MEDIA FRIENDS OF ISRAEL

AN INTRIGUING article in the The Jerusalem Post by Irish Friends of Israel spokesperson Sean Gannon recently bewailed the pro-Palestinian bias of Irish people and the Irish media, but singled out two exceptions in the latter category. These were: “one Sunday broadsheet” (no prizes for guessing that’s the Sunday Independent) and the “The Irish Times’s influential opinion/letters page, due to personnel changes since 2006″. Who on earth could Gannon be referring to?
A fortnight earlier, the Sindo ‘s Eoghan Harris singled out the same IT letters page in particular (“a calm oasis where both sides can have their say in peace”) and the newspaper generally for its refusal to show “the corpses of little children shorn of any subtext”.
So what personnel change has led to this sea change at the IT ? Could it be that the spikey former Sunday Tribune editor and ex-Guardian writer Peter Murtagh is the new media saviour of the Irish right as championed by Harris and Gannon ? Murtagh was made opinion editor in 2005, giving him a position that included overarching responsibility for opinion, including the letters page.
Murtagh was one of the ‘Daily Mail Set’ that wanted the newspaper to ‘modernise’ in the period of flux following former editor Conor Brady’s decision to stand down in 2000. The modernisers were defeated in the editorial succession stakes but Murtagh has since been reconciled with Madam Editor Geraldine Kennedy, with whose world view — to the right — he would concur.

Adopting the Mail drive towards female readers, Murtagh has recruited a host of female writers — Sarah Carey, Elaine Byrne, Anne Marie Hourihane — but he has also toughened up the opinion pages with a distinctly right-wing veneer.
Murtagh recruited the ultimate neo-con global scribe Mark Steyn when he was foreign editor and the tone of his opinion articles are now distinctly to the right as his own column indicates — he was recently appalled at the suggestion that Ireland withdraw from the European industrial arms complex, the European Defence Agency. And Murtagh presided over a virtual British Army recruitment exercise in a series of articles in the newspaper.
Murtagh was also instrumental in providing a ‘balanced’ approach to the debate over the Israeli carnage in Gaza as both the letters page and the opinion columns showed — at a time when almost the entire world was horrified at the slaughter. This balance included a refusal to publish an opinion piece from Fianna Fail TD Chris Andrews, who had incurred the wrath of Israeli ambassador Zion Evronv more than once in remarks on the Gaza assault published by the newspaper. Praise from The Jerusalem Post and Harris is deserving indeed.

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