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Monday 31 January 2011

Question

This began as a facebook exchange which I throught I'd throw out a bit wider.  Someone highlighted Gerry's latest gaffes in a 20 minute RTE interview and I asked the question:

"How come it has taken the RoI media a few weeks to highlight this basic ignorance and ineptitude yet the NI media was incapable of it for decades?"

The Louth soil cannot be blamed for transforming Adams' feet into clay certainly not in the few weeks he's lived there.  News Letter journo, Sam McBride offered this answer:

"one of the reasons is that when SF get into trouble up here, their natural line of defence is to turn it into a sectarian row (eg. Murphy attempting to introduce Irish road signs while facing calls to resign over the water crisis). It's pretty hard to do that in a country where 98% of people are nationalist..."

What do you think?

1 comment:

O'Neill said...

Sam's right!

I'd say there's also a fair bit of cowardice/pragmatism shown by the Irish News, UTV and BBC NI- they know a high % of their SF-supporting audience would believe Gerry if he told them today was, despite all the Brit assertions to the contrary, in fact Tuesday.

Challenge SF too much and you're also challenging the critical facility of their sheep and that way you soon start losing your readers and viewers.