Apart from alcohol dependency, gambling has to be one of the most destructive addictions in this country, and one that we’re way too ambiguous about. And so it was a welcome awareness-raising exercise when stand-in presenter Dr Ciara Kelly interviewed Maebh Leahy, CEO of the Rutland Centre, on Newstalk’s High Noon last week. The specific…
American politics have become much more prominent in the media since the election of Donald Trump, and I reckon it’s important to sample a variety of media sources to get a balanced picture. Dipping alternatively into CNN and Fox News certainly gives the viewer different perspectives, but of late I’ve taken to following EWTN’s News…
Prompted by the Tuam babies controversy there were more and more harrowing personal stories, testifying to times that were less compassionate and often more cruel than today. Referring to the culture of the times helps our understanding but doesn’t provide justification – Church-run institutions should have been counter-cultural, should have set a much higher standard.…
There were so many instances of classic media bias. It started with The Pat Kenny Tonight Show on TV 3, Wednesday of last week, when the topic was the Eighth Amendment, a debate prompted by last weekend’s meeting of the Citizens’ Assembly. First off there was a soft interview with a pro-choice woman who had…
Has Political Correctness Gone Mad? – a documentary with a name to draw in the curious, on Channel 4 last Thursday night. It was billed as an authored programme, an opinion piece, by Trevor Phillips, and despite advance warnings about bad language and racist terms, it was actually a reflective and relatively moderate programme. I…
It was a dizzying week, with more drama on Oireachtas TV than on any mainstream channel. It had all the features of fictional drama – moral dilemmas, cliffhanging tension, heroes (short supply), villains (don’t ask), the rise and fall of interlocking story arcs. You didn’t know from breakfast through lunch whether you’d still have a…
A couple of new shows hit the TV screens last week. With much advance hype one of these arrived on RTÉ2 last Thursday night. US drama This Is Us tells the interacting stories of several individuals who share the same birthday. It was appealing enough to make me want to watch another episode, but only…
With so much negative stuff in the news these days, it was good to hear an upbeat item on the Pat Kenny Show (Newstalk), last Friday. It was part of a series on the North Inner City of Dublin, a place full of history, characters and subject to what Kenny called “one of the worst…
In the past few weeks I’ve been following the English crime thriller series Unforgotten on ITV. This is series two and the high artistic standards set in series one are thankfully maintained…though really it’s the same plot with different characters – a body is found that has been hidden for years, and gradually the police…
Well, for better or for worse, for richer but hardly for poorer, it was Trump week. The dust had hardly settled on Martin Luther King Day when the media went into overdrive in anticipation of inauguration day. I can remember the hype for Obama’s first inauguration, and there were indeed some touching and emotional moments,…
Brendan O’Regan