Irish newspapers set to 'unleash hell' on dead people
Lawlor hooker defamation 'only tip of the iceberg'
Drunk on their own sense of unstoppable power and armed with a complete disregard for the truth or any sense of morality, Irish journalists are poised this week to unleash a series of character-destroying tirades against all dead people.
Led by what is being dubbed the 'four horsemen of journalism' (the Sunday Independent, and three other rags), reporters have vowed that deceased public figures will not have a chance to twitch postmortally before their memories are forever sullied by the defaming flick of a pen.
The plan will be implemented retrospectively, with decades worth of deaths being reviewed, and fabricated fallacies being published over the coming weeks and months. The excitement in Irish newsrooms was palpable yesterday as extra staff were called in to pore over years worth of obituaries and shamelessly make shit up.
Many believe the precendent for the bold new move was set this weekend when it was inaccurately reported that disgraced Dublin TD Liam Lawlor had died in a car crash in Moscow - with a 19-year old prostitute, in a speeding Mercedes that was swerving to avoid a herd of other ladies of the night in the city's red light district.
It has since emerged that some details of the story, which were widely published in Sunday newspspers, may not have been entirely accurate.
On RTÉ's Pat Kenny show one of the journalists involved explained how the error came to be published. "We were all just sitting around wondering how to best present the story - the ironic fall of a tragic figure, the two sides of lovable rogue, and so on. Then all of a sudden one of the interns mentioned that under Irish law you can't libel a dead person, and - ffft! - we were off!"
"When we heard the passenger was a Ukranian woman", said the Managing Editor of one of the papers involved, "the story practically wrote itself. It's a basic tenet of investigative journalism - middle-aged office worker equals teenage whore - and I stand over my team's actions. I'd assume the same again of any Eastern European woman, especially one in a car with a man, in Eastern Europe."
In the same interview, he also denied that the decision to publish the story was commercially motivated, claiming that the fabrication of the story was driven "only by pure evil", and that newspaper sales were never a motivating factor.
The first in the series of exposés is expected tomorrow, when wildly varying accounts of the life of Pope John Paul II are to be revealed.
Not everyone is supportive of the plan to disrespect the dead, however. The Lawlor scandal has led to renewed calls for a Press Council that would regulate potentially hurtful press savagery, a proposal that has been rejected as unneccesary by the Association of Journalists in Ireland.
The AJI secretary pointed out that such an institution has not been needed in Ireland since the late opium addict Eamonn DeValera had well known Nazi sympathiser Micheal Collins killed, and it isn't needed now.
Drunk on their own sense of unstoppable power and armed with a complete disregard for the truth or any sense of morality, Irish journalists are poised this week to unleash a series of character-destroying tirades against all dead people.
Led by what is being dubbed the 'four horsemen of journalism' (the Sunday Independent, and three other rags), reporters have vowed that deceased public figures will not have a chance to twitch postmortally before their memories are forever sullied by the defaming flick of a pen.
The plan will be implemented retrospectively, with decades worth of deaths being reviewed, and fabricated fallacies being published over the coming weeks and months. The excitement in Irish newsrooms was palpable yesterday as extra staff were called in to pore over years worth of obituaries and shamelessly make shit up.
Many believe the precendent for the bold new move was set this weekend when it was inaccurately reported that disgraced Dublin TD Liam Lawlor had died in a car crash in Moscow - with a 19-year old prostitute, in a speeding Mercedes that was swerving to avoid a herd of other ladies of the night in the city's red light district.
It has since emerged that some details of the story, which were widely published in Sunday newspspers, may not have been entirely accurate.
On RTÉ's Pat Kenny show one of the journalists involved explained how the error came to be published. "We were all just sitting around wondering how to best present the story - the ironic fall of a tragic figure, the two sides of lovable rogue, and so on. Then all of a sudden one of the interns mentioned that under Irish law you can't libel a dead person, and - ffft! - we were off!"
"When we heard the passenger was a Ukranian woman", said the Managing Editor of one of the papers involved, "the story practically wrote itself. It's a basic tenet of investigative journalism - middle-aged office worker equals teenage whore - and I stand over my team's actions. I'd assume the same again of any Eastern European woman, especially one in a car with a man, in Eastern Europe."
In the same interview, he also denied that the decision to publish the story was commercially motivated, claiming that the fabrication of the story was driven "only by pure evil", and that newspaper sales were never a motivating factor.
The first in the series of exposés is expected tomorrow, when wildly varying accounts of the life of Pope John Paul II are to be revealed.
Not everyone is supportive of the plan to disrespect the dead, however. The Lawlor scandal has led to renewed calls for a Press Council that would regulate potentially hurtful press savagery, a proposal that has been rejected as unneccesary by the Association of Journalists in Ireland.
The AJI secretary pointed out that such an institution has not been needed in Ireland since the late opium addict Eamonn DeValera had well known Nazi sympathiser Micheal Collins killed, and it isn't needed now.
posted by Emmet at 2:06 p.m.
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