A Class Act.

In Blog, Politicsby rabbleLeave a Comment

Soundmigration has some pertinent questions for the country’s political journo class.

He’s got a lengthy enough post over on his blog where he takes a meat cleaver to the Irish Times’ coverage of the IFSC Clearing House Group. Reality maps too closely onto satire it seems.

Is this retreat into personality as politics and politics as successive pseudo-entertaining events because current mainstream journalists lack the space to develop their own critical analysis of the macro political economy and the multi faceted nature of converging crisis? What about dependence as it is on the government of the day for its copy? Is there a herd mentality within journalistic practice? And where are working class political and economic journalist in the mainstream media?

We’ve no idea what statistics there are for this shit here, but us rabblers came across a report called Unleashing Aspirations in the UK mentioned over on The Guardian a few years ago. It noted among other things, that journalists born since 1970 predominantly came from middle class to upper middle class backgrounds. It seems fewer than 10 per cent of new journalists came from a working-class background and only three per cent came from homes headed by semi-skilled or unskilled workers.

With dozens of people fiddling around with media degrees here, surely there must be a set of similar statistics for Ireland?

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