Your local paper – black, white and read all over

A Different View with Dave O’Connell

It was the legendary Sunday Times editor Harold Evans who defined news as something that somebody, somewhere wants to suppress. All the rest, he said, was advertising.

Another definition might be that newspapers are a balance of items that people want to see in them and things that people want to keep out.

 It’s all good and well to feature in full colour when you’re winning county championships or getting seven A1’s in the Leaving – but when you’ve been caught speeding through your local village like Batman on his way to a crime in Gotham City, it’s a name check you’d prefer to keep to yourself.

 Twice in recent days, I’ve heard the local paper held up as a stick with which to punish wrongdoers – although there’s probably no other context in which you’d find TV licence dodgers and men who consort with prostitutes in the same sentence.

 The study of ‘sex buyers’ across five EU countries, including Ireland, found that the thing that most worried those caught was having their names published in the local paper.

 Other than that, they didn’t really seem to be overly concerned, one way or the other.

 The study across five countries – Ireland, Bulgaria, Cyprus, Finland and Lithuania – also found that sex buyers are mostly well-educated men in relationships and that two-thirds of them are earning more than €20,000 a year.

 On the basis of their average salaries, there must be an awful lot of them out there, because the same report estimated that €25 billion is made from the sex trade in Europe, and €250 million of that is made in Ireland.

 But that’s another story – the point here is that it wasn’t the infidelity that bothered the blokes….it was the fear of your name ending up in the local paper.

 At the same time, RTE – when it isn’t leafing through the pages of local newspapers for stories – is running an infuriating radio ad which warns people of the danger they put themselves in if they do not buy a television licence.

 There are the usual threats of a court appearance and a fine, which is fair enough – but the deal clincher is that your name will also appear in your local paper.

 Trust me, it won’t. And we won’t hammer fellas who are caught without a lamp on their bike or a missing tail light on their tractor either.

 Local newspapers don’t report licence fee convictions, because we’ve got more to be getting on with.

 And our role is not to act like RTE’s stick to beat people with if they don’t pay their share of Marian Finucane’s massive wages.

 All of this will change of course when Communications Minister Pat Rabbitte introduces the new broadcasting charge for those who don’t watch telly at all but who do have tablets or iPads to download their favourite shows.

 But the money will still go to RTE alone even if you don’t watch it, and no doubt RTE will keep insisting that you will be caught if you don’t pay up and you’ll be dragged though the courts like a greedy developer who didn’t finish out the estate.

 For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.