Journalists will throw much more useful light on an economic crisis if they manage to avoid the error of generalisation, the fallacy of aggregation, and the perils of compartmentalisation. By Yanis Varoufakis.

Over the past two years, the economic crisis that has engulfed Greece has also thrust me in front of the microphones and notepads of the myriad journalists who descended upon Athens to report on the unfolding drama. In this sense, I have not only been witnessing the evolution of Greece’s (and the Eurozone’s) meltdown but also the struggle of the world’s media to make sense of it. In this article I summarise what I think are three important lessons to be drawn from this experience on behalf of journalists attempting to strike the difficult balance between (a) the need to produce stories that resonate with their editors, readers, audiences, viewers and (b) the almost infinite complexity of the underlying story. The three lessons that I want to focus on I shall refer to, respectively, as the error of generalisation, the fallacy of aggregation, and the perils of compartmentalisation.

The media is itself an institution of power and it reflects the ethos of the elites of power. The idea that it is 'objective' or 'impartial' is a mirage. By Vincent Browne.

Leo Varadkar thinks RTÉ has a “liberal” bias, by which I think he means a “left-wing” bias and that it is promoting a “particular agenda”, presumably a “left-wing” agenda.

I cannot imagine with what spectacles Leo watches RTÉ, which, through my spectacles, is suffused with a right-wing perspective, but the idea that there is a uniform agenda pursued by RTÉ is crazy. That’s not needed anyway; the right-wing reflex comes naturally.

This underscores the struggle the Broadcasting Authority of Ireland (BAI) will have to undergo as it seeks to define over the next while (deadline for submissions is today) the idea of “objectivity” and “impartiality” in broadcasting, required by the 2009 Broadcasting Act.

The BAI finding was no surprise - RTÉ's big problems lie elsewhere. By Vincent Browne.

RTÉ has a lot to worry about, but the Broadcasting Authority of Ireland (BAI) finding against the station on the Seán Gallagher tweet probably ranks somewhere around number 17 in the station's catalogue of concerns, well behind its financial crisis, its morale crisis and the Fr Kevin Reynolds controversy.

We knew, a few days after the presidential election,that the tweet that undid Seán Gallagher had been bogus - and we knew also that a correcting tweet from Sinn Féin had been ignored by RTÉ.

We appreciated that RTÉ had made mistakes in broadcasting the erroneous tweet in the first place, and in not correcting this on air during the final TV presidential debate, and in not correcting it again the following morning on Pat Kenny's radio programme. But nobody except the paranoid believed that this was other than a series of simple and understandable errors, made under pressure.

The idea that news can be "independent", "objective" and "impartial" is a problematic one. By Vincent Browne.

It is not the idea of the Broadcasting Authority of Ireland to attempt to set standards for radio and television news and current affairs to ensure “independence”, “objectivity” and “impartiality”. That was the idea of Eamon Ryan, the instigator of the Broadcasting Act of 2009, and it was this Act which required the authority to do this.

I am not sure Ryan, then minister for communications, energy and natural resources, knew what he was doing, or the questions he was requiring the authority to beg. For “independence”, “objectivity” and “impartiality” are elusive concepts in broadcasting – maybe even non-existent.

The idea of “independence” suggests news and current affairs broadcasts are independent of all vested interests and independent of ideological, political, moral and aesthetic bias.

The realities of life for Travellers are too boring for tabloid TV. By Rosaleen McDonagh.

As an aunt of many nieces, some of whom are getting married this summer, watching Channel 4’s My Big Fat Gypsy Wedding has its own resonance. Sitting on the sofa with ten young beoirs (young women ) between the ages of 7 to 17, creates a sense of embarrassment, some anger and internalised shame.

The good old days of strong and exclusive reader loyalty are over, for better or for worse. By Axel Bruns.

The release of Sky News UK’s Twitter guidelines for its journalists – or rather, the Guardian’s not entirely disinterested commentary on those guidelines – has caused a bit of a stir across social media networks. The guidelines demonstrate that, two decades into the internet age, news organisations continue to have trouble coming to terms with the online world.

To put it simply, the rules appear to encourage Sky News' journalists to maintain the purity of their corporate identity. According to the Guardian’s coverage, they “ban” retweeting of peers working for rival news organisations, or of any other Twitter user, while encouraging the sharing of Sky’s own tweets.

They also ask staff to hold off on tweeting about breaking news until there’s a Sky-branded story available, in order to maximise traffic to Sky’s own sites rather than those of its competitors.

On a day when the Syrian conflict once again made international headlines, reporting by RTÉ's weekend news team was sadly lacking on Sunday.

Journalists spend an awful lot of time demanding better of others. Perhaps it's time they did the same for themselves. By Vincent Browne.

Over the last several weeks in Britain, the Leveson Inquiry, chaired by Judge Brian Leveson, has heard evidence of grotesque media intrusion into the private lives of individuals.

Anguished excerpts from the diary of Kate McCann - mother of Madeleine McCann, who went missing in Portugal in May 2007 - were published in the News of the World. The other children of the McCann family were subjected to terrifying harassment by photographers.