Valuable and Fallible: A Review Essay on Reception, Ethics and the Media

Abstract

Valuable and Fallible:A Review Essay on Reception, Ethics and the Media Colum Kenny A Post-Nationalist History of Television in Ireland, Edward Brennan (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019), xv+235 pages. Journalism’s Ethical Progression: A Twentieth Century Journey, Gwyneth Mellinger and John P Ferré (eds) (Lexington, Kentucky: University Press of Kentucky, 2020), 258 pages. ‘The history of journalism ethics speaks to the present in a variety of ways’. So writes John Patrick Ferré, one of the editors of Journalism’s Ethical Progression, who adds that – at the very least – ‘understanding how predecessors defined the situations they faced, applied principles, appealed to values, and identified stakeholders can help contemporary problemsolvers face issues systematically with the knowledge of past failures and successes’. Some people think that media made a democratising quantum leap with the onset of internet services but, if so, it remains the case that qualitative questions about moral issues are timeless insofar as they concern the truth, motivation or fairness of any communication. Each of the costly volumes considered here is directly relevant to current media developments. Edward Brennan, the author of a new ‘post-nationalist’ study of television in Ireland, raises questions that by extension help citizens to understand and respond to the complexities of a media-saturated society, in which commercial and political forces use remarkably sophisticated means to set agendas by means of gratification and manipulation. Just TV alone is still an intrusive medium, with the average number of hours watched by each person being substantial. Here, Brennan takes a broad view of TV studies by looking beyond the institutional story of particular national broadcasters such as Ireland’s RTÉ and beyond their internally produced programming, and beyond the relationship of broadcasters to advertisers and politicians, each of which provides the focus for other accounts. Brennan’s use of the term ‘post-nationalist’ in his title is by no means an Review Articles Studies • volume 109 • number 434 227 assertion that the concept or reality of the nation-state is somehow redundant, but it is recognition of the contemporary globalised ideology and identity of nation-states and of their citizens’ use and enjoyment of media from sources based outside any single state. He highlights the danger of studying television in Ireland as if Irish viewers had only ever watched, or taken seriously, Irishmade programmes on Irish channels. The history of television in Ireland is not just the history of RTÉ and other Irish channels. Long before some bigger states, Ireland, like Canada, began to experience the widespread reception of TV services and programmes from abroad in a language widely understood by its citizens and not subject to Irish regulation. There have been, in this and other ways, diverse sources for the construction of each citizen’s identity, and no single seamless Irish culture. Like many of the people whom Brennan interviewed for his book, and whose comments are enlightening and amusing, this reviewer recalls as an exciting and special event his first experience of watching live television. In the 1950s my parents brought me and my siblings to the house of acquaintances in Glasnevin, where we struggled through a storm of ‘bad reception’ to watch programmes being transmitted across Northern Ireland, part of the United Kingdom. As was common then, the strength of the blackand -white picture and its accompanying sound waxed and waned, sometimes breaking up into horizontal bars. We waited impatiently to see again the interrupted programmes, but just being in the presence of a working TV set was delightful. Although no television service was yet licensed within the Republic of Ireland, people were buying sets and erecting tall, cumbersome aerials to receive analogue signals that spilled over from the United Kingdom. Brennan found that his interviewees had difficulty remembering what they had actually done during many of the evening hours before television arrived in the home, what there was that TV presumably displaced – besides the rosary and some radio listening and perhaps a little reading. Brennan explores the development of hire-purchase and rental deals that were used to facilitate the acquisition of TV sets in Ireland at a time when citizens had little disposable income. It is a striking fact that the population...