Photo Minute: Segregated Alabama USA In 1956

Gordon Parks, who was African American, took these photographs in 1956.

How To Be A News Reporter, A Story teller, A Liar Or A Truth Sayer

Journalism in general is at an all time low in a global sense as well as an Irish one; that is if real journalism ever existed at all. Now social media is getting it right more than ever before and conspiracy theorists have a nasty habit of having more than just a theory about things, and are the new cub reporters on the coalface of what is really going on. 

Newspapers themselves are being regulated to being just another blog on the internet and that is a culture shock for many in the business of storytelling. Their relevancy is being eroded and diminished even further by their own sense of omnipotence, and are quite miffed that they are not considered the voice of truth, reason, intelligence, and accuracy anymore. Fundamental values and all that is not what it used to be I’m afraid. Most of the time all that they have in the absence of real facts, (the cornerstone of truth I guess) is lies, innuendo, suggestion, gossip and rumour. All that, even together, will never be allowed to get in the way of a good story.

Reporters and writers masquerading as journalists is one thing but it is a fact today that good journalism is dying because of the short cuts to the story without wearing leather to find the truth just beyond the fiction. For example MSN news claim they report news, but in the absence of that they will report rumour, and what they can’t confirm or separate of which is either, they provide you with an email for the news part and another for the rumour and picks what they think will pass mustard. And that as they say, is a fact.

Please check out the video below on just exactly what it takes to be a news reporter.

Barry Clifford

(1/2 Minute to load)

Irish Independent: 1916 snapshot view of things (Little has changed since)

Lest We Forget 1916 and the Irish Independent views of the men who fought for Irish freedom then. Little has changed since

The editorial in the first issue of the Irish Independent after the rising in 1916 that had included Michael Collins, headlined with this: ‘Criminal Madness.’ It continued: “No terms of denunciation would be too strong to apply to those responsible for the criminal and insane rising of last week.”

By the 9^th of May of that year, the British had already executed 13 leaders of the rising and James Connolly lay gravely wounded while waiting for his own execution, and Sean Mc Diarmada was still a prisoner, the Irish Independent called for more blood to be spilled, Irish blood: 

“ If these men are treated with too much leniency they will take it as an indication of weakness on the part of the Government (A British one)…Let the worst of the ringleaders be singled out and dealt with as they deserve.”

Two day later the Irish Independent wrote this: “A certain few of the leaders remain undealt with, and the part they played was worse than that of those who have paid the extreme penalty. Are they, because of an indiscriminate demand for clemency, to get off lightly, while others who were more prominent have been executed?

The next day the Irish Independent freedom of the press wishes were granted: James Connolly and Sean Mac Diarmada were shot the at the break of dawn. Michael Collins survived a little longer.

Sourced

Irish Independent V Sinn Fein and Gerry Adams: A Question Of Truth

It seems that the Irish Independent is in journalism meltdown as it reacts to Mary Lou Mc Donald assertion as to how bias they are against Jerry Adams and Sinn Fein. This is a bias so evident that that any relevant news regarding the economy or the ineptness of Enda Kenny is sorely amiss in the last several weeks, and one that I predicted then that will never abate. What is it that makes this newspaper in particular reduce itself to gutter journalism better suited to The Globe or The Enguirer or The Daily Mail? It is fear.

No, not any physical fear like being shot with a water pistol, but the fear that Sinn Fein are getting too close to ruling this land in some form, and being  a majority party in a coalition is more than the stuff of fiction anymore but a very real possibility. What is this fear based on?

It is based on the fact that the newspaper itself  has as one of its biggest shareholder yet to face a court for corruption: Dennis O Brien. His corruption has cost the irish taxpayer allready over €40 million. It is not just about Dennis either for this paper also hedged its bets on those that has sold this country down the river. It is the insitution of corruption itself that they have to fear most and the lastest revelations about investigations that never happened execept by title about off shore accounts, and the heirarchy of needs by politicians that put their ill gotten money in these floating banks..  

Where was the strong optics of ternacious journalism then, where was it when the idiot Lowry took the brown enevelope off fat fingered O Brien? Where was it when Derek Desmond pocketed more millions without that jaundiced eye to know exactly how he did it? Nowhere. When the clown that tried to lie and bluff his way into the presidency of this country, Sean Galllagher, was finally exposed about yet another brown envelope that held just one €5000 donation for a bacon and cabbage dinner with no desert, this newspaper hired him. This is all just part of the fear of now being finally exposed themselves and all that they have tried to hide beneath the folds of those ample lies and the historical ones too.

David Quinn also writes for them. A right wing religious nut who once claimed that the Magdalen women were employees of those hellish laundries, and that the Industrial reformatories run by the religious were fine places, and that their victims merely had an axe to grind. It was he that responded to every alarm bell by the religious that sounded the truth against their abuse of children; then beavered away without conscience or truth itself to stand in his way in order to defend them.

The Irish Independent can only write now with suggestion without fact, innuedo without reason, and panic itself between the lines, in doing what it can to dissect every nuance and utterance from Gerry Adams and Sinn Fein and make it seem like a threat of violence, or of rape and its defense.

It stated today that for reasons of corporate political advantage that Sinn Fein will attempt to lead Ireland into fiscal and moral anarchy. The reality is it is Sinn Fein who wants to find out who did that already to this country for the Independent let go merely a Freudian slip of what they fear most: truth and accountability that ends in justice. 

Barry Clifford