First paragraph (Teaser):

Joe MacAnthony discusses the differences as he sees them between the Irish and Canadian news media, from the perspectives of both an insider and a professionally exiled outsider, and explains how the pressures applied by owners are realised in the newsroom.

Rest of the text:

"Above all, perhaps, the story [of the Irish Hospital's Sweepstake] underlines what journalism must continue to combat: censorship, state secrecy and the unwarranted power of an influential few." [Stephen Dodd writing in 2003 in the Sunday Independent, one of only a handful of mainstream articles on the issue] [1]

In the early 1920's, lotteries promising huge prizes and pledging support for worthy causes gained enormous popularity across the world. With no governing body or independent commission to monitor their working, corruption and fraud dogged these alleged charitable enterprises, their prizes and monies frequently disappearing.

In Ireland, the lotteries fiercest critic of the time was Justice Minister Kevin O'Higgins. He claimed to have 'developed pneumonia from the dampness in his office caused by the tears of lottery promoters who are coming in crying about the poor and how they wanted to help them.'

Believing it would be impossible to separate the crooks from the well intentioned, O'Higgins ordered a comprehensive ban on all lotteries in 1923 and made sure it was strictly enforced. Four years later, he was shot down and killed on his way to Mass. The promoters' campaign began again and in an unprecedented move, the Irish Government agreed to provide state backing for an Irish based sweepstake. With this official endorsement, the Irish Hospital's Sweepstake had global appeal, and would continue to sell tickets illegally in over 128 countries throughout its 57 year history. [2]

In 1973 Joe MacAnthony, working for the Sunday Independent under the editorship of Conor O'Brien, undertook an investigation into the origins and workings of the sweepstakes. The story began with accounts of gross sexual inequality in the Sweeps workplace, yet as he dug deeper the depth of corruption behind the lottery became apparent. Anecdotal evidence of its humble beginnings recounted scenes of organisers wading through bank notes, overwhelmed by the number of entrants. So overwhelmed, in fact, that the container they had designed to hold the tickets for the draw was comically inadequate to accommodate the number sold.

As MacAnthony delved further into the organisation, which had amassed huge fortunes for those that established it, despite the fact it was designed purely as a vehicle for raising money for charity, the scale of the fraud became apparent. Millions of pounds were diverted from charitable organisations into private accounts. In interview with filmmaker Bob Quinn, MacAnthony tells how a superintendent supervising the draw had on one occasion the good fortune of selecting his own son's ticket.

However, as Frank Connolly observed in our interview 'Confronting Power' last year, publicly divulging the misdemeanours of wealthy and powerful elites is a dangerous game and not one that is likely to be encouraged in mainstream journalism. [3] By investigating and publishing the sweepstakes story, MacAnthony had fallen foul of the Irish Independent's owners, the Murphy family, not least because it resulted in 'advertising [being] pulled for two months', but also due to the fact that the story was targeted in part at a close friend of the Murphys, the Sweepstakes' chief executive Patrick McGrath, whose family's influence and money 'spread into other areas of the Irish economy' (In 1972 the year the story ran the McGrath family were reputedly worth $400 million). [1] The repercussions of MacAnthony's story inevitably led to compromise the Murphy's ownership of the paper.

In 1974, Tony O'Reilly stepped into the breach, buying up a majority share and taking over the Independent. When MacAnthony wrote a piece exposing the former minister Ray Burke - then a county councillor and a member of the Dáil - in relation to his providing consulting services to property developers for lands on which he was able to vote for development permissions, MacAnthony had apparently gone too far.

MacAnthony, doing what journalism is supposedly all about - 'truth-telling', had his wages cut and was effectively squeezed out of both the paper and the Irish media as a whole. He describes in his interview with Quinn how he turned up at the RTE Donnybrook studios where he was to begin a six month contract for RTE's '7 Days' only to be told that he no longer had access to the building. [4] He had been given no notice by RTE of that decision, though he still received a pay cheque every week.

