“Bad Result, but we didn’t play well”, Rio Ferdinand tweeted. Not the most insightful piece of journalism I thought, yet it was widely reported. On the day Mr Ferdinand (sometime Manchester United defender and media darling) updated his twitter account, his football club where in shut down mode.
Their petulant manager had thrown his toys out of the pram the day before and ordered everyone at the club to shun the media. For those of you who aren’t slaves to the whore that is English football, I should point out that Manchester United are the self styled “Biggest club in the world” and if the woman who cleans the toilets at their monstrosity of a stadium was suffering with an itchy foot, it would normally result in a press conference attended to by the cream of the world’s media.
So a media blackout caused panic and journalists did what is now their default action. They turned to the world wide web to fill the vacuum. They looked at amateur blogs to see what the ordinary man was saying about this drastic situation. Journalists condemn blogging as a dilution of their great art, even though they are happy to dip in on blogs when it suits them. After that, they looked up twitter, where the famous share their inane thoughts for the benefit of people with no lives but access to a smart phone.
And there they found Ferdinand’s simplistic message and they parsed and dissected it, as though it was the Wisdom of Solomon.
I wanted to be a journalist when I left school. I had my paperwork all ready and had been offered a place in the College of Journalism. Faith alas intervened and through a lack of financial resources and ambition I ended up in Accountancy.
My desire to write had been nourished by teenage years spent buried in investigative magazines. This was an era of El Salvador, the Falklands War, the dark years of the Northern Ireland and the misery and corruption of 80’s Irish life. It was a boom time for journalists like John Pilger and Robert Fisk to scrape the underbelly of world affairs. I loved it and desperately wanted to be like them - travelling the world and uncovering secrets that the powerful don’t want us to know about.
I had no interest in the mundane side of journalism. Reporting on council meetings and car accidents and writing obituaries for people you’d never met. I imagined that I’d finish college and be brought on to the editorial staff of Newsweek and given the job of discovering the secret links between Margaret Thatcher and Saudi Royal Family.
Though I spend my life now buried in spreadsheets and cash flow statements, I don’t regret the missed opportunity I had as a teenager. For journalism is a dishonoured profession now. From the outside it seems that they don’t even have to leave their offices anymore. They can just sit at a PC and surf all the social media and let the story come to them.
The biggest story in Melbourne this summer is the St. Kilda schoolgirl saga, which is ironic because the lady involved is neither from St. Kilda nor a schoolgirl. She is a 17 year old who allegedly slept with a number of footballers and more recently caught a football manager in a very public honey trap. What makes the story interesting is her skilful use of social media. She initially published nude pictures of footballers on Facebook and later teased the drooling public by drip-feeding new revelations on twitter.
The story culminated in the honey trap. She contacted a trashy newspaper and told them how she had been in contact via text message with the 47-year-old football manager. The paper booked her into a hotel room and told her to invite the manager round. When he turned up they were ready to photograph him going in and coming out of the hotel.
He has now been sacked while the girl has signed six figure contracts with TV stations and magazines. It is life Jim, but not as we know it.
Not only does this show that journalists are now been led by the nose by Facebook and twitter, but when things get a bit slow they end of creating the story themselves. Why wait for news to happen when you can install a 17-year girl in a hotel room and watch the news develop in front of you.
I hanker back to the old days when journalists’ doorstepped celebrities and politicians to get real quotes. Now you are more likely to read, “Charlie Sheen could not be reached for comment, but he did say on twitter….”.
And it’s not just the trashy populist press that does this. The big papers have become just as lazy. Their big story in the last few months has been the Wikileak’s revelations, which looked like it would be the biggest scoop since Watergate until you actually read them. Finding out that the Bush administration thought Kim Il Jong was a nutter is hardly earth shattering and the ease with which the information was obtained (a memory stick and a naïve American serviceman) was disproportionate the magnitude of the story.
Investigative journalism should be about shady meetings in underground car parks and documents smuggled out of prisons in body cavities. That’s why I felt disappointed when I saw my old hero, John Pilger, on the steps of a London courthouse defending Julian Assange. I don’t dispute the politics of the situation or that Wikileaks is pointing a well-deserved finger at the powers that be. But they have cheapened journalism at the same time by saying that all information should be publically assessable. If that’s the case there will be no room left for the humble gumshoe to uncover that which is hidden from us.
