Dublin Opinion

“Television is a series of lies but even the modern audience - make that particularly the modern audience - expects the bits of television that claim to be true to actually be true. It’s just the way we were brought up. We believe in television. We want our documentaries - and the documentary is a notoriously slippy form - to be true.”

So says Ann Marie Hourihane in the Irish Times today (sub req).

She is talking about how documentary making and the telling of news panders to a kind of racy narrative that often exists in parallel to the truth. She cites what happened to Dan Rather when he tried to tell a story about George Bush, how he skipped serving in Vietnam through the influence of his father, and tells us that Rather was sacked because he made the claim while only relying on ‘unverifiable documents’.

She also mentions Griff Rhys Jones and the claim that for his program BBC ‘Mountain’ he didn’t in fact climb Ben Nevis.

Closer to home, and how could she ignore it, she mentions JDW and her cocaine-addicted storylines.

“And all week, of course, we have had the fascinating case here of Justine Delaney-Wilson and the cocaine-snorting Minister (allegedly). Delaney-Wilson is said to be on holiday in New Zealand, presumably hotly pursued by some of this country’s press.

In the past, with a less aggressive print media, you can be pretty sure that there were just as many fudged competitions, fake viewers’ letters and stories based on unverifiable documents, but back then none of the rest of us knew.”

So before, in a less media savy time the wool was regularly pulled over our eyes, but we lacked the critical facility to spot it. The past is indeed a foreign country, where the other, our earlier selves, is the ignorant lumbering subaltern incapable of understanding the lingo of the media exec. A couch-bound Caliban with a primitive TV zapper.

“But the point is that the television audience has become so well informed about the medium that 12-year-old children can discuss commissioning editors, production companies and contemporaneous notes while devouring a hamburger and maintaining a vice-like grip on the remote. It took me years to learn that stuff.

There are those who would argue that when you make television news become show business, you’re going to end up in a lot of trouble.”

You know Ann, I’ve been saying the same myself. In fact, I feel I’ve been saying it too much, boring everyone with my ‘media is this’, ‘media is that – blah, blah, blah’. I feel like a whiny child distressed that things aren’t the way they should be and demanding with a stamping foot that they ought to be just how I like ‘em.

“Truth used to be stranger than fiction, now it is fiction.”

And there you have it. An acknowledgement, of sorts.

Because of all the incidents she mentioned relating to that ‘notoriously slippy form’ the one she forgot to mention, and which has attracted a fair amount of controversy, is the Hidden History documentary The Killings At Coolacrease.

The omission is weird because Hourihan was involved in the ensuing controversy herself. On the 25th of October she wrote a column supporting the conclusions of the program and repeating the unfounded claim made by Eoghan Harris that “both Richard and Abraham were shot in the genital area”.

Not only that there was a blizzard of letters to the Irish Times about it, Pat Muldowney’s Indymedia articles were republished by Village and the Irish Times. WorldbyStorm has been writing on it consistently, and consistently well, on Cedar Lounge Revolution.

In her 25th of October article Hourihane says:

“There was never a shred of evidence to justify the Pearson murders, and there still isn’t. Here was an otherwise excellent - a groundbreaking - programme that was far too balanced in its efforts to give both sides of a lamentable story.”

It seems egregious to point out, because it is so obvious, that this is an incredible statement considering that the program omitted the conclusions drawn by two contemporary investigations conducted into the Pearson murders (see the Muldowney and Cedar Lounge articles for details).

So there we have it. Truth used to be stranger than fiction, now it is fiction.

Update: I should have linked to Pat Muldowney’s article on Indymedia. The comments attached provide a lot of information about attempts to provide a balanced approach to the story. Thanks to the commentors who noticed this post.