Social Items

TPQ
Showing posts with label The Phoenix. Show all posts
Showing posts with label The Phoenix. Show all posts
Jim Duffy ✍ writing on the demise of The Phoenix magazine.


Its standard of journalism was poor, its fact-checking almost non-existent. 

It might have a kernel of truth somewhere but would drown it in biases and the prejudices of its owner and writers.
 
I featured in it a few times. It might have one correct line but drown the rest is falsehoods and bile. It trotted out its owner's prejudices as facts. One of the most laughable ones was hinting I was the grandson of Éoin O Duffy.

1. O'Duffy never married and never had children, so how could I be his grandson?
2. As was known in the circles the people in the publication moved in, Éoin O Duffy was gay. One of his lovers was Micheal MacLiammoir, a fact Micheal was open about.
3. There was a clue in the name. He had an O in his name. I don't.
4. He was from Monaghan. I have no relations born in Monaghan.
 
All they had to do was ask and I could have told them, but fact checking was an inconvenience with it.
It also wrote that my father was a "major landowner in Meath". Lol He had thirty acres. It was that size because my real great grandfather, Patrick Duffy, inherited his first cousin's next door farm that first cousin was unmarried and the McDonagh family had all died unmarried so the farm was inherited by his closest living relative, his next door neighbour. Arthur McDonagh's mother, Mary Duffy, was the sister of Patrick's father, Thomas. By no stretch is a thirty acre farm major.
 
They also used the story to trot out the falsehood that O'Duffy led the Blueshirts to fight for Franco. He went to Spain in 1936. The Blueshirts had been disbanded in 1934. O'Duffy led the Greenshirts, the paramilitary wing of his National Corporate Party, to fight for Franco. The rag couldn't even get basic history correct.
 
I stopped reading The Phoenix when I realised it was a poisonous unreliable rag. About the only thing I will miss is its front pages. They were often funny, much funnier than the front pages of Private Eye.
 
One front page embarrassed a friend of mine. He had been chubby and had dieted and lost a lot of weight. He was proud of his new thin figure - only to find a picture of his chubby self appearing on the front page of the magazine as he was in a photo beside a politician. He was furious at seeing his old self on the shelves of all newsagents.

⏩ Jim Duffy is a writer-historian.

In The Ashes

John Ware ✍ rejects both the form and content of a recent faux characterisation of his journalistic standards. 

I don't know Niall Meehan, but I read that he is the former "Head of the Journalism and Media Faculty" at a private college in Dublin.

So he will know that scepticism, curiosity, and an open mind are key to fair minded, ethical journalism for which I dare say he sees himself as one of Ireland's custodians.

Unfortunately, these qualities were absent in a series of ad hominem attacks he recently posted about me.

First, by buying incuriously into a classic example of moral confusion in The Phoenix with the inference that I was a Very Bad person for giving evidence in court recently against Gerry Adams who spent two days in the witness box denying he'd ever been in the IRA.

I have no difficulty justifying breaking my off-the-record undertaking of 43 years ago to his right-hand man, Danny Morrison. While, of course, I maintained it for the purposes of my programme about Adams and Morrison in 1983, it was rather more conscience-testing in the face of Adams' latest chutzpah attempt to rewrite history on oath. Since I was in possession of a relevant piece of evidence contradicting his outlandish denial of IRA membership (so insulting to IRA victims), when I was asked to provide it, I took the view that there was a much greater obligation to the victims, the general public and the historical record, than to Danny Boy. The war has, after all, been over for almost three decades! Furthermore, all political parties including Sinn Fein always insist that legacy victims are the priority when this is so obviously untrue. Finally, let's remember that collusion by silence cuts both ways - whether covering up awful crimes by the State or by the IRA, although not, it seems, to Messrs Meehan and The Phoenix.

Second, my reported comments to Ian "Butch" Studdard in 1983 have been taken right out of context. Studdard was in thrall to Adams, and didn't mind who knew it. If I said what he says I said, it will have been a deliberately provocative satirical riposte to his face for his fawning over Adams. I certainly recall being told that Studdard had warned Adams in advance that I was investigating his claims never to have been a member of the IRA which was a grossly unprofessional and uncollegiate thing to do.

Third, Meehan references a 39 year old article which I wrote as a contribution to an investigation by the much respected Ireland correspondent of The Independent David McKittrick in which we suggested Colin Wallace - an army press officer and part time UDR solider who alleged there was an intelligence services smear campaign against certain MPs - was also something of a Walter Mitty. And, that one way of testing his credibility was to examine the derring-do claims he made about his exploits as a display parachutist at public events with two army teams called The Phantoms - whom he said he commanded - and the Black Knights. 

Wallace complained to the Press Council who ticked me off for preferring the evidence which suggested Wallace had bragged about his parachuting achievements, whilst simultaneously accepting there was "clearly room for rival versions...".  It was a bizzare verdict but in any case, readers can judge for themselves which version they prefer based on the research that I conducted.

In raising the Wallace business, The Phoenix makes the smeary suggestion that I was part and parcel of an establishment attempt to discredit evidence that "state forces (had) promoted illegal (sic) loyalist violence." This was a silly thing to do because a couple of google clicks would have demonstrated the opposite. My work for the BBC on collusion between agents working for military intelligence and special branch led to the Stevens 2 and Stevens 3 inquiries, as recognised by Sir John Stevens himself and by the Irish government at the time. Also, in the government commissioned report that found extensive State collusion in the assassination of Patrick Finucane, the late Sir Desmond de Silva QC said:

I should also record that retired senior intelligence officers, and the former BBC journalist John Ware, also engaged extensively with the work of my Review and provided me with important evidence and insights. Their assistance was provided voluntarily and was extremely valuable in enabling me to produce this Report.

I mention this only to demonstrate the puerility of The Phoenix's journalism and Meehan's apparent respect for it. Incidentally, if it's ethical values they're in search of, they will find an exploration of them over 18 chapters in my book (Neither Conform Nor Deny) due to be published next month. It's a forensic analysis of the moral maze into which the British State ventured by always prioritising the protection of agents over the criminal justice system and sometimes over life itself during the NI conflict.

Finally, Meehan draws attention to claims made about me and the BBC by an Al Jazeera journalist called Richard Sanders and a barrister, Martin Forde KC.

As with his other posts, Niall Meehan's incuriosity prevented him from seeking my side for each of the stories he cites. But he's in good company with Messrs Sanders and Forde whose allegation that I and my Panorama colleagues misleadingly edited an email in a programme about Jeremy Corbyn, is completely untrue and objectively so. The real mischief is in the way Al Jazeera reported the edit. Both Sanders and Forde ignored a courteous letter drafted by the BBC legal department to Forde which he refused to discuss followed by repeated attempts by me to patiently demonstrate how he and Al Jazeera had got the detail round their necks - not to put too fine a point on it. It may come as no surprise that a journalist failed to grapple with the detail wherein lies the devil, but one expects better from a KC. KCs are not infallible, after all. In my opinion, and in the opinion of the BBC, Forde and Sanders' conduct over this was intolerably high-handed.
 
For those still interested, the detail is laid out here - with some unsettling reflections on Messrs Sanders and Forde's approach to reasoned, evidence-based argument . . .  and the ethical standards of Al Jazeera's journalism, at least in this case here.

John Ware, a veteran investigative journalist, is author of
the upcoming book Neither Confirm Nor Deny.

Incurious Journey

Subscribe to: Posts (Atom)