There is, maintained Browne, a cancer in Irish journalism. It has nothing to do with individual acts of corruption; rather it is endemic and deeply embedded. It distorts journalists’ perception and interferes with their ability to function properly as surrogates of the reader. The cancer is the payment of more than the average industrial wage to journalists.
Browne did not go into detail about how the cognitive adjustment necessary to better understand the interests of the public might follow from simply being paid less.
It was understood that Browne’s lecture was merely a foreplay ritual that had to be endured, not a principle that could be applied in the free market. Supplicants brave enough to point out that Browne himself earned a multiple of the average industrial wage were dismissed as sophists.
Browne continues to earn a multiple of the average industrial wage. His income from RTE alone, which he disclosed last week while trying to prise details of Steve Staunton’s pay from John Delaney, the chief executive of the Football Association of Ireland, is €120,000, four times the average industrial earnings. His income from The Irish Times adds to his annual bounty, which he disclosed some time ago as in the region of €200,000.
This has not deterred him from prescribing for the ills of the media, chief among them the concentration of media ownership in fewer hands. Last week, he returned to this theme after CanWest announced it was to put its share of TV3 on the market.
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His argument is that media organisations have displaced religion and education as the principal means by which ideology is disseminated, and by allowing “foreign and corporate-owned” media to gain ever greater dominance in the Irish market, we have ceded control of our society and our minds.
Unarguably, as Irish media ownership has become more concentrated, a neoliberal consensus has grown more dominant in the media here, one that coincides with the interests of the owners. Neoliberalism has become so deeply embedded that it is now taken as common sense, rather than as a particular view of the world. Browne’s proposed solution is to limit media ownership to one outlet in Ireland per owner, even though that might cause problems with European Union competition law.
Leaving aside the fact that Browne launched the Magill TV Guide while co-owner of Magill, and drove the launch of the Dublin Tribune while a shareholder in the Sunday Tribune, the difficulty with his analysis is in the presumed link between a spread of ownership and a challenge to the neoliberal hegemony.
The example of local radio and provincial newspaper ownership here suggests that multiple owners does not mean significantly differing points of view. If the neoliberal hegemony can be challenged, perhaps it is from the other direction, from the bottom up, by means of average industrial wages in the media.
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