireland, influencing public opinion and in turn public policy.
And yet, when it happens in its brute form it passes almost unnoticed. Once a champion of the powerless, the Tribune is now indistinguishable in its intent from any other part of the Independent empire. Worse, amid the semiotic orgy of the Myers distraction, it doesn’t even seem to matter.