Will State Subsidies Kill Irish Journalism’s Credibility?

While the Hate Speech Bill was binned faster than Simon Harris’ tenure as the ‘TikTok Teesh’, the remaining systematic vestiges of its enforcement mechanism remain fully reusable by the long arm of the Media Commission. 

Styled Comisiún na Meán to sanitise its malevolent motives, the Shelbourne Road HQ recently announced a highly generous disbursement of over €5m to various media organisations as part of a wider initiative “to support both the media sector and the creation of high-quality accessible public journalism across Ireland”. 

The scheme, provided by the Department of Tourism and Media, will create over 100 new jobs across the country to cover local authorities and court proceedings under the Local Democracy Reporting Scheme (LDRS). This includes just over 70 newly funded roles as well as supporting those working within a freelance capacity. 

Mediahuis, the Belgian/Dutch owners of Independent Newspapers which include The Irish Independent, The Sunday Independent, and a range of regional titles, mentioned that “while we have some reservations about the funding schemes, as set out in our response to the public consultation, we nonetheless believe the schemes are an important step forward in safeguarding the future of local journalism.” 

While the other beneficiaries of the optional scheme include the usual suspects such as The Journal, The Irish Examiner, and Dublin Inquirer, the inclusion of other less suspecting outlets such as Cork Beo, The Limerick Leader, and The Anglo Celt shows how wide the Media Commission’s tentacles have stretched despite the abandonment of the hate speech bill. 

The successor to the Broadcasting Authority of Ireland (BAI), Comisiún na Meán is an outgrowth of the triumvirate of Silicon Valley, Brussels, and Dublin to police and monitor nativist sentiments online. 

Signed into law by President ‘Nation-States are redundant in the age of climate change’ Michael D Higgins on 10 December 2022, the Online Safety and Media Regulation Act, which follows on from the European Union’s (EU) Digital Services Act (DSA), saw the creation of an Online Safety Commissioner in line with the EU’s Audiovisual Media Services Directive which aims to ensure that, “Media services must not contain incitement to violence or hatred directed against groups or a member of a group based on discrimination on grounds such as sex, race, colour, ethnic or social origin, genetic features, language, religion or belief, political or any other opinion, membership of a national minority, property, birth, disability, age, sexual orientation or nationality”. 

These myriad categories would eventually evolve into a piece of contentious domestic regulation under the terms of the Criminal Justice (Incitement to Violence or Hatred and Hate Offences) Bill 2022 which replaced the Prohibition of Incitement to Violence Act 1989 to assimilate censorship into the digital age of edgy memes and right-wing online marketing strategies. 

As the enforcer of the bill, Comisiún na Meán’s powers include the imposition of fines of up to €20m or 10% of a company’s turnover for failure to remove hateful content or mis/disinformation by compelling a designated online service to take certain specified actions. 

Headed by a sinister cross-eyed Anglo, reminiscent of a colonial Viceroy, Jeremy Godfrey whose U.K Civil Service background makes him an ideal candidate for a role within yet another Irish government blob sinecure as the State is only too eager to exclude native appointees within its apparatus as shown by recent appointments in the Gardaí and the national broadcaster. 

But in late 2023, the hate bill and commission’s purported purpose went into overdrive amid smoke blazing the main thoroughfare of the capital of Silicon Valley’s tax haven located within a stringent regulatory euro trading bloc following the stabbing of three children by an Algerian migrant. 

Taoiseach Leo Varadkar pounced immediately following native proletarian rage: “We will modernise our laws against incitement to hatred and hatred in general”. 

The threat of five years imprisonment for possession of hateful material and a failure to even define the concept was a tough pill to swallow for centrist dads and centre-right politicians alike with a groundswell of grassroots and parliamentary opposition to the legislation ultimately confining it to an emasculated shell of its former self when passed last year. 

However, the institutional cleavages of the worst aspects of that bill continue to run amok as evidenced by the new media scheme. 

Indeed, another more sinister attempt to buy out mainstream media organisations was revealed last year when a range of publications received over €1m of taxpayers’ money under the Department of Foreign Affairs-backed Global Ireland Media Challenge Fund (GIMCF). The quid pro quo of this devil’s bargain included a commitment to applying “more emphasis on the wider topic of climate change” and “a focus on EU issues such as the rise of populism and disinformation.” Indeed, as evidenced by this year’s globohomo spectacle, a so-called “new perspective approach” to the coverage of St Patrick’s Day was also part of the scheme. 

RTÉ, Virgin Media, the British Reach PLC (Irish Daily Star and Irish Daily Mirror) and the German Bauer Media (Newstalk and Today FM) all received €5,000 individually to tailor their content to suit the demands of this censorious Ministry of Truth. 

The committee which enabled this funding included a who’s who of free expression coercion merchants including Storyful founder Mark Little. His other pet project, the misinformation combating corporate parasite Kinzen, received over €100,000 in state funding from the Department of Health to combat COVID ‘misinformation’ – which all turned out to be accurate information – during the pandemic. While “outside the normal tendering process”, the splurge in revenue revealed just how insidious the relationship between the State and these proxy organs making a buck by cashing in on the misinformation lucrative cash cow has become. 

Alternative media sites and influencers offering a replacement to these increasingly redundant State-backed media organs face creeping encroachment from the judiciary and law enforcement as evidenced by efforts from the Phoenix Park with backing by a District Judge to obtain private messages from Gript Media during rural upheaval against imposed migrant settlements in Newtownmountkennedy.

While the happy coincidence of sentiment between the press and the State has been a perennial fixture in Irish affairs from as far back as the 80s when the National Union of Journalists (NUJ) passed a resolution backing the Irish Women’s Right to Choose Campaign, the zeal and level of influence over media output contemporarily vastly eclipses that of yore adding severe obstacles to progress within dissident political movements and a greater need to offer alternatives.