Oh, the infighting on the left. If only they could get along and get their act together, and maybe they’d achieve something. In the aftermath of #coponcomrades, and after a couple of years of complete lack of consensus around Corbyn’s Labour leadership in the UK, it is easy to feel like the infighting on the left has become a pet peeve of many, interestingly especially those who aren’t...
Category - Media
I watched the first episode of Ways of Seeing, the BBC John Berger mini-series from 1972, last night. Explaining how images are given new meanings in different contexts, carrying ideological biases depending on their presentation and contextualisation, Berger ends the episode with a warning: “But remember that I am controlling, and using for my own purposes, the means of reproduction needed for...
“Children of working mothers have better social and everyday skills,” read an Irish Times headline last week. A few days later, The Guardian reported on another study suggesting that mothers should spend as much time with their children as they can afford, and went with the headline “Child’s cognitive skills linked to time spent with mother”. Such is the game of pitting mothers against...
Is the general public “right to be angry at the sense of entitlement” of a homeless, pregnant mother-of-two in temporary hotel accommodation? asked The Niall Boylan Show on Facebook the other day. Linking to screen grabs of a journal.ie article about the woman and a selection of comments on the same, the radio show noted that Laura from Cork was “not getting a huge amount of sympathetic...
So The Late Late Show decided to book Katie Hopkins – British tabloid columnist, vocal Trump supporter and bigoted racist extraordinaire – to fly over from England to discuss the context and outcome of the US election. RTÉ received over 1,000 complaints in little over a day, but the complainants were quickly labelled smug and opposed to democratic, basic free speech, and accused of – wait...
Is tone policing the new master suppression technique? What is a master suppression technique? you ask. It is a way to suppress and humiliate an opponent, according to Norwegian psychologist and philosopher Ingjald Nissen, who articulated the framework of such techniques in 1945. And tone policing? A tone argument is one which isn’t strictly concerned with what is being said, but rather with...
We’re used to being told that we’re doing it wrong. We’re used to being told that we’re too aggressive, too angry, too shrill. But when, all of a sudden, we start hearing it from people supposedly on our side, alarm bells start ringing. These alleged pro-choice supporters with the vocabulary of anti-choicers started voicing their concerns in national newspapers recently, airing their...
I started writing a piece the other day called ‘From #NotAllMen to #NotAllMedia’, which I had yet to publish. I wanted to clarify yet again how my criticism of the reporting of the Cavan murders was a structural critique of sorts, aiming to start a conversation around the wider media climate and its impact on the real-life experiences of its audiences, and how making it personal and debating...
Five people die in Cavan, and in the days to come, Irish newspapers are full of questions. “Why did he do it?” asks one national daily, picturing a man and his three sons. “How could he kill those poor boys?” asks another. It is almost immediately clear that the father, Mr Hawe, has stabbed the other four to death: the mother and the three sons. He has then killed himself. And in search...
So today started out well. What better way to start your day than with a nice cup of coffee, a bit of sunshine and a good dose of privilege spread across the opinion pages of the Independent? Now, before you go looking for the article – don’t. Don’t give them the honour; don’t feed their advertisers. Lovely woman as I am, I have summarised Barbara McCarthy’s privileged views below...