Sir, - Are our newspapers unaware of the effect they continue to have on a largely unthinking public? Are you? Let us see.
If all newspapers were to realise that one certain factor (call it an X-factor) is a leading cause of illness and death here; if newspapers were openly to acknowledge the clear WHO statistics regarding death and injury from that X-factor; if they did not decide to close their minds (and therefore ours) to the certain evidence about home and family wreckage due to the Xfactor; if they were to consider the chilling fact that 80 per cent of our 16-year-olds have already begun a course which increasingly involves them in that X-factor, and there there are annually 7,000 admissions to psychiatric hospitals in Ireland, largely due to the X-factor; then, would it be too much to expect a more responsible press to begin to sound a warning? So why is it altogether different when the X-factor happens to be alcohol?
Why do newspapers give such generous and free commercial advertisements for alcohol under the thin veil of news? Why, for instance, is it acceptable that our Taoiseach and the German Chancellor should recently pose for commercially inspired photocalls to parade that X-factor on TV and in our newspapers (including yours, March 20th, front page, five columns)? Is there not an agenda being painted lavishly in the background? Are these responsible leaders playing a cheap (eventually a cruelly expensive) popular card of merely conceding to the well-established and powerful drinks lobby? It is not that we object to someone enjoying a drink, it is the arrant free commercial publicity and its downstream effect that we question.
Is there any hope that you would, although at an obvious cost, dissociate yourself from the tabloids (and broadsheet tabloids!) and give a lead that young and old so badly need. The Irish Times is able to give such a lead. Our challenge goes to you by way of compliment. Please tell us that you are not another hireling of mammon. Is there then a hope that, rather than an occasional hand-wringing feature, you would build into your paper's policy a consistent measure of decency, reason and common sense in this regard? Is there a hope that you might begin by tackling the sponsorship of alcohol in sport