The September 2002 Flood Tribunal report confirmed almost 30 years later the accuracy of MacAnthony's report in concluding that Mr. Burke had received a number of corrupt payments from developers and would in the end serve four and a half months in Dublin's Arbour Hill Prison for making false tax returns. [5] [6]

Since then he has lived and worked in Canada, where he has continued to investigate corruption and malfeasance as a producer director with the Canadian Broadcasting Service, with exposés on subjects like the international trade in tainted blood, the Opus Dei organisation, political corruption, arms trafficking and the like. A documentary report, exposing the illegal activities of Canada's security service created a political firestorm which eventually led to it being closed down. [7]

MB: Do you think it is true that Irish media has become increasingly orientated to corporate and establishment power in recent times? Or has this always been a problem? We are referring to the seeming willingness of journalists to report relatively uncritically about matters related to business and government.

JM: I think that outside corporate influence on the Irish media is a problem. Due in no small part to the extraordinary expansion in the PR industry. And to the dampening effect of harsh libel laws which might protect the few but punish the many by limiting the reach of investigative reporting.

What is much more dangerous in my view is the use of corporate power from within the media itself. I am referring to the manner in which the dominant Irish media, the Independent group, is being used to advance the interests of its controlling shareholders, the O'Reilly family. What makes this practice particularly shocking is that the top man, Tony O'Reilly, has gone beyond using dubious donations to influence political decision-making to directly bartering the power of his media for influence with the country's top politicians.

In a normal democratic society, a media group of the Indepentent's standing would be duty bound to condemn such practices as damaging to the interests of its readers and to the country as a whole. Sadly, we find no such moral outrage among the editors at the Independent group.

Mr. O'Reilly's agenda first became clear in 1999 when he had a discreet confab with the leader of the Labour Party, Ruairi Quinn, and quickly followed with the publication of a poll that was certain to enhance the electoral ambitions of Mr. Quinn's party. Eight years later, we saw the O'Reilly game plan come to its ultimate decadent flowering when he graciously received the chief executives of the Irish Government, Messrs. Bertie Ahern and Brian Cowen, who came with their begging bowl to seek for similar favours for the Fianna Fail party.

And why did they do it? Because they well knew O'Reilly has the power to push and pull his media in whatever direction he chooses.

I recall laughing on reading a remark of former President Erskine Childers during a speech to the august body, the Institute for Sand and Gravel.

"In Ireland today," he said, "we are at the apex of a vicious circle."

What better description of that sleveen style meeting in the Independent boardroom with the chief representatives of the Irish people?

MB: How does the pressure from owners and advertisers manifest itself in today's newsroom?

JM: While I don't feel qualified to give a general assessment, I can speak from personal experience on this issue. Back in 2001, I was given a one year contract by the Sunday Independent to write an article a week. The arrangement was made at the height of a national controversy the previous autumn over an article the paper published in which disabled athletes were called 'cripples'. As the editor, Aengus Fanning, told me at the time, they wanted someone of reputation, a masthead figure. I was agreeably surprised, believing I would be returning to my old stamping ground with a good deal more experience than when I left.

What followed was a dampening experience, to put it mildly. Articles I wrote that related to American policies involving Israel, Afghanistan and Ireland were kept out, although I was still paid for them. The most striking example of censorship came when one of my articles actually got into the first edition of the Sunday edition of the Independent.

It disclosed that the Israelis were removing the bodies of dead Palestinian guerrillas from a site adjoining Lebanon to an area deeper inside Israel. It was commonly regarded as a prelude to aggressive action by the Israeli army, who exchanged these bodies for their own soldiers when taken prisoner. The article was pulled bodily from the paper in the night and replaced with a pro Israeli article on the lines of 'Arafat fiddles while restaurant burns'. I was told that Mr. O'Reilly was in Dublin that weekend with pro Israeli backers who were also potential investors and that may have been the reason the story was pulled. But who's to say?

