No balancing act in sight as Irish media sets its Sinn Féin agenda

The best explanation of how Sinn Féin are covered in Irish media is to be found in a town in North Carolina with a population the size of Tallaght.

I hate to say “I told you so”, but here we are.

Regular readers will remember my post last week about a brief TV appearance I made that put the cat among the Irish media pigeons about Sinn Féin and how they are covered, and everything that has happened since on the airwaves and in the newspapers has pretty much proved my point.

On Virgin Media’s “Tonight” show last Wednesday, I made a (very short) contribution to say that Irish media’s coverage of Sinn Féin - particularly its internal workings with regard to disciplinary matters - almost always carries a subtext that they are not to be trusted, and thus not fit to govern.

Fianna Fáil TD and minister of state Niall Collins went on to prove my point on the Tonight show almost immediately, talking about Sinn Féin’s past as the political wing of the IRA and its tacit acceptance of criminality in pursuit of their cause.

Oddly, he never mentioned writing a letter to a judge pleading for leniency in the case of a drug dealer in 2014 while he was his party’s justice spokesman, but I’m sure it just slipped his mind.

After I published the post, things got a little wild on social media as the discussion got going - are Sinn Féin really singled out for special treatment, or are they held to the same standard as everyone else?

The op-eds in Irish media gave a clear answer as, one after the other, the usual suspects put the boot in.

Now, I’ve never seen a media hornet’s nest that I didn’t want to poke vigorously and repeatedly, so on Friday I put out the following tweet:

I think you can guess what happened next.

The weekend brought a veritable tsunami of screenshots of headlines in response to that tweet, all almost exclusively negative about Sinn Féin and Mary Lou McDonald. From the columnists to the broadcast commentators, it was the only show in town.

Not that anyone cares what I think, but given how many fellow journalists follow me, I thought my tweet might have given them pause before they crafted their weekend columns, but not a bit of it - like Niall Collins, they ploughed on regardless.

The tropes were trotted out, one after the other, and the ears of the “shadowy figures from Belfast” must have been burning like the fuse of a petrol bomb, so often were they mentioned.

There was an obsession with the “questions that need to be asked” of Sinn Féin, and the bait was swallowed, hook, line and sinker as the party of 2024 was once again cast as the party of 1983, as if none of the last 40-odd years of Irish history had ever happened.

When this happens in the northern part of the country, barrister, bon vivant, columnist, podcaster and raconteur Joe Brolly often calls this “IRA-ing” - everything any nationalist ever said is met with something along the lines of “but the IRA …”

In the south, the current iteration of that fashion is “Sinn Féin-ing” - no matter what serious issues the people in the south or facing, the most important thing is to talk negatively about Sinn Féin at every given opportunity.

More than 14,000 homeless, including thousands of children?

“sinn féin, sinn féin, sinn féin …”

Endless waiting lists for urgent medical procedures like scoliosis surgeries for kids?

“Sinn Féin! Sinn Féin! Sinn Féin!”

Paschal O’Donohoe promising an Israeli official that he will block an Occupied Territories Bill that is supported by many, many Irish people?

“SINN FÉIN!! SINN FÉIN!! SINN FÉÉÉÉÉIN!!!!”

OUT IN THE COLD

This is not new, of course, and for years it was an effective way of keeping “the Shinners” isolated and outside the mainstream of party politics, and it’s not a mistake - in fact, it has its roots in a theory first formulated more than a century ago.

Back then, news sources were mostly limited to radio and newspapers - TV hadn’t quite made its breakthrough, but the theory that Walter Lippmann first aired in his 1922 book Public Opinion appeared to hold true - and perhaps became even stronger - once the goggle-box took hold of our consciousness.

In his book, Lippmann put the case that the world is too complex and too rich in events for us to be able to process everything that happens in it, and that mass media takes on the role of filtering and packaging it to make it easier for us, as consumers and voters and citizens, to digest.

The media step in and essentially set the agenda, offering simpler models by which people can make sense of the world.

- Walter Lippmann, Public Opinion

In the following years, Lippmann’s ideas were studied and expanded, and though he never used the term himself in his book, his principle point became known as “agenda-setting theory”, and a light went on for media producers and consumers.

Academics were puzzled, though; research showed that individuals were still more strongly influenced by their peer groups than by what the media said - for instance, no God-fearing American was going to become an atheist overnight just because some cable TV channel or newspaper said so, but gradually they worked it out.

In 1963, political scientist Bernard Cohen finally put his finger on it in the most succinct way possible - you didn’t have to give people ready-made opinions, you simply had to ensure that their focus was where you wanted it to be, and the rest would take care of itself.

"(The media) may not be successful much of the time in telling people what to think, but it is stunningly successful in telling its readers what to think about.

- Bernard Cohen

Think back to the three examples of Sinn Féin-ing above - any reasonable citizen would agree that the housing situation in Ireland is disastrous, that children with scoliosis need urgent care, and (perhaps to a lesser extent) that Paschal Donohoe blocking the Occupied Territories Bill is a bad thing, but where were the columns and editorials and op-eds about them this weekend?

