Still dodging the abortion issue

Political and media amnesia may soon be impossible, thanks to the wealth of archival information now at our fingertips, but sometimes humdrum human memory is the best archive of all. Harry Browne recently stumbled upon an accidental forgetting by the Irish Times that shows just how easy it is to leave a scratch on the record of history.
Amnesia is par for the course in our political-media system. Indeed it would be hard to imagine that system functioning without an ingrained habit of forgetting. How else, for example, would any Irish ‘expert’ on economics and finance, apart from Morgan Kelly, ever be allowed next or near a microphone or a printing press? David McWilliams claimed the ‘credit’ for the bank guarantee in 2008? Down the memory hole it goes, replaced by praise for his prescience and insight. (I confess to being one of the judges who awarded him for ‘story of the year’ for the way he covered the crisis in 2010.) My own dealings with journalists over the years suggests that an incapacity to retain information even from one week to the next -- apart from a simplification or two to assist in the odd bout of punditry -- may be a positive advantage for success and advancement in the profession. ‘I have the attention span of a gnat!’ a leading RTE journalist once boasted to me.
However, those of us engaged in press criticism do enjoy being able to spring an ‘Aha!’ or two, based on contradictions between current and past pronouncements. It’s one of several old-reliables for Private Eye’s ‘Street of Shame’ pages, and the process has been made immeasurably easier by digital archiving and the wonders of Google. Indeed it’s one of the legitimate grounds for cyber-optimism, this notion that ‘they can’t get away with these flip-flops any more’. (Although of course, ultimately, they can, they can.) In one caricatured version of cyber-optimism, we’re told that we hardly need individual memory any more, that everything is caught in the web.
However, I recently stumbled upon a case of media amnesia, an accidental forgetting by the Irish Times of an important moment in our relatively recent history. And while I was able to reconstitute the moment, to retrieve an accurate history, with the help of online resources, some peculiarities of the case meant Google was no help to me, and that my own memory -- a pretty crummy one at the best of times -- was indispensible to the operation.
The story is all about a photograph -- intrinsically, for the time being anyway, a less search-able artefact than text, of course. In December, a week before Christmas, the Irish Times ran a piece on page 3 in the Saturday supplement, following up the European Court of Human Rights decision on the Irish abortion cases. The full-page article was illustrated with several archive photos illustrating the history of the argument over abortion in Ireland. The biggest was a striking black-and-white image of a protest.
IT abortion protest pic
The caption took care of this picture first: ‘pro-choice protesters campaign before the 1992 referendum’.
IT abortion protest pic caption
I remembered the particular protest very well: in my memory it was a protest over the High Court decision to prevent 14-year-old ‘Miss X’ from travelling to Britain for an abortion, a protest held within days of that decision becoming public in February 1992, and nothing whatsoever to do with the three-part referendum that eventually took place in November of that year. So it seemed to me the caption was almost completely wrong: characterising the protesters as ‘pro-choice’ - though they may individually have been just that, it was not the character of this event; using the odd verb ‘campaign’ for people who were sitting down in Merrion Street to block traffic; and referring to the referendum rather than the X Case, when this protest was “before” the referendum only in roughly the same sense that it was ‘before’ the Summer Olympics of the same year.
But in addition to the wrongly described protest, I also remembered something special about this photograph, which had, I was sure, graced the front-page of the Irish Times, where I worked at the time. Even today I can name some of the people shown in the picture, but that’s not why it’s so memorable. Look at the banner the women are carrying: isn’t it odd that a large display of this nature would have so much blank space on it? I knew the reason that the photo showed this blank space, and I was pretty sure the Irish Times had explained it at the time.
Luckily the third-level institute where I teach has free access to the full digital archives of the newspaper. It wasn’t entirely a straightforward search, but I knew roughly the date I was looking for, so it didn’t take me long ‘flipping’ through the newspaper to find the picture, just as I remembered it, on the front page, 18 February 1992, looking exactly the same as it does above -- apart from the crummy reproduction on the old archives -- and exactly as it did in the December 2010 version, but with this helpful caption:

A demonstration yesterday outside Government Buildings against the High Court injunction forbidding a 14-year-old alleged rape victim from obtaining an abortion in Britain. The banner includes a telephone number which has been deleted by the Irish Times, in compliance with the High Court ruling of December 1986, which found that the provision of assistance, including information, to a pregnant woman seeking an abortion was in breach of Article 40 of the Constitution. This judgment was upheld by the Supreme Court in February 1988. -- (Photograph: Eric Luke)

The number was that of the Women’s Information Network, probably the finest group of activists I have ever met, women who voluntarily staffed an essentially illegal helpline to assist women seeking abortion information and referral. After so many protests back in those days, I can still sing the number, ‘Six seven nine four seven oh oh -- women have the right to know!’ So the Irish Times was making a point about censorship and about the ban on abortion information by printing this photograph in 1992. They might, however, have made the point more strongly by, for example, blacking out the number rather than whiting it out; the photo-desk technicians eliminated the phone number quite artfully, by a darkroom process called ‘dodging’, by which you block out an area of an image while printing it, leaving nothing but the white photographic paper showing. White paper, white banner -- you’d hardly realise that anything was missing.

By a strange coincidence, the 18 December 2010 story in the Irish Times, by Carl O’Brien, was headlined, right above the doctored photo: ‘No more dodging the abortion issue’.
We should be so lucky. Because a “dodged” print of Eric Luke’s photo found its way into the Irish Times picture archive; and one assumes because its crucial explanatory caption was either not archived with it or was lost along the way, perhaps in the transition to digital; and probably because the people who might have carried the institutional memory of what happened to that photo are no longer around the place; because of some combination of all those things, the Irish Times, in 2010, forgot. And so -- in contravention of its own guidelines, which require it to inform readers when photos have been altered -- the newspaper presented a literally false picture of what was happening in 1992, when so much of what we knew and debated about abortion hinged on a seven-digit telephone number.
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