P.

My motivation was the frustration that the likes of Michael Taft (or any of the other speakers at the TASC conference last October, or Paul Sweeney, etc.) is not a regular columnist (at least, in the Times — I don’t check the Independent regularly). A response to an individual article by any of their current stable simply legitimises their overall policy on economic commentary. The Times (at least) likes to think of itself as balanced, and it seemed to me that a regular — persistent, even — analysis showing the imbalance might provide the evidence for some shift.

(I realised that project would not be one I could do: I don’t have enough economics to analyse the articles.)

I don’t read the papers seriously anymore. Browse the free parts of the IT and maybe buy a copy of Sunday Tribune once in a blue moon.

But I feel its like the Victorian pastime of going to see the patients at Bedlam for amusement. It’s the sort of think that civilised people should try to wean themselves away from.

I mean its painful and pitiful to see, in article after article, the extent to which Irish journalists don’t realise that if you make factual claim ‘X’ the reader can google things and within a couple of minutes be able to verify it. Or that most of them rarely seem to basically contextualise factual claims. Having followed the debates on the minimum wage and social welfare payments over the past two years, the degeneracy of Irish journalism is clear to any rational being.

Do they not realise that the internet and availability of information demands that they raise their game and not think that its enough to belt out golf-club cliches as serious economic and political analysis.

I’m genuinely looking forward to the day when the IT goes under.