An article I wrote called 'The Facilitators' - about the legal and accountancy companies who provided cover for every dirty, rotten scoundrel with the money to pay their fees, also went on the spike.

Another piece about the dire financial state of cable companies then met the same fate. It came about after I saw a free European sports channel abruptly turned into a paying channel. I was curious to know why. I did some research and found cable providers were having a hard time financially. Unfortunately, the article I submitted came at a time when Mr. O'Reilly's Chorus cable service was being put up for sale. So that never made it into the Sunday either. Another on Ireland's use as a surrogate for American entry into the EU also went down the tube. As did one on the effects of war on Afghanistan.

This is not to say that I was obsessing and writing only material of this nature. I wrote around fifty articles all told and many of them were published. But near the end stories were just being pulled without explanation. It was not a happy time.

MB: What do you think of Sir Anthony O'Reilly's influence on Irish media?

JM: It is beyond me how a monopoly watchdog could have given him carte blanche to seize control of almost all the Irish Sundays. This was an unconscionable act, in my opinion, and exacerbated by even allowing him to sew up and avoid competition from the old Irish Press Group. It is a legitimate question to ask who were the people that made this decision, gifting Mr. O'Reilly a crushing advantage over potential competitors? Who appointed them? What is their background? Even today, it cries out for investigation. And certainly, there are the journalists out there, capable men and women with the ability to do it. Although given the present structure of the media, it could be a steep mountain to climb.

MB: Why isn't the story of the sweepstakes and your involvement in breaking it better known? Whose benefit does it serve to bury the past in this way?

JM: Hard to say on either question. I'm not into the persecution complex – a long spell in the Canadian Samaritans taught me where that leads – but I must confess to a niggling feeling that there might have been more contact

I went into professional exile just four months after breaking the Ray Burke story, in June 1974. In the fifteen years that followed, I got just one call of any kind from the Irish media. That came from RTE and is a story in itself. Michael Heney and Charlie Bird wanted to do an interview for a documentary about the Sweep. That was around 1978.

I agreed and they came to see me at Canadian Broadcasting Corporation where I was then doing exposes for their current affairs programme - neatly called the fifth estate. We did a humungous interview on film in which I told them everything I knew. Needless to say, knowing RTE, I expressed doubt that it would ever get to air. They insisted it would.

They were right about the documentary. After a short delay, it lasted 16 years, it finally came to air in 1994. But my interview was not to be seen. In fact, the only mention I got was as having written an article on the subject. Some time later, curious as why not even a single sentence was used, I asked a knowledgeable source in RTE to look for the film and perhaps see the reason for the blanket rejection. He made an extensive search but the film was not to be found. In the archives or anywhere else.

Contact from the rest of the Irish media only began with the Ray Burke controversy over the corrupt land deal I had exposed in 1974. In saying this, I would like to acknowledge the invaluable assistance from a very fine journalist, Paul Murphy. who knew the territory like the back of his hand. Paul jokingly called himself my leg man but it needs to said that he was much more than that. I could not have done the story without his help and I would like to see him share the credit.

What puzzled me about the Burke case what that I had found the document in the Company's office that damned him. And still nothing was done. Just as the detective who came to interview me predicted. Certainly, if I had stayed with the Sunday Independent, I would have stayed on his tail, and on those who made contributions to his phantom political fund, including Tony O'Reilly.

I put down the welter of corruption in Irish politics to Burke's escape from retribution after that exposure in 1974. It gave everybody in the game a licence to steal.

MB: There are a number of media organizations in Canada, Adbusters for one, who are concerned with the concentration of media ownership there - particularly that of CanWest. What is the state of Canada's dominant media and are Adbuster's concerns well founded?

JM: There are two interesting stories that I know of involving CanWest, who established Ireland's first private national broadcaster, TV3. Izzy Asper, it's former chief and now dead, bought up a lot of TV stations around the world. In New Zealand, where he had just added a station, he called a meeting of the senior executives and asked them, "What do you think is the more important function of your station?" One of those present, braver than the rest, piped up, "Providing the news." Asper offered a succinct reply. "No," He said. "It's selling soap."

After he died, a son who took over was angered when their newspaper editor in Ottawa refused to follow his instructions on what party to support and wrote an editorial in support of the opposition. Asper-fils announced he was fired. With that, all hell broke loose with journalists all across Canada rising to the support of the editor. It shook the Aspers to the core. I can't remember if the editor was re-instated but he did well subsequently and the Aspers never dared to try it again.

MB: What do you think are the main differences between the Canadian and Irish news media?

JM: Well, I certainly experienced pressure at the CBC when I was a producer there with the fifth estate. It was the country's main current affairs programme and investigative reporting was the name of our game forte. The show's reaction to pressure was nothing like what it was in Ireland. And all of us doing investigative work got plenty of it.

For instance, when we began broadcasting my investigative on the country's intelligence service – I had found their undercover agents were carrying out illegal break-ins, mail openings and warrantless phone tapping – not unlike the phone tapping I did a hefty report on in Ireland.

By then, the top people in the service knew that I had penetrated their headquarters and had the names, addresses, home phone numbers - even the nicknames and other useful information on many of their important people. They weren't sure what would happen next.

The Minister said if we continued with these damaging reports, the Government would make a heavy cut in the Corporations budget – like RTE, they were a state corporation.

The CBC were already apprehensive but it wasn't about a budget cut. Since I wasn't a Canadian citizen – the deputy Prime Minister, a brother of comic actor Leslie Nielsen, cut off an interview I was having with him when he found that out - they feared the Government might try to deport me. To counter that possibility, they provided me with a lawyer on 24-hour call to counter any attempt to get rid of me.

Their response to the budget threat was to send me to the National News and continue reporting to an even bigger audience than The Fifth Estate. The public response was so large and the wrongdoing so horrendous - a first class reporter called Brian Stewart whom I was paired with on the National News had even found agents had burned down a barn to prevent a meeting of so called subversives - that the Government gave in to the uproar and closed down the service completely.

It gave no satisfaction at the end of it all to find that the intelligence agency's successor – called Canadian Security and Intelligence Service and consisting of a comparable shower of blunderers as its predecessor – were given legal powers to carry out the very same activities as exposed in those who went before. A prize example was their destruction of taped conversations of the men known to have planned the blowing up of the Air India plane that crashed off the Irish coast.

A different example of pressure in Canada came when I did an exposé on Opus Dei. When it came to fighting back, their people were far better organized than the security service. The story described how Opus Dei members had recruited children as young as 12 years old and, significantly, told them to keep their association with the group from their parents.

I got an interview in California with the secretary to the founder of Opus Dei, now Saint Josemaria Escriva. She described the putative saint's ferocious bullying and how on one occasion he kicked down the door of the women's dormitory over some suspected misdemenour. And how they broke up families by forbidding contact for adherents.

They tried to stop the story going on air by organizing massive write-ins to the Minister with responsibility for the CBC, to the Corporation's President, the President, the Head of Current Affairs and came in to aruge with the executive producer of the fifth estate and even got into me in the editing room. Despite the pressure, the programme went on air. But the story never got the normal second airing.

Another pressure-packed story I did with some relationship to Ireland was a report I did in the late seventies on the international trade in tainted human blood. Blood brokers, as the dealers were called, made vast profits from paying $2 a pint for blood drawn from the poorest of the poor in the barrios of Latin America. Which they would then re-label as Canadian product before selling it in Europe. I remember in Berne, Switzerland, asking the secretary of the International Red Cross if the tainted plasma went to the Scandinavian plant which provided plasma to the Irish Blood Transfusion Service. He said, rather sadly, 'Yes, it does.'

As the story was going to air, we faced an injunction from the Canadian provider whom I discovered had been selling semi-treated contaminated plasma to Europe, without telling the purchasing organizations or its dubious provenance.

The blow fell only hours before the report was due to go on air. I was actually out drinking with Paddy Cole, the Irish showband musician, when I got the call. We were talking about practical jokes at the time and when I was told the Vice President of the CBC, Peter Herrndorff was on the phone, I presumed it was another joke and told the bartender to advise the caller to fuck off. I was soon put right and arrived at Herrndorff's office rather the worse for wear. The VP grinned and put me on a conference call with the legal big wigs in Ottawa.

I made a rather more spirited defence than was probably appropriate. But they were satisfied with my defence and told the blood provider to do his worst. We were broadcast.

This episode provided another interesting sidelight on how Canadian officialdom, as opposed to their Irish counterparts, responded to investigative reporting. The morning after the broadcast, the Health Minister Marc Lalonde banned all Canadian plasma exports. And the company never sued.

In the aftermath, I had one of the two most enjoyable moments in my career - the other being when I found the document exposing Ray Burke's corruption.

In a career spanning 30 years and in spite of a fair amount of legal threats, I am happy to say that I have never been brought to court for any of my reporting, much less been sued. My practice – and it prevails even today – has always been to keep a little damning evidence on top of the wardrobe as insurance.

But after the blood story, I did get a call to appear in a Swiss court. Not, fortunately as a litigant, but as an expert witness on the blood trade.

What happened was that two enterprising journalists in Zurich, posing as agents for rebellious Kurds had persuaded a Swiss broker to sell them a consignment of dubious plasma. When they ran the story, the broker sued for defamation.

In the search for defence witnesses, their lawyer came across my story. It so happened I had come across the broker in my research – I had even tried to find him in Zurich. So the lawyer called me to testify on behalf of my colleagues. Naturally, I was delighted to do so and arrived in court suitably primed to testify.

There is a cardinal rule in the legal trade that you never ask a question of a hostile witness when you don't already know the answer yourself. In this case the broker's lawyer broke the rule. In an effort to diminish my standing with the court, he asked me how many people I had interviewed in my investigation. It was a question I would have gone down on my knees to pray for.

At this moment, I have doubts about the exact number but it was around 100. I paused for a glorious moment and then reached for my inside pocket. "And I have their names and addresses here." I said.

I can vividly remember the judge putting his hand over his face to hide his laughter. The lawyer didn't take the list. He just said 'No more questions.'

The court adjourned and when it resumed, it was announced that the broker had dropped the case.

Within an hour, my colleagues and their lawyer were breaking out a bottle of champagne.

MB: In our interview with Fintan O'Toole he says, in effect, that the Irish Times Trust provides a safeguard against encroachment on editorial policy. You refer in your film interview with Bob Quinn to abuses of the Irish Times Trust - whereby senior members of the management of that newspaper have taken advantage of the terms of the trust. Could you tell us more about that and the impact it may have had on editorial matters at the paper? [8]

JM: I worked in the Irish Times library for six years. Although Douglas Gageby didn't consider me a suitable candidate for journalism, I published my first pieces there. I loved the place. It was full of great characters, which in its own way added to the quality of the paper. When controversy arose, everybody felt involved.

I recall one night when the then editor Alec Newman - admittedly in his cups - wrote a leader trashing Eamon Andrews, a famous television personality in Britain and Ireland at the time. A huge battle erupted, as the then owner of sorts, a man named McCann, wanted the piece out, as it more than teetered on libel. Everyone hung around as the presses stalled, taking sides, trying to catch the row carrying from the editor's office.

Honour, desperate diplomacy and discretion triumphed when a few hundred copies were printed and became much prized possessions in the aftermath.

Scandal thrived in house, with one editor slipping away for nooners on the back of a scooter driven by a delectable young woman whom everybody lusted afer. There were surreptitious assignations among the bound volumes in the attic and quite a lot of boozing, leaven with learned disputations. But none of it ever affected the unchanging high standard of the paper.

What seems to have replaced these enjoyable shenanigans are not learned arguments about classical subjects, but disputes in the higher reaches about who can make the most money out of what is supposed to be a non-profit Trust, and purportedly guided by the highest motives.

It seems to me that this vulgar protifteering has affected the quality of the paper. When you think of making money going to bed at night, you surely carry that philosophy into work next day. It is the natural bent of people who think like that to turn to the right in politics. And that is what seems to have happened to the Irish Times.

From being an exceptional newspaper, with the openness to opinion that marks the liberal press, it has now turned to telling its wealthier readers what they want to hear. The last straw, in my view, is promoting the hard right views of that extreme old fart and cast iron Bush supporter, Charlie Krauthammer. Already well past his sell-by date in the U.S., the Irish Times now uses him to deliver lectures, unanchored by fact, on why the Irish would do well to support that tarnished President's crusade to 'save' the world.

I recall John Arnott, a major shareholder in the paper, playing chess in the Kildare Street Club. He was a decent, unassuming man and a major influence in turning the Irish Times into a Trust, where profits would be reasonably expected to enhance the technical performance and quality of its journalism. Now, the people who control the paper prefer to 'use' and squabble over their personal share of that pie.

How could anybody with the best interests of journalism at heart, enjoy a spectacle like that? The Irish Times should, and could have been, the last bastion of fine journalism and a beacon to those in the rest of the media. Now it is neither.

MB: You have commented that we have 'sick journalism' in Ireland and that this is not down to the good journalists, but down to the people that control what is said by them, those that encourage triviality. Could you expand on this?

JM: There are two kinds of journalism in vogue in Ireland. To a greater extent than I have seen elsewhere. One is lap-dog journalism; the other merits the title of trash-can journalism. The greatest practitioner of these deplorable practices can be seen on any given day on the website of the Irish Independent. It abases every standard of decent honest journalism with poorly written mawkish exploitation of every tragedy that crosses the editor's path. It has no equal on the internet for plumbing the depths. The Irish Independent under Vinnie Doyle had its faults but it was a solid, well written and informative newspaper, well up to the standards of its peers. The present version is less a page-turner, than a stomach churner.

MB: Do you agree that real investigative journalism has disappeared in Ireland?

JM: Investigative journalism never disappears. Since the French Revolution, outspoken writers have faced mortal threat, imprisonment, ostracism, indifference, along with nagging from worried relatives and cultish fads like the celebrity mania defacing media in today's Ireland. Always, someone will step forward to take up the fallen standard, however dark the circumstances.

I think of that little man living in Monrovia when the monstrous regime of Charles Taylor was literally cutting off the arms and ears or poking out the eyes of dissenters.

But every morning, at the height of this terror, he would emerge from his little hovel to display a rough board with the news of the day chalked across it. The do-good media organisations wanted to give him grants, a scholarship, perhaps even teach him the rudiments of grammar. It might have been nice, but none of it would have made any difference to his commitment. If he was the last man on earth, he would still have been out there, holding up his board and hoping that someone, anyone, would be interested in reading the real news of the day.

Investigative reporting may be regarded as a curse by the powerful and a mixed blessing by the rest. But so long as there is that little man from Monrovia, you may be sure that it's never going to go away.

1. http://www.independent.ie/opinion/analysis/irish-
sweepstake-scandal-remains-a-lesson-to-us-all-497325.html
2. http://www.independent.ie/national-news/state-
turned-blind-eye-while-money-rolled-in-191162.html
3. http://www.mediabite.org/article_Confronting-Power---Part-1_464545113.ht...
4. http://www.rte.ie/laweb/brc/brc_1960s.html
5. http://www.rte.ie/news/2005/0124/burker.html
6. http://archives.tcm.ie/irishexaminer/2002/09/28/story864642561.asp
7. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RCMP_Security_Service