The following email was sent today to David McWilliams of the Irish Independent and the Sunday Business Post:

Dear David McWilliams,

Glad to see you're not softening your criticism of the government and its lack luster proposals to tackle the economic crisis, despite the fact it seems everyone across the spectrum is now agreeing with you - an uncomfortable position to put a formally controversial journalist in.

However, reading your latest piece 'Brace yourself now for the Deckland Depression', which I broadly agree with, it occurred to me, these were exactly the properties and lifestyles the Irish Independent and it's competitors have been marketing for the last 10 years - what you aptly dub the 'property porn market'.

Yet not one Irish journalist has considered tackling the media's role in creating and sustaining the property bubble. While the banks, developers and politicians arguably bear the brunt of the responsibility, the Irish media provided the medium for the message. Porn really isn't porn unless it's recorded and displayed in a magazine or on TV.

I suggested to Irish Times Assistant Editor Fintan O'Toole that perhaps the media's inability to discuss or even acknowledge it's role evidenced of an absence of stimulus-freedom in mainstream media discourse. Surely if it had occurred to a journalist, it would be considered newsworthy and therefore fit for publication?

For instance UCD's Colm McCarthy raised the subject on RTE's Prime Time (16/10/08) acknowledging several times that the media were key stakeholders in the property bubble. Back in the studio however, Richard Curran, Shane Ross and Mark Little all suffered the exact same selective memory loss, unanimously failing to address this core part of Donagh Diamond's investigation. 

At the same time John McManus was writing in the Irish Times: "the banks take the lions share of the blame, they were the people who were paid to know better, paid to have a broader view and to see the long term consequences, to see the long term view and they patently didn't." Failing to notice that these are the exact traits the liberal media claims for itself, and here we have the business editor of the Irish Times staking those as the traits for which the share of blame is to be reasoned. Without, it seems, a hint of irony. 

I have been writing to journalists and editors for several months now, requesting that they discuss the issue. However, letters for print are rejected, articles for publication are ignored ('An unfulfilled social contract' is attached below) and we have had no reaction, from journalists at least, to our MediaShot 'The Media and the Banking Bailout'.

Given your new position as Economist in Chief, would you consider raising the issue?

Yours sincerely,

David Manning

An unfulfilled social contract

A guest on a recent edition of TV3's 'Nightly News with Vincent Browne' commented on an 'extraordinary juxtaposition' gracing the front page of the next day's Irish Times. An image of Minister for Finance Brian Lenihan, having just struck a deal to underwrite the bad debts of Ireland's major financial institutions to the tune of €400 billion, looking somewhat 'haunted', while just beneath, an advertisement for an Irish based bank displayed it's current lending rates. Browne responded, "Well that's the way things go."

These few words represent almost the entirety of the mainstream Irish media's audit of their complicity in Ireland's current banking crisis, by virtue of their promotion of over valued property and irresponsible lending practices during the boom years. A testament to the absence of potential for reform within the corporate structure. That is, even where this reform is regularly demanded from others, it is not practiced internally.
 
The symbiotic relationship between the corporate media and big business, in this case the property business, is a relationship that put newspapers and media outlets at the virtual helm of the property boom titanic. In July 2006 the Irish Times bought the property website MyHome.ie for €50 million. Three months earlier Tony O'Reilly's Independent News & Media acquired PropertyNews.com, the "largest internet property site on the island of Ireland." Along with their competitors, the Irish Times and Irish Independent promoted the sale and purchase of vastly over valued properties to consumers - invariably under the disingenuous presumption that property value is a function of time.
 
For instance in May 2005 the Irish Times' Edel Morgan speculated: "One can only surmise what the average millionaire will be able to buy in Dublin in another nine years. A pokey one-bed apartment in the outer suburbs? Or maybe a townhouse on a new development bought under the local authority's affordable housing scheme? Will the semi-d become the preserve of the multimillionaire while only the super rich will afford the luxury of living detached?" [Welcome to the €1 million standard semi-d]
 
This fraudulent mythology of never-ending property value increase has been perpetuated by the media for over a decade, with few notable exceptions. It epitomises the inherent business bias which resonates through reporting of the property market and indeed the banking system, where discussion occurs strictly within a context prescribed by those in the banking and property business. Or as Greg Philo of the Glasgow University Media Group recently commented, it takes the form of a 'procession of the powerful'. Media debate on the subject of the property boom, and now its predicted crash, is invariably dominated by those with financial vested interests.
 
For example, when the government was considering changes to stamp duty in late 2007 in order to artificially bolster property prices the Irish Business Post "asked six experts for their views on whether now is the time for the government to reform the tax". [Stamp duty: the debate rages on] The response was overwhelmingly in favour of what should now be considered a failed policy. Those experts were: Chief Economist with Friends First, President of the Irish Auctioneers and Valuers Institute, Economic research officer at the Economic and Social Research Institute, Economist with Douglas Newman Good, Chief Economist at the Sherry FitzGerald Group, Lecturer in economics at the Cairnes School of Business and Public Policy at NUI Galway.
 
In November last year, when the Irish Times canvassed the views of property experts, or as they are more casually known property dealers, developers and investors, "to find out what they expect will happen over the next 12 months." They consulted: Managing director, CBRE, Investments director, Lisney, Managing director, Savills HOK, Managing director, Sherry FitzGerald, Managing director, Ballymore, Chief executive, IPUT, Director, Finnegan Menton. [Focus on prime locations and bargains] Predictably, these 'experts' were unanimously upbeat about the future of the already deflating property bubble.
 
The effect of this reliance on people who have very specific and profit orientated agenda is rarely if ever commented on. A lack of self regulation which underscores the vacuousness of assurances that 'the overriding duty of [the media and] journalists is to readers'. And while this social contract remains unfulfilled, calls by journalists and editors for reforms within other corporate sectors remain nothing more than empty rhetoric.