Trust is the key to media's future

Cavanman's Diary

“A citizen of London, I returned home to a wedding in Cavan via the Holyhead boat. I hitched to Cavan. That afternoon, I found myself at the reception seated by the editor of The Anglo-Celt, the local newspaper where I had published my first short story.

How is the writing going? he asked.

Oh fine, I said.

He filled me out another glass of wine.

I’m glad to hear it, he said.

Thank you.

So will we be seeing a book out soon?

Not yet. (Pause) But I have a play finished.

And is it going on?

Yes.

Where? In the Abbey?

Oh no. I searched round frantically. On TV.

TV, he said.

ITV actually.

Well that’s wonderful.

I got a thousand pound.

You’re made up. He raised his glass. What’s it called?

Night-crossing, I said.

To Night-crossing, he said.

We touched glasses.

It starts with two lads leaving Ireland on the Holyhead boat.

Sounds good.

The dancing began and I forgot all about the play I’d never written. A week later, I was sitting in Ward’s Irish house when Dermot Burke, my next-door neighbour in Cavan and now by coincidence my next-door neighbour in Piccadilly, came in with a smile on his face and a copy of The Anglo-Celt.

Look, says he.

And there I was on the front page with a cigarette in my mouth over a small headline that read: CAVAN AUTHOR FINDS FAME.

Oh Burke brought that copy of the Anglo-Celt, into every company I found myself in; he produced it out of his pocket as we sat with friends, he had it photostated and posted it around.

He’d set me questions about the plot and the more he asked, the more I had to invent.

In time, I invented a producer from ITV, a Mr Evans, if you don’t mind, who lived in Hammersmith. Apparently I saw him from time to time. He went over the shots and camera angles with me. I even eventually set a date when it would be broadcast to the nation – November 10th, let’s say. In fact, I began to believe in it myself. I believed the script existed. The more of the story I invented, the more real it became.

Then I’d suddenly wake out of a dream terror-stricken by my duplicity. Slowly I tried to extricate myself from the lie. There were problems with production monies, I said. There were production difficulties. Something had gone wrong down the line. The date for the broadcast came and went. No one mentioned it.

But in fact I had set myself a duty. Everything I write now is an attempt to make up for that terrible lie. Had I not lied I might never have tried my hand at fiction. The truth is the lie you once told returning to haunt you.”

- Dermot Healy, The Bend For Home (1996)

There is nothing as entertaining as a good liar. I worked with one years ago; he was priceless.

He once told me he was driving along a motorway and saw a squirrel jump from a tree on the left-hand side of the road on to the roof of a lorry, run across the lorry and leap on to another, coming in the opposite direction, before landing safely on the branch of a tree on the opposite side. Where do you go from there?

There are different categories of liar. Your common or garden liar is what I like to call a ‘story-topper’. This person is not really a liar per se, more of a raconteur I like to think.

Others exaggerate for comic effect. I fall into this category myself from time to time (that is the truth).

Then there is the compulsive liar, the person who fabricates entire stories just for the sake of it. These are my personal favourite and the ones who are most compelling. They are liable to come out with anything, just for the hell of it. Usually, they are like an Irish spider, fairly harmless. Although they will surely have been bitten by a Black Widow if you ask them.

Anyway, is a lie always a bad thing? Of course not, not a fib in a social setting anyway. In the times we live in, though, it is becoming impossible to separate fact and fiction.

A lot of people have lost faith in the traditional media and, even though I work in the industry, I can understand why to an extent. Around this pandemic, for example, there has been some reporting, which spins the truth in a certain direction, like a crafty tennis player.

Last week, I read an article about an outbreak of 20 confirmed cases of Covid on Clare Island, off the Mayo coast. One line jarred with me.

“Based on the number of cases on the island itself, Clare Island would have an equivalent incidence rate of 12,500 per 100,000 people,” it read. Why stop there, though? Why just multiply the cases and the population by 500 times? Why not a million times? You get my point, I hope.

Other outlets, I felt, let themselves down with the fawning tone of their coverage of the inauguration of President Joe Biden. They made no secret of their scorn for his predecessor, which is a stance they are entitled to - but not in hard news coverage. Even if Donald Trump, incidentally, is one of the greatest and most brazen liars of all.

These things matter. Media outlets shape opinion as much as they reflect it. I regularly find myself scrolling through the archives of this newspaper and I am awe-struck at the power this paper held at one point. It wasn’t just influence, it was real power.

There was no local radio, no internet of course, no teletext. The Celt was selling the guts of 25,000 copies around Cavan and surrounding counties. It was printed on site, had a huge staff and a small fleet of vans on the road.

The population of the county was much smaller 25 years ago, say, than now – for every three people in Cavan, there were only two back then. And with the circulation having been higher, it’s safe to assume that the paper had a greater saturation, so much so that it was just taken as a given in GAA circles that everyone would read it.

For example, when a player was selected for a trial with a county minor team, say, there would be no official recognition (that came later, if he made the cut). Rather, there would be a few lines in a column somewhere stating that Johnny Reilly was to be at a certain local landmark at a certain time to be collected. And Johnny would be there.

I started here 13 years ago and caught the tail end of that era, and the Celtic Tiger too. For journalists of my vintage in particular, many of whom are getting out to take up PR jobs and so on, there has been a feeling of being on the ropes for a long time.

It reminds me of Tony Soprano’s first meeting with his therapist, Dr Melfi, in the pilot episode of the HBO classic. Tony is in Melfi’s office and talking about the demise of the American mafia.

“It’s good to be in something from the ground floor. I came too late for that, I know. But lately I’m getting the feeling that I came in at the end, that the best is over,” he says, with a pained expression.

Now, I’m not comparing the newspaper business to the mob, you understand – although there are a few wiseguys around – but the nostalgic sentiments echo. The difference is, the Cosa Nostra is dead whereas I truly believe newspapers have a bright future.

Of course, they will move online and that process is already well underway, and has thrown up challenges, not least the questions about how to make that model pay, with Google and Facebook gobbling up advertising revenue.

A subscriber-based approach, in my opinion, is the future of the industry, backed by government funding to subsidise some of the significant cost of covering events of public interest such as courts and council meetings.

People have always been willing to pay for news they could believe, that was fair and balanced, and for opinions that were authentic and informed, whether they agree or not, and I don’t think that has fundamentally changed. The reason why the transition has been slow is clear: the big hitters in the industry erred terribly in opting to give away so much of their content for free for so long.

A generation was lost but, while the next one has never paid for a newspaper or magazine in print format, they are well accustomed to shelling out for subscriptions to music and video streaming services and to patronise artists and so on.

If they are provided with a product they believe in, they will support it. And therein lies the key point of it all: Trust. Good liars are entertaining but, no different to Trump, they don’t last.

The longest-established media titles have survived all they have because they were trusted. And like that great Cavan writer Dermot Healy, they have set themselves a duty to uphold it.