Why has Pat Rabbitte failed to act on the issue of concentration of media ownership? By Vincent Browne. 

Last year, the businessman Denis O'Brien addressed the proper role of the owner/controller of a media enterprise, saying that the owner/controller should act "at an appropriate distance from editorial matters" and should be aware of "the responsibility that rests with media owners not to interfere with editorial content”.

On Friday 11 January, the Irish Times published an interview with James Osborne, the former chairman of Independent News & Media (INM), which O'Brien now controls. Osborne is quoted as saying that, on 14 April last year, a Saturday, O'Brien phoned him and demanded that an article about him be withdrawn from the following day's Sunday Independent.

Osborne said he responded: "No, that's not what I'm going to do." And he did not do that. He recalled in the interview that the article turned out to be "pretty innocuous". It was about the biggest borrowers with Anglo Irish Bank, O'Brien being among them.

Last week, we published a piece, The true value of John Waters, which speculated as to the possible value, in cold hard cash, of controversial opinion columns to a newspaper website’s bottom line. The piece was intended as a thought experiment, rather than as an accountancy exercise, as clarified by its author in a follow-up piece on his blog, but caught the imaginations of enough people that the Irish Times’s online editor, Hugh Linehan, was prompted to respond – in a comment on his own column, Online issues lost amid Twitterphobia, on the Irish Times website:

“I can honestly tell you that the financial benefit of these pieces is negligible. Some people have been impressed by the article you've linked to and the conclusions it draws because it appears to have crunched real numbers. However, all those conclusions and most of the numbers are wrong.”

Which led to the following exchange on Twitter:

The Irish newspaper industry has realised there's easy money to be made from declaring war on its own online readership. By David Johnson.

Stop me if you've heard this one, "What's black and white and red all over?"

If you answered, "The Irish newspaper industry, which is only scarleh after yet another humiliating fiasco in which they displayed an appalling ignorance and lack of understanding over the basic concepts of the internet," then well done, gold star for you.

Unless you have been living under a broadband-free rock this last week, you can't help but have seen a flurry of online chatter concerning a declaration from the NNI, the Irish newspaper industry's lobby group, that Irish newspapers should be paid at least €300 each and every time an external website linked to some of their content. This was not a matter of having content republished without permission, this was simply for linking back to an article on the website of an Irish newspaper. The matter was first raised by a group of solicitors representing the charity Women's Aid, who had been targeted back in May 2012 by the NNI with a demand for payment from the charity for linking to two stories about itself that appeared in the online edition of a newspaper.

The Irish Times reported an untrue story on its front page about Irish pro-Palestinian activists - then reported it again and again. The Press Ombudsman shrugged his shoulders, and the Press Council couldn’t be bothered. The Dervish affair tells a worrying story about the state of our press, and about the failure of Ireland’s much-vaunted “independent” form of press regulation. Harry Browne reports

As anyone who attended or followed its Gaza protests last month can attest, the Ireland Palestine Solidarity Campaign (IPSC) is a serious, dedicated organisation. It maintains a consistent human-rights message with the help of a strong network of contacts in the Middle East, regardless of factions and rejecting all forms of bigotry. Within it Palestinians and Jews work together - two of its most outspoken members are Jewish, including its former chairman. (Disclosure: I am not a member of the IPSC but have supported and advised it on media matters, including the case discussed in this article.)

Arguably, it is in its role in the continuing subjugation of women that the media is at its most insidious. By Vincent Browne.

There is more to the publication of the topless photographs of Kate Middleton than the breach of her privacy or the hilarity of a long-time dedicated porn pusher, Richard Desmond, finding a principle here, or Independent News and Media (INM), publisher of the Sunday Independent and the Sunday World, suspending an editor on ethical grounds.

Of course there was no justification for the publication of photographs of Kate Middleton on an occasion when she had reasonable expectation of privacy and where there was no overriding public interest consideration, as distinct from a public prurience consideration, as Alan Shatter has observed.

The photographs were published to boost corporate profits and the standing of the executives involved in INM’s currently precarious hierarchy.

Given his interference in editorial matters in INM, in contradiction of the principles he himself has enunciated, Denis O’Brien is not a fit person to be allowed control the country’s second most powerful media enterprise. By Vincent Browne. (Updated: Denis O’Brien’s two letters and my response to the first can be read below.)

Denis O’Brien wrote two letters to me, one on 21 June last, the other on 20 July, the latter in response to an email from me on 8 July. The first of these letters contained a threat to sue me personally, if, in his view, I defamed him in further references to the findings of the Moriarty tribunal report. The second raised a few interesting issues to do with the control of the media.

In response to a point I had made about the necessity for a plurality of media ownership and control, he wrote in the second letter: “Perhaps you might like to consider that since the media finds it increasingly difficult to make a profit, it requires owners who can make money elsewhere to effectively subsidise important journalistic activities. Once they do so at an appropriate distance from editorial matters there shouldn’t be a problem.”

The extraordinary influence of Rupert Murdoch on British politics, exercised for decades through close oversight of his News International newspapers, is over. By Brian McNair. 

It may just be coincidence that this week’s charging of former News International executives Andy Coulson and Rebekah Brooks for alleged phone-hacking offences came just days after Rupert Murdoch announced he was giving up his directorships of the UK newspaper company. Events had been heading in that direction, after all, and neither the charges nor the resignations have in themselves been received as surprising developments.

News Corporation decided some weeks ago to separate its publishing and entertainment arms in an attempt to insulate the lucrative latter from the fall out of the UK phone-hacking scandal on the global business. James Murdoch had already walked away from the UK operation, and in resigning his directorships, Mr Murdoch senior has now created further distance between the family name and News Corp’s British journalism interests. A final sell-off or closure of the remaining UK titles seems ever more likely, as the global corporation seeks to contain the damage caused by the constant drip-drip of phone-hacking revelations to its wider operations.

The Leveson inquiry is a club matter, in which a member has caused such extraordinary public embarrassment he must be black-balled, so that nothing changes. By John Pilger.

Rupert Murdoch is a bad man. His son James is also bad. Rebekah Brooks is allegedly bad. The News of the World was very bad; it hacked phones and pilloried people. British prime ministers grovelled before this iniquity. David Cameron even sent text messages to Brooks signed “LoL”, and they all had parties in the Cotswolds with Jeremy Clarkson. Nods and winks were duly exchanged on the BSkyB deal.

Shock, horror.

Offering glimpses of the power and petty gangsterism of the British tabloid press, the inquiry conducted by Lord Leveson has, I suspect, shocked few people. As the soap has rolled on, bemusement has given way to boredom; Tony Blair was allowed to whine about the Daily Mail’s treatment of his wife until he and the inquiry’s amoral smugness protecting him were exposed by a member of the public, David Lawley-Wakelin, who shouted, “Excuse me, this man should be arrested for war crimes.” His Lordship duly apologised to the war criminal and the truth-teller was seen off.