Perhaps it was just as well then that I became an Accountant and not a Journalist. We merely caused the Global Financial Crisis, but that my friend is a completely different story. Tune in next week for more revelations.
Sunday 20 March 2011
Tuesday 8 March 2011
Tribute to Christchurch
I first visited Christchurch in 1995 and fell in love with the City straight away. I arrived on a Sunday night, four days into a six-month trip around the world that was supposed to exhaust my travel bug. Unfortunately, when I saw how fantastic the other side of the world was, I couldn’t help coming back.
I’d been through Hong Kong and the steamy suburbs of Auckland, so the cool air and cleanliness of the place was the first thing I noticed. The other thing that surprised me was that every suburb and street seemed to be named after an area of London. Imagination was obviously not a strong point among the original settlers. I stayed in Beckenham, which was also the last suburb in London that I had lived in and settled onto a mate’s couch for the duration of my stay.
On my first full day, I took a walk into town. The Cathedral was the first thing I noticed. We Northern Hemisphere people think we have a monopoly on beautiful old buildings, but Christchurch could challenge that. The Cathedral was magnificent and stood as a centre point for the City. When I saw the ruins of it on TV after last week’s earthquake, I cried. What would Milan do without the Duomo, what would London do without St Paul’s and ironically given the subject of this blog, what would Dublin do without Christchurch?
Christchurch was a beautiful city. It seems strange and cruel to talk about it in the past tense. I have so many fond memories of the place that this is the hardest thing I’ve ever written. It’s the first place I ever spent Christmas away from home, it’s the first place I ever used the Internet, the first place I ever got a number one crew cut and the first place I ever watched a cricket match (which sparked an interest that led to me jumping around the living room this week when Ireland beat England in the cricket world cup).
And now, the City is ruined, a victim of the world and nature, which at least lets humans off the hook, because we’re the blame for everything else.
On my second day I headed to Lyttelton Harbour in a vain attempt to find a fishing boat that a sea captain had told me about the night before. He promised a mate and I a free trip to the West Coast of New Zealand in return for some unspecified duties. When we turned up at the harbour next day we found out that the fishing boat we sought had sunk five years previously and we were either talking to a ghost or a prankster. For our own ego, we decided it was a ghost and the legend of the Mary Jane will be made into a movie one day, with Johnny Depp playing me.
The cricket match came later when I made one of my many visits to New Zealand. I was there with my mate Jez and we headed to Jade Stadium to see the Kiwis take on South Africa in a one-day match that kicked off at 11am. We found out that the bar only sold beer in units of six and given the time of day we figured that one six pack between us would be sufficient before lunch. When New Zealand was bowled out for 220, we hightailed into town for lunch at the Loaded Hog, a venue that served the best Nachos south of Mexico City.
We had a couple of pints there before heading back to the stadium for the South African innings. It was a long walk to our seats from the beer tent and we wanted to minimise our travel back and forth and so Jez asked when did they stop selling beer.
“The 35th Over” answered the young bar tender.
“Is that the start of the 35th over or the end?” replied Jez. The bar tender stared at him for a second before saying, “you know I’ve been working here for seven years and nobody has ever asked that question, but now that you mention it, it’s the start.”
As we were both Accountants, we calculated that 18 beers between us would see us to the end of the match. Unfortunately, South Africa only took 43 overs to win and we soon found ourselves in an empty stadium with 12 warm cans of beer under our seats. Didn’t stop us drinking them, mind you and we spent the last hour staring at the rising moon and noting how beautiful the stars were. That’s what drinking outdoors does to you.
On my last trip, I spent a lot of time in the old university, which is now an arts centre and marvelled at how cosmopolitan it was for a small city so far from the rest of the world. It had reinvented itself from being an outpost supporting the farming industry to a city of culture where art galleries nestled beside flower-strewn parks and the Avon River added an air of calmness.
Christchurch now will have to reinvent itself again, to rise phoenix like from the ashes. I’m sure it will, we just have to realise it will never be the same as it was before and hope that it can be better. I met my first kiwi in 1987 and I’ve been drawn to them ever since. They have an attitude to life that I admire and seem to have a bond with the Irish that goes beyond a love of beer. One of my best friends lives in Christchurch and he sums up that kiwi spirit. Whenever I was feeling sorry for myself, he’d pat me on the back and tell me to “harden up”.
