This short extract is from chapter 5 (The role of the media in post-conflict Northern Ireland) from the upcoming e-book by Vicky Cosstick entitled Don’t Mention the War: Exploring Aspects of the Legacy of the Northern Ireland Troubles. This e-book will be launched in Belfast on Monday 4 February – you can register to attend via the Eventbrite page here. 

This is the fifth serialisation from the e-book. The first excerpt sets out the issues to be explored: There are in NI two distinct realities, two parallel universes. The second excerpts focuses on The impact of the Troubles on women’s experience and equality.The third is entitled The reality and consequences of trauma in Northern Ireland. The fourth is: The Good Friday Agreement: A flawed and incomplete process.

Vicky’s work encompasses research and essays about the legacy of the conflict in Northern Ireland on the 20th anniversary of the Good Friday/Belfast Agreement, working with artist Rita Duffy and supported by Joseph Rowntree Charitable Trust funding.

The e-book can be ordered in advance of publication from Amazon here and will be published on 4 February. Other articles from Vicky Cosstick on Northern Slant can be found here.

Northern Slant welcomes perspectives from authors of different backgrounds and political persuasions – the opinions shared in this publication belong entirely to the author and not Northern Slant.

 

A propensity to amplify conflict

As Professor [John] Brewer says, the “master narrative” of the Troubles is socially constructed in a process which includes the media (conversation with author). It has also been manipulated by the propaganda put out by the British government. It is patently the case that the media plays a specific part in the choreography of conflict, during peace negotiations, and when, ideally, a society is transitioning towards a more normal existence. In a given specific situation journalists can be and are usually seen to be “independent, impartial and honest”. However, behind the scenes, editorial policies, choices and decisions are made about whether and what to cover. These days, it’s fair to argue that their policies, choices and decisions are being partly driven, especially in an increasingly fragile economic environment for traditional media outlets, by what sells.

Graham Spencer writes that, during the Troubles, the representation of violence in the media supported the perception that the conflict was sustained by tribal hatreds and the evil nature of terrorists (1999). Detailed examination of the political and social context of the violence was inhibited. There was, then, limited analysis for understanding the new climate of peace. He continues, that the media’s inherent propensity to amplify conflict means that it has struggled and, I would suggest, continues to struggle, to define its role in the post-conflict situation. Or, does it struggle? I have found little evidence that journalists are thinking very much about their role in post-conflict Northern Ireland. This is a personal observation and intended kindly, but I see journalists as having a culture or mentality rather similar to the humanitarian international NGO staff I worked with for years: high-adrenalin, reactive, activist – highly professional at the task in hand, but rarely or barely reflective.

 

A mechanism for accountability

Writing in The Guardian in 2013, Roy Greenslade bemoaned the lack of coverage of Northern Ireland: “Unless violence breaks out, the ‘national’ press turns a blind eye to events in the six counties.” For Greenslade, there were two stories deserving coverage. First is the level of collusion between paramilitaries and British security forces – a story that, as we have seen, refuses to go away and only becomes larger and more insistent as every year passes. Second is the story of the development of the peace process since 1998: “Without any reporting of the positive aspects of the past 15 years, people in Britain lack the information to pressure the government to take the process on to the next level.” Greenslade was writing in 2013, prior to the collapse of Stormont, Brexit, and the DUP/Conservative Party pact at Westminster.

The press is the fourth estate, one of the mechanisms of a functioning democracy, and holds government to account. In the light of Brexit and the Tory/DUP pact, the question now is whether the implications for Northern Ireland of Brexit, the unresolved issues from the Troubles, and the conduct of the DUP are being examined and monitored in the British media. These are matters of accountability. For example, when DUP leader Arlene Foster admits to the public inquiry into the botched Renewable Heating Incentive (RHI) scheme that she did not read the proposed legislation, or is found responsible for illegally blocking the release of legacy funding while she was First Minister, it is important that the British public should know it. Journalist Sam McBride of the Belfast News Letter and i newspaper is doing sterling work covering the RHI fall-out – but it is still not being picked up further in the British media.

The failure of the British media to pay attention to the complexities of what is happening in Northern Ireland now looks like an abnegation of responsibility. The unfinished business of the peace process, and the progress of this region, which still has some of the highest rates of poverty and deprivation in the UK, requires the scrutiny of the fourth estate.

When I wrote to Jon Snow of Channel 4 News to request an interview, I asked him – and ideally other members of the news team – how post-conflict Northern Ireland is represented in the media both in NI and in Britain, how current issues are perceived, and how choices are made by journalists and editors. When he replied, he said that “the problem with my newsroom is that there are now very few people who worked during the Troubles. So I suspect it’s just me.”

My question was about now; he assumed it was about then. The idea that current stories from post-conflict Northern Ireland should be covered at all, indeed that there have been or are any, did not occur to Jon Snow. When I met him, he took it for granted that I was interested in his experience of covering the Troubles. I was, and the interview made a strong and much appreciated article for Northern Slant.

He admitted that Channel 4 is now weak on its coverage of the region in comparison with that of Scotland and Wales, and that he had reported from there only three or four times since 1998. They do not have anyone “on the ground”, he explained – “the oxygen has gone out of the story.”

