Eddie Holt, Redux

Ah, the power of ‘citizen journalism’.  Much as Eddie Holt might rail against the corporate media, little did he suspect that the power of the b-word* and the disapproval of our own Worldbystorm would result in his losing his job at the Irish Times.

Now, if only Madam would start listening to us about John Waters!

On a more serious note, Holt’s departure is indicative of a wider right-ward drift within The Times roughly since Kennedy took over as editor. It seems as if there’s a conscious effort to move the paper away from it’s presumed liberal-left ideological standpoint and to give conservative commentators a larger voice within the Irish media.

The problem, though, is that The Irish Times was never as liberal-left as it was made out to be; certainly not in recent years. It’s almost an article of faith among certain quarters that the paper is barely to the right of The Morning Star, pointing to the presence of Fintan O’Toole, Vincent Browne and Mary Raftery.

Okay, let’s accept that point. All three of those could probably be categorised, to a greater or lesser extent, as being ‘left-wing’ (although with Browne his political stance changes like the weather). Who else is there? Breda O’Brien? Garret Fitzgerald? David Adams? The Waters (Shaman-Bard to the Tribe of the Gael)? The late, unlamented Kevin Myers? Stephen Collins? Indeed, Kennedy herself? Hardly a bastion of revolutionary Marxism.

The Dubliner, some time ago,  had a very interesting piece related to this examining the supposed left-wing bias of the Irish media. Although hardly the most scientific survey ever conducted, it took a broad cross-section of Irish political commentators and positioned them across the ideological spectrum.  With a handful of leftish exceptions, the vast majority were located somewhere on the right, with a lot of clustering towards the centre. And The Dubliner itself hardly suffers from delusions of socialist utopianism.
Of course, all this is relative.  An admirer of Ayn Rand (I hear there’s one or two around and about) might consider anyone saner than Mary Ellen Synon to be a collectivist totalitarian and a Trotskyist cultist might see even the indymedia collective as dangerously reactionary.

All of which is why it’s a little depressing, although hardly shocking, to see The Irish Times moving the way it is.  While one mightn’t be a huge admirer of Harry Browne or Eddie Holt, they do seem to represent an increasingly marginalised position within the Irish media.  Even Fintan O’Toole has only recently returned from his exile in China, like Lenin arriving at the Finland Station.

It’s one thing for a paper to look at it’s broad ideological position and attempt to diversify; it’s quite another to react against a perceived position it doesn’t even hold.

* The b-word, of course, being ‘blogosphere’, but I’d hate myself if I used it.