A little over a week ago, a small phalanx of journalists gathered outside Leinster House for what is called a doorstep with the People Before Profit-Solidarity TD Ruth Coppinger.
Ben Scallan, who works for the right-leaning publication Gript and was a candidate in the 2020 general election for the Irish Freedom Party, asked a question that amounted to a standard, “What’s your reaction?” The context was Jim O’Callaghan’s plan to speed up deportations of failed asylum seekers.
It must be frustrating for politicians (and other journalists) to repeatedly hear representatives from the same outlet ask the same handful of questions over and over, particularly when almost every issue – as is the case with Gript – seems to be filtered through the prism of immigration. But politicians find lots of questions journalists put to them irritating, and they are generally adept at channelling implacable courtesy in the reporter’s general direction, while saying precisely nothing.
Coppinger did not do that. She pointedly refused to answer, saying “Not for Gript, no.”
Politicians shirk tricky or unwelcome questions all the time. But they don’t blacklist entire media organisations, which are members of the Press Council, because they object to their editorial line
She and her colleague Paul Murphy later laid out their position in some detail, which boils down to a refusal to take questions from that outlet. Coppinger says taking this stand against Gript has resulted in two serious death threats by online posters, but it is her view that the trolling “confirms we were right to not engage”. Several commentators who would probably describe themselves as liberal and left-leaning agreed with her, arguing that politicians have a right to refuse to deal with media outlets they don’t like.
The issue here isn’t actually very complex, despite Coppinger’s attempt to roll it up into everything from an ideological clash between right and left to her perception of the failings of individual journalists. (In a late-night tweet, she called two journalists who challenged her position on this “very pathetic”, for which she subsequently apologised – though not, it is fair to say, with gushing sincerity. She also claimed, without offering any evidence, that the same journalists would not have made an issue of a politician refusing to engage with a left-wing outlet.
This isn’t an issue of right or left, or about whether you like or detest Gript’s editorial line or its goady approach to politicians, or Coppinger’s own politics. It’s whether you believe in freedom of the press and believe politicians should be accountable to the media, and by extension to the electorate.
At a time when all sorts of values feel in flux, freedom of speech and by extension freedom of the press remain one on which it is refreshingly easy to tell where you stand. There’s a simple test. Do you believe in free speech? Do you believe in it for views and people you loathe? Unless you answer ‘yes’ to both questions, you don’t believe in it.
If this all sounds like a story you’ve seen play out before, it’s because you have. You’ve seen it before when Donald Trump excluded the Associated Press from pooled press events at the Oval Office and on Air Force One because they refuse to call the Gulf of Mexico the “Gulf of America”. You’ve seen it when the US president calls individual reporters or their questions “stupid” or says they are “animals” or “some of the worst human beings you’ll ever meet” or when he suggests, as he did recently, that CNN and MSNBC are “illegal”.
You don’t have to look to Trump, Xi Jinping or Vladimir Putin to see independent journalism under assault. Moderate, liberal politicians might baulk at playground insults but they contribute to undermining the media when they drag their heels on reforming libel laws, cut funding to public media, refuse to engage with freedom of information requests or do nothing as big tech cannibalises the work of journalists.
Despite frequent accusations of chumminess, there is for the most part a healthy distance between politicians and the media in this country. Sometimes it’s more like a gulf. Sinn Féin robustly denies that it has a policy of encouraging its representatives to pursue media outlets they feel wronged by, but if it’s not an actual policy, the party’s willingness to resort to legal writs is certainly a noteworthy trend.
Still, few salvos aimed at the media from political parties in this part of the world have been quite as overt as this. Politicians shirk tricky or unwelcome questions all the time. But they don’t blacklist entire media organisations, which are members of the Press Council, because they object to their editorial line.
Murphy vociferously denied that the position taken by People Before Profit-Solidarity had echoes of Trump’s attacks on the media. “That’s different,” he said, when the similarities to the move to exclude AP from Air Force One were pointed out. “We don’t have the power to do that to Gript,” he added, a retort several football pitches from the point. Coppinger claimed, with equally perplexing logic, that “the comparison to Trump is just ludicrous. I’m not a sexual predator.”
But it is not a stretch to make that comparison. And the reason why this matters beyond the relatively narrow spheres of influence of Gript and PBP-Solidarity is because we are living through what has been called a “democratic recession”. In many countries, democratic norms are being eroded by politicians who, once elected, start chipping away at anything that makes them accountable: civil service, courts and the media. It never happens overnight, but starts gradually, with a conflation of issues that have nothing to do with each other, or the suggestion that certain rights and values may not be absolute, or with the mocking and deriding of journalists.
As Noam Chomsky puts it: “If you’re in favour of freedom of speech, that means you’re in favour of speech precisely for views you despise. Otherwise you’re not in favour of freedom of speech. There’s two positions you can have on freedom of speech. Now you can decide which position you want.”