On Sunday morning we got our answer - one contributor to the Brendan O’Connor Show on RTE Radio whose name I missed (note - David in the comments below informed me that the contributor in questions was Sheena Cahill) said that she had counted 51 articles about Sinn Féin as she perused the papers ahead of the morning’s newspaper review.

If one wished to be cruel and crude, one could describe that kind of coverage as what Steve Bannon once called “flooding the zone with shit.”

Ironically, as Brendan closed the first hour of his show, he found himself compelled to read out a text message as a listener responded to a contributor’s personal frustation over the housing situation in Ireland - that, and not “Sinn Féin-ing” was what resonated with the audience.

THE REAL QUESTIONS TO BE ANSWERED

The most important questions around all of this are not actually who is saying what.

In fact, they are the most important two questions we should ask when reading any media at any time - why am I being told this, and why now?

When it comes to Sinn Féin, the answer is simple - there is a general election coming, and there are wealthy and powerful people, many of them involved in the media, who do not want Sinn Féin to win, and the agenda is being set to do everything possible to prevent that from happening.

In 1972, the agenda-setting theories of Lippmann and Cohen were put to the test by associate professors of journalism Maxwell E. McCombs and Donald L. Shaw in a study around another election entitled The Agenda-Setting Function Of Mass Media, which has become more commonly known as the Chapel Hill study.

To test the idea that the mass media can set the agenda, the two used the 1968 presidential election and interviewed people in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, a town with around 60,000 people, or a few thousand less than the Dublin suburb of Tallaght.

They selected 100 voters to interview over a period of three weeks, and in parallel collected and analysed the coverage of the election.

What they found was that “while the mass media may have little influence on the direction or intensity of attitudes, it is hypothesized that the mass media set the agenda for each political campaign, influencing the salience of attitudes toward the political issues.”

In short, the more the media talked about something - foreign policy, law and order, civil rights - the more important the interviewees said it was in the election.

A blunt summation of how this looks in the recent Irish media context might be that the agenda is being set to “Sinn Féin are not fit to govern” - the more this is repeated, the more ears it reaches, and the more it is discussed among peer groups, the more important it becomes - instead of housing, health or Paschal Donohoe’s alarming inability to remember the content of his phone calls.

But the flip side is also true - if we accept that the mass media can set the agenda and influence what we think about, it does not automatically follow that we agree, and there is an enormous risk that a considerable number of voters end up alienated and losing faith in the media altogether.

Some might dimiss this from old prejudices - “who needs the knuckle-draggers that vote for Sinn Féin anyway?” - but the truth is that, like the party itself, the demographics of Sinn Féin’s voters have changed over the years, and you alienate them at your peril.

Sinn Féin’s meteoric rise in opinion polls worried the establishment horses for a long time, but then two things happened - one was the rise of the far right, particularly online, which started to eat away at their support in a way that no mainstream political movement could.

Attacking Sinn Féin’s nationalist credentials as being the party with Ireland’s best interests at heart by going after their record on immigration was a godsend for the more established parties.

Though no strangers to a bit of racism themselves (and indeed architects of some of the worst structural racism in Europe), most don’t want to be seen tagging their posts with #IrelandIsFull, but they are more than happy to sit back with a bucket of popcorn and watch Sinn Féin scramble to deal with this new political paradigm.

As tent encampments and buildings earmarked to house refugees burned, Sinn Féin struggled to maintain its support among both working-class and newly-found middle-class voters, resulting in a series of mis-steps that cost it even more support.

That sudden vulnerability allowed the media to begin attaching the “crisis” label to Mary Lou McDonald’s leadership, amplifying it with every further perceived crisis.

Anything with a whiff of the justice system, such as inappropriate texts to minors or an allegation against a Dáil committee member, was like throwing another ten gallons of petrol on the flames.

So where to from here?

In the absence of a viable left-wing or centre-left media alternative, this will not stop - “the beatings will continue until morale improves”, to quote the great Dublin band Something Happens!.

With an election due before the end of the year, the drumbeat of negativity about Sinn Féin will go on pounding, but down that path lies a risk that many in the media may not have priced in to their coverage.

There’s a lot of voters out there voting for the first time, and they don’t get their news in the same places that their parents and grandparents did. Perhaps more than any generation, they hate being told what to think, and they don’t take too kindly to being told what to think about, either.

They will make up their minds based on media sources that existing political correspondents don’t even know exist.

When they look in their future, they don’t see who is Taoiseach - they see their chances of getting a home or a decent retirement for their parents being as distant as they ever were, and no amount of Sinn Féin-ing is going to convince them otherwise.

For the party itself, Sinn Féin’s previous electoral problem has been timing such a backlash against the establishment to coincide with polling day. What has happened in recent weeks and months looks to have been a perfect example of agenda-setting theory being used to prime the electorate for another centre-right government to keep the status quo going.

We move now from a situation where the agenda has been set firmly against Sinn Féin to the next major question, and the party’s only hope.

Once by far the best on-the-ground operators in Irish politics, can they now mobilise and use the negativity towards them to galvanise voters and get them to rally around their cause?

Because nothing sets the agenda for a post-election period like votes in a ballot box.