Feeling a little queasy at the coverage of Gerry RyanÕs death

I have to admit to having had very mixed emotions on reading only a fraction of the oceans of coverage given to the Gerry Ryan inquest. When you see page after page of print and photographs day after day, then the issue of where does coverage end and exploitation begin, comes to mind.

I felt a little queasy and not a little intrusive.

It’s the dilemma which any newspaper hack faces any day of the week and one which yours truly encountered time after time in covering stories. The irony in this instance would not have been lost on Gerry Ryan himself – for a living, he was someone who walked that narrow line between reportage and exploitation.

Let’s face it, morning after morning, Gerry Ryan went on radio and the show was essentially built on a ‘come-on’ to listeners to tell their story to hundreds of thousands of listeners. His was a shoulder to cry on. Yet, he could also be aware of the issue of privacy . . . for when his marriage broke up, he and his partner issued a public appeal that their privacy would be respected. Fat chance!

That ‘ill-defined line’ between coverage and exploitation is all the more difficult to follow because it appears to move with a wilfulness all of its own. There is a ‘public interest’ plea possible for almost any story. In other words, a case can be made for reporting things on the basis of the public’s ‘right to know’. But where does that duty end and the much less noble ‘right to sell newspapers or radio time’, begin?

Ask any journalist why the courts are reported and the standard reply will always be ‘so that justice may be seen to be done’. In pursuit of that estimable aim, for instance, there is a regular demand that the happenings in certain court hearings such as ‘family courts’ should be reported. In fact, court coverage by Nell McCafferty some years ago highlighted a sometimes quirky system that needed public scrutiny.

But, if you were to press most journalists beyond that ‘stock answer’, it would also be readily admitted that courts are reported because they are interesting, because they are ‘news’, and because the reports of hearings are likely to be read by many and ‘sell newspapers’.

It is not by chance that Judge Judy is one of the more popular shows on US television . . . it’s ordinary people in ordinary situations, and fascinating.

For more, read this week's Galway City Tribune.