On 9 May 2018, Prime Minister Theresa May was able to say, during Prime Minister’s Questions in the House of Commons, that “the only people being investigated for these issues that happened in the past are those in our armed forces or those who served in law enforcement in Northern Ireland – that is patently unfair. Terrorists are not being investigated, terrorists should be investigated and that’s what the government wants to see.” She was immediately corrected in the Northern Ireland press, with the fact that of 1,188 unresolved killings currently being investigated by the PSNI, only 354 are attributed to the armed forces, with 530 to republicans and 271 to loyalists. But because of the impermeable barrier between the news in Northern Ireland and British news, Mrs May’s mistake was not reported in the British press and she came under no pressure from it to correct her comments in parliament. A number of victims’ support and campaigning organisations, including the Pat Finucane Centre, Relatives for Justice and Justice for the Forgotten, took out an advertisement in the British press headlined: “Prime Minister, last Wednesday you misled Parliament.” When I showed the advert to Jon Snow, he did not know anything about the mistake. Nor did he know, for example, that in Northern Ireland there have been more deaths from suicide since 1998 – 4,500 plus – than the total number of deaths recorded during the Troubles, or that Arlene Foster had been found responsible as First Minister by High Court judge Sir Paul Girvan in March 2018 for illegally blocking legacy funding, funding that Lord chief Justice Sir Declan Morgan had previously ruled should be released to allow over fifty unresolved Troubles inquests to go ahead.

The government is therefore not being called to account in the British press for its approach to Northern Ireland, nor is the DUP/Tory confidence-and-supply arrangement’s impact upon decision-making for the whole UK and specifically for Northern Ireland receiving the scrutiny it deserves. Journalists I have spoken to in both Northern Ireland and London agree that there is no conspiracy to keep Northern Ireland out of mainstream British news reporting, but “the lack of interest suits the government very well”, says one (conversation with author). Graham Dawson goes a little further, writing that negative reactions to any reference to the Troubles in Britain may be a “cultural manifestation of denial and disavowal” or a “state-organised forgetting”, an “institutional amnesia.”

In Northern Ireland’s frozen peace process, certain elements of traditional broadcast and print media are more part of the problem than the solution. This matters because the peace process is fragile and even more vulnerable in light of Brexit, the continuing vacuum of leadership, governance and accountability.

And what of the media within Northern Ireland? It is a very small place, with its population of 1.8 million just 2.7% of the total UK’s population of over 66 million – a simple fact with many ramifications. It sustains few local newspapers, variously shaded in orange – the Belfast News Letter and the Belfast Telegraph – and green – the Irish News and the Andersonstown News. There are few Sunday supplements and journals in which considered, in-depth journalistic analysis can be published. There are endless “opinion pieces” from the “commentariat”, which includes a few women but mostly male veterans of the years of reporting the conflict, “security journalists” and some academics. Almost all presenters of politics and talk shows on TV and radio are male.

Those opinion pieces are typically knee-jerk reactions to whatever is going on in the prickly, factional political ecosphere at any given moment. It could be an MLA’s ill-considered tweet, a loyalist bonfire, a Sinn Féin-sponsored commemoration or speculation as to whether or not Arlene Foster would meet the Pope. Whatever happens, it is de rigueur for everyone to pitch in fast with what they think, from their own orange or green point of view, in print, on Twitter, in blogs, on talk shows. These opinions burst like bubbles in the air, changing nothing and surprising no-one.

 

The whiff of cordite

Meanwhile, in the shadows, behind the scenes and between the lines of the public discourse are the ever-present paramilitaries – many in Northern Ireland depend upon and even boast about their “connections” to them. Much of Northern Ireland is in thrall to its paramilitaries. Some politicians are themselves former combatants; academics study them, certain journalists depend on them for information. This is what Professor John Brewer calls the “whiff of cordite”.

In the public discourse, Professor Brewer says, there has been a “canonisation of victims and perpetrators.” Politicians are “beneficiaries of the trauma”; for political reasons “victims are kept locked in their victimhood” (conversation with author). There is at play, it seems to me, a sort of “drama triangle”. The classic drama triangle was a psychodynamic device invented by Karpman to show how, in everyday relationships, “persecutor, victim and rescuer” can become locked into a never-ending cycle of conflict and mutual dependency. In Northern Ireland, I would see this self-reinforcing dynamic at work among the perpetrators and victims of violence, and the observers – primarily certain journalists, academics and politicians. The roles are slightly different, but the dynamics are similar and one of the factors that keeps Northern Ireland locked in conflict.

To return to the original question, why does media coverage of Northern Ireland matter?  Because, as we are seeing in Donald Trump’s America, journalism is not only there to entertain, to sell content and advertising, or even to inform. It is the fourth estate, a key mechanism of accountability and democracy, and as such is required to shine a light on the very issues that might be escaping people’s attention or appear to be of little interest – including all the ways that unresolved impacts of the Troubles are continuing to affect the social and economic lives of tens if not hundreds of thousands of the North’s population.