Him and his family are safe at least and I’m sure he’s doing his best to harden up in circumstances that would try the patience of a saint. For his sake and for all the people of Christchurch, I’ll say a prayer tonight. Towards tomorrow and a better day.
I’d been through Hong Kong and the steamy suburbs of Auckland, so the cool air and cleanliness of the place was the first thing I noticed. The other thing that surprised me was that every suburb and street seemed to be named after an area of London. Imagination was obviously not a strong point among the original settlers. I stayed in Beckenham, which was also the last suburb in London that I had lived in and settled onto a mate’s couch for the duration of my stay.
On my first full day, I took a walk into town. The Cathedral was the first thing I noticed. We Northern Hemisphere people think we have a monopoly on beautiful old buildings, but Christchurch could challenge that. The Cathedral was magnificent and stood as a centre point for the City. When I saw the ruins of it on TV after last week’s earthquake, I cried. What would Milan do without the Duomo, what would London do without St Paul’s and ironically given the subject of this blog, what would Dublin do without Christchurch?
Christchurch was a beautiful city. It seems strange and cruel to talk about it in the past tense. I have so many fond memories of the place that this is the hardest thing I’ve ever written. It’s the first place I ever spent Christmas away from home, it’s the first place I ever used the Internet, the first place I ever got a number one crew cut and the first place I ever watched a cricket match (which sparked an interest that led to me jumping around the living room this week when Ireland beat England in the cricket world cup).
And now, the City is ruined, a victim of the world and nature, which at least lets humans off the hook, because we’re the blame for everything else.
On my second day I headed to Lyttelton Harbour in a vain attempt to find a fishing boat that a sea captain had told me about the night before. He promised a mate and I a free trip to the West Coast of New Zealand in return for some unspecified duties. When we turned up at the harbour next day we found out that the fishing boat we sought had sunk five years previously and we were either talking to a ghost or a prankster. For our own ego, we decided it was a ghost and the legend of the Mary Jane will be made into a movie one day, with Johnny Depp playing me.
The cricket match came later when I made one of my many visits to New Zealand. I was there with my mate Jez and we headed to Jade Stadium to see the Kiwis take on South Africa in a one-day match that kicked off at 11am. We found out that the bar only sold beer in units of six and given the time of day we figured that one six pack between us would be sufficient before lunch. When New Zealand was bowled out for 220, we hightailed into town for lunch at the Loaded Hog, a venue that served the best Nachos south of Mexico City.
We had a couple of pints there before heading back to the stadium for the South African innings. It was a long walk to our seats from the beer tent and we wanted to minimise our travel back and forth and so Jez asked when did they stop selling beer.
“The 35th Over” answered the young bar tender.
“Is that the start of the 35th over or the end?” replied Jez. The bar tender stared at him for a second before saying, “you know I’ve been working here for seven years and nobody has ever asked that question, but now that you mention it, it’s the start.”
As we were both Accountants, we calculated that 18 beers between us would see us to the end of the match. Unfortunately, South Africa only took 43 overs to win and we soon found ourselves in an empty stadium with 12 warm cans of beer under our seats. Didn’t stop us drinking them, mind you and we spent the last hour staring at the rising moon and noting how beautiful the stars were. That’s what drinking outdoors does to you.
On my last trip, I spent a lot of time in the old university, which is now an arts centre and marvelled at how cosmopolitan it was for a small city so far from the rest of the world. It had reinvented itself from being an outpost supporting the farming industry to a city of culture where art galleries nestled beside flower-strewn parks and the Avon River added an air of calmness.
Christchurch now will have to reinvent itself again, to rise phoenix like from the ashes. I’m sure it will, we just have to realise it will never be the same as it was before and hope that it can be better. I met my first kiwi in 1987 and I’ve been drawn to them ever since. They have an attitude to life that I admire and seem to have a bond with the Irish that goes beyond a love of beer. One of my best friends lives in Christchurch and he sums up that kiwi spirit. Whenever I was feeling sorry for myself, he’d pat me on the back and tell me to “harden up”.
Him and his family are safe at least and I’m sure he’s doing his best to harden up in circumstances that would try the patience of a saint. For his sake and for all the people of Christchurch, I’ll say a prayer tonight. Towards tomorrow and a better day.
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