The recent tragic terrorist murders in Northern Ireland have rightly appalled and frightened all of us. It has however highlighted two things to me; how politics in Northern Ireland have changed and how the media can get it wrong.
I listened to an interview on the Today programme a couple of days back. On the whole the interview was very good with both Labour and Tory spokesmen coming accross very well. It was the nature of the exchanges between John Humphries and John O’Dowd, a Sinn Féin councillor, that caused a sharp intake of breath and has led to this blog.
In his pre-amble John Humphries quoted the views of a ’senior Northern Ireland politician’ that we were ’staring into the abyss.’ The interview started like this:
JH I use the word murder. Is that a word that you would use on behalf of Sinn Féin ?
JO’D It is. ……….
Now I don’t know what it is about Northern Irish politicians but they do seem to be a combatative lot. Cllr O’Dowd then went on to criticise the media for trying to set traps for Sinn Fein. He then gave a rather good piece on how Sinn Féin had moved and how the peace process in the Province had changed and they were not going back. John Humphries came back with (my paraphrase) – well Sinn Fein took a long time to condemn the original attack and it was all a bit weak. Cllr O’Dowd called this rubbish and I think at this point Mr Humphries lost his cool, coming up with the rather barbed ‘.. I remember what the Provisional IRA was doing.’ Having regained his composure JH tried to bring it back on track with ’All I am doing is asking you, quite simply to say that this is murder and it is to be totally condemned’ completely forgetting the first answer given by Cllr O’Dowd.
Does all this matter?
Well yes. Firstly in the Northern Ireland context it matters because it appears that, even after all this time, the BBC and by inference the rest of the UK media, continue to have doubts over the full hearted commitment of Sinn Féin to the peace process. By taking these lines they are, I am sure, giving ammunition to those in the movement who are ‘flakey’. If you want an understanding of the delay in the Sinn Fein response suggest you read Alistair Campbell’s blog on the matter.
On the wider front, my experience of the media (a couple of conversations with Torbin Lee and Linda Tanner) has shown me that the media are after 2 things; Conflict and Controversy – because they sell. As a local politician the media remains one of the key conduits through which we get our message out to the public. To be successful in that we have to play their game. So we generate conflict and controversy. Which inevitably leads to politics, even at the local level, dominated by conflict. We then wonder why the population of Bristol are fed up with politicians constantly bickering and doing nothing.
The answer – that’s a little tougher than the analysis, but answers we have to find otherwise I fear for our democracy.
