merrion street

One of the themes explored in the context of World Press Freedom Day last week was the power of media freedom to transform societies. This seems entirely apposite given the dramatic events of 2011, especially when we extend our definition of media to include the social media and the citizen journalist. The role of social media in the surge of revolutionary fervour from Tunisia, to Tahrir Square, to Benghazi and beyond, provides an immediate and illuminating example of the capacity of a free media to promote radical change. Access to communications technology allowed protestors to engage with and fundamentally alter their political, economic and social lives and potential.

The capacity of a free media to hold the powerful to account is of vital importance in the lives of the citizen and the State. This is because the proper functioning of our democratic system depends ultimately on freedom of expression. It is of central importance, therefore, that the organs of the Fourth Estate continue to engage citizens, to shape public opinion, to inform, to analyse and to provide a forum for public discussion and debate. Government must be challenged consistently and the full spectrum of views, interests and concerns in our increasingly diverse society must be fully represented in our media.

The power of a free media to effect social and political change, to create folk heroes and to hold villains to account, is nothing new. Whether through pamphlet, newsletter, broadside or broadsheet, freedom of the press has been of critical importance to the economic and social development of our democracy. Indeed, parliamentary democracy, the free press and journalism have evolved together over centuries.

And a free, independent and pluralistic media remains of central importance to a modern democracy. We must be alive to how fundamental this right is. We must remain mindful of the “rightful liberty of expression” enshrined in our Constitution and remain “eternally vigilant” to ensure this guarantee is upheld.

The media and indeed the entire country have faced four years of profound economic challenges with very real, very long term consequences. While the previous administration floundered amid the unprecedented events unfolding, the media that did much of the groundwork in determining what exactly had gone so spectacularly wrong and attempted to explain this to a shell shocked public. Indeed, the media has been central in creating and explaining the history of the recent past.

I’m thinking of Simon Carswell’s pieces on Anglo, for example. Well researched, detailed articles kept the public informed on an ongoing basis, built a narrative piecemeal and ultimately produced a forensic, insightful and compelling review of what went wrong. Carswell was not alone – Cliff Taylor, Brendan Keenan, Matt Cooper, Brian Carey, Tom Lyons, Emmet Oliver and several others researched, explained, analysed and informed. Or, going back a few years, the journalists whose work uncovered the early traces of what became the subject of the Tribunals. Acting in the best traditions of their profession, they investigated, researched, interviewed and put their names to their work. Sometimes, as in the case of your former and my present colleague Susan O’Keeffe, at personal risk.

In some important ways, little has changed. The trends online suggest that the sites people visit for media generally mirror offline behaviour – people visit, and trust, established media outlets. There is and will continue to be a need for those who sift through the raw material and analyse and make sense of it. Regardless of its presentation on phone or tablet, content and good journalism continue to prevail online in exactly the same way as they do in old media – content, as they say, is still king.

This is not to gloss over the race to the bottom that is also happening before our eyes especially in sections of the print media. Nowhere have standards dropped so much as in the coverage of politics. The impression is abroad that if some journalists wanted to file stories that rise above tittle – tattle and cynicism, they will be rejected by their editors.

The transformation of the news business, however, continues apace. As I mentioned earlier, the arrival of social media in particular has devolved the power to create news to the individual citizen. The ensuing and rapid diversification of views online is symptomatic of this. News can be disseminated almost instantaneously online by anyone who happens to have a smartphone and an internet connection. Though still perhaps in its infancy, one can enjoy the full gamut of journalistic endeavour on the vast ‘blogosphere’. In this modern Babel, professional commentary can sit, entirely contemporaneously, alongside pieces of pure ephemera and cant. All human life is here. This democratisation of our public discourse seems, at least on the surface, to be a positive development but the proliferation of media and rapid pace of change also brings challenges. There is much that democracies can and must do to shape our future media ecosystem.

Media governance, for example, including how best to handle defamation and privacy online, should be a central concern of any democracy. There may well be issues included in the forthcoming reports of the Leveson Inquiry in the UK that suggest we take a more complete look at media governance in Ireland, although our own Press Council model has been commended in the course of that inquiry.

Equally, payment models for media, both online and off, are of vital concern, including the manner in which advertising is bought and sold in Ireland. The Irish market reflects the global trend for advertisers to follow the audience online. Traditional players have lost out to global internet companies and international advertising networks possessing enormous scale and reach. Campaigns can be run from abroad without the need to maintain a presence in the Irish market.

Similarly, copyright issues remain critical, particularly around how we manage both copyright violation and the reasonable use of content online.

There are other issues, fundamental to the journalistic profession, to be considered, around the standards to be employed in relation to investigative journalism and the partisan nature of certain content and, indeed, of certain organisations.

If the rise of social media and the advent of highly flexible internet based advertising have threatened the basic advertising income of all media, national and local, print and broadcast, this has of course been compounded by the severity of the economic crisis. A free media requires adequate funding and today's shrinking revenues may inevitably lead to ownership structures being changed.

In the medium to long term, the international nature of internet governance means that truly coherent solutions can only be found on an international level, through bodies like the EU, the Council of Europe, the OSCE and the United Nations. In the short term, there are issues that can and must be dealt with on a national basis, and around which debate should focus.

One effect of the globalisation and fragmentation of the media marketplace is that practically every country is facing similar issues. In Australia, for example, a debate over the concentration of media ownership has been sparked by the acquisition of a majority shareholding in Fairfax Media, one of the country’s oldest and most important newspaper groups, by the owner of one of its largest mining companies, Gina Rinehart. Known for her opposition to the Government’s plans to introduce a tax on mining profits and a carbon tax, Ms Rinehart may be attempting to “exert her influence”, as the Federal Communications Minister put it. Increasingly concerned at their lack of regulatory capacity, commentators fear that Ms Rinehart, in conjunction with Mr Murdoch, could potentially control nearly all the major daily papers in Australia.

I think we all acknowledge that the management of the media mergers area is critical in ensuring that diversity of ownership and diversity of content continue to be secured. The critical role of the media in our democracy, and the potentially harmful effects of an over concentration of media ownership, mean that this issue is a vitally important one. The media’s role in determining the character of our public discourse and its influence on the quality of our democracy means that it cannot be treated like any other enterprise. I and the Government remain committed to implementing a set of robust measures that allow for a transparent and objective assessment of the public good in media mergers cases and to doing so as quickly as possible.

We decided last May to proceed with the drafting of a large Consumer and Competition Bill, a Bill which included a substantially revised system for dealing with media mergers based on the recommendations of the 2008 Advisory Group on Media Mergers. This Bill is a major piece of work that consolidates and updates our consumer protection and our competition codes in full.

The Bill has, however, had to take its place in the in the lengthy list of legislation that this Government has committed to, some of which has had to be prioritised to meet timeframes agreed with the Troika, and so it is likely to be some time before this Bill is available for publication. I have been in discussions with Cabinet colleagues about extracting the media merger-related provisions from the package and pushing ahead with these as a standalone Bill.

No decision has been reached on this, but I expect to bring a proposal to Government on the subject shortly.

In the interim, I would stress that there we do have clear and working legislation in this area – the measures governing media mergers set out in the 2002 Competition Act will continue to apply.

A free and diverse media sector, both in terms of ownership and content, is a prerequisite for a functioning democratic society. It is, as UNESCO has noted, part of the package of fundamental rights for which people will strive. Yet the safeguards we have in place are struggling to keep up with the rapid pace of change.

The transformation of the media business is unstoppable and, in the coming years, difficult and complex decisions will have to be taken if we are to retain a media ecosystem that is both vibrant and diverse and which serves the needs of all the people of Ireland.