Seven reasons to change the subject

RADIO REVIEW:DAVID NORRIS sounded faintly desperate as he asked the question. "Are we going to talk about other things now, Pat?"

Norris had spent the previous 10 minutes on Wednesday’s

Today with Pat Kenny

(RTÉ Radio 1, weekdays) fielding the issue of the unreleased letters for clemency he had written in 1997 on behalf of his former partner Ezra Nawi, after the latter’s conviction for statutory rape of a 15-year-old boy in Israel. The presidential candidate was keen to move on to other pressing matters, such as Ireland’s uniqueness in the world. “Other people think in black and white,” Norris said. “We, the Irish, dream in colour.”

If Norris hoped his rhetorical flourish would transform Wednesday’s interview into a celebratory campaign launch, he was mistaken. “You may have to explain to win,” said Kenny, as he continued to pick away at his guest.

Norris seemed to regard the presenter’s focus on the unpublished letters as a distraction or even a distortion, apparently unable to grasp the fact that, faced with an incomplete response on a key topic, Kenny was perfectly entitled to press him. He was learning that even-handed coverage does not mean being given a free ride.

The crowded field in the race for the Áras meant that the contenders were inescapable presences last week. It also meant that the debates, ostensibly the fairest way of covering the election, proved unwieldy. The first encounter between the seven candidates, on Wednesday's News at One(RTÉ Radio 1, weekdays), was a perfunctory affair with an oddly polite atmosphere, as though the participants were at an awkward meet-and-greet function.

The one-on-one interview was a more revealing format, as shown by Martin McGuinness's appearance on The Ray D'Arcy Show(Today FM, weekdays). D'Arcy started off with a few underarm deliveries for the Sinn Féin candidate. He asked if McGuinness would chafe in the confines of the presidency, given he was a "doer", which is certainly one way of describing him. But the presenter then moved on to his guest's past, calling him a former IRA chief of staff, a statement predictably rejected by McGuinness. D'Arcy then asked whether McGuinness had murdered anyone, had ordered anyone else to kill or was in a room when such actions were discussed.

Again, McGuinness dismissed such accusations, while admitting he fought the British army in Derry. He also tetchily wondered if he was going to be asked about other matters. But D’Arcy would not ignore the elephant in the room. “You have that stench of murder hanging over you,” he said, “and I wanted to clarify that.”

The presenter clearly felt his guest was holding back, thus giving an impression of “a lack of honesty”. D’Arcy is few people’s idea of a dispassionate or nuanced inquisitor, but, given what was at stake (and given McGuinness’s own plaintive accounts of unionist discrimination), the emotive approach did not seem unfair.

Whatever about its efficacy in the political arena, the desire to appear scrupulously unbiased can be positively misleading in other areas. On Tuesday's Moncrieff(Newstalk, weekdays), the American scientist James Powell spoke about the disparity between the overwhelming scientific consensus on climate change – that it exists and is man-made – and the widespread public doubts on the subject, especially in the US. Powell said the fact that 33 national academies and 100 scientific organisations found that climate change existed, with none dissenting, meant there was a "well-funded campaign of disinformation" on the issue in the US. But public scepticism was also fuelled by the media's natural inclination to be impartial. "The prestige press have bent over backwards to be, quote, fair and balanced, unquote," with mavericks given equal weight to respected institutions. "Half the people believe scientists disagree [on climate change]," he said, "but there's very little disagreement." To his credit, Sean Moncrieff did not dissent.

Meanwhile, Prof Richard Somerville, a member of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, made much the same point to Pat Kenny on Tuesday. “There are outliers in science,” Somerville said, “but you’re making a mistake if you think those people should be given equal credence with the overwhelming consensus.”

It was a risk that Kenny seemed willing to take. Somerville was in studio to talk about the 19th-century Irish scientist John Tyndall, but the host, who has in the past had climate-change deniers as guests, also asked whether environmental damage was really that bad. Kenny pointed to stories such as the Times Atlas of the Worldadmitting it had overestimated glacial melting in Greenland, only to be rebutted. "Almost all the points you're making are media misquotations of scientific results," said Somerville, with the patient air of someone who had been through it all before. He spoke of "false balance" in the media. "If I say the world is round, they search for someone who says it's flat."

Kenny backed off, saying, whatever the case, it was wise to take a precautionary approach and preserve natural resources. It was a retreat by any other name, a mismatch between Somerville’s modest authority and Kenny’s misplaced contrarianism. Sometimes it pays to get the balance right.

radioreview@irishtimes.com

Radio moment of the week 

The news that the social network Twitter is setting up in Dublin is welcome, but it may not be evidence of a widespread, highly skilled knowledge economy. On The Last Word(Today FM, weekdays), Paddy Cosgrave of Dublin Web Summit told Matt Cooper that many of the jobs created here by digital multinationals are on the lowest rung of the tech ladder. In Silicon Valley, he said, Ireland was sometimes described as Little India. Ouch.