In the previous post I suggested that continual media exposure has little or no positive effect on families in the Focus Group.
I am intrigued by the question of who profits from high profile reportage of controversial subjects that are divisive, and/or uncover previously unknown facts. Mostly, these issues would have been (or are being) hidden by powerful interests, and would have been (or are) sure to cause scandal.
Such coverage (and long analyses of the why) are almost always cheered on enthusiastically by activists and campaigners. I have many examples of such reportage having no long-lasting impact at all which I could readily give.
The example that I include here is the now well-known redress boards in Ireland, which handed out considerable sums of money as compensation – following continual media exposure – to people who experienced physical, emotional and sometimes sexual abuse in the Industrial Schools and Magdalene Laundries in past decades.
Some of the people – now adults – who received compensation were, in my experience, in very vulnerable situations, with a lot of the trauma experienced in their childhood/youth unresolved. (Trauma will be dealt with in more detail in the Chapter on Trauma and Related Topics).
It struck me, reading the news articles that, rather than focusing on how healing might happen, and how some form of restoration or reconciliation might be encouraged, the media (almost always) excited and titillated us with stories of the behaviour of the brothers, nuns and priests who ran the homes.
There may have been articles written about people whose memories were different, and who felt that they benefited from such institutions. If there were, they were few and far between.
It is tempting when exploring deep societal problems, (such as we do in Ireland all the time), to portray people who behaved wrongly as baddies, and those who were hurt by the bad behaviour, as goodies.
Because we seem to love competition and comparison, this simplification of what are very complex problems is very attractive to media.
As a result of many scandals over the past thirty years or so, the Catholic Church in Ireland has moved from being an untouchable goodie on an unreachable pedestal to being (in many people’s eyes) a baddie. Never has the expression the bigger they are the harder they fall been as apt!
Yet focusing on the story from this perspective often prevents us from reflecting on our history, and how we, the general public, might have collectively allowed (or enabled, or even encouraged) the abuse of power that some elements in the Church engaged in.
Undoubtedly, the uncovering of the abuse that happened in these institutions made a lot of profit for media outlets. I am fairly sure that they profited far more from the methods of reporting it in the way they did than they would have had they reported it in a way that encouraged reconciliation and healing. And I do not know how much money that legal (and many other) professionals gained from the entire redress board experience.
But all, I would say did a lot better out of it, financially, than the vast majority of the people who experienced the abuse.
I have no expectation at all that highlighting the above will change media reportage.
My motivation to mention it at all is two-fold.
Firstly I personally knew (and know) men and women who suffered greatly and whose lives (and children’s lives) did not improve one iota because of the compensation received as a result of the wide-scale media coverage.
Secondly I like to be curious about the motivation behind the way that much reporting (of what, of course are legitimate news items and stories) is done.
I am not judging here – I am merely commenting on how I experience reportage – and speculating as to who really benefits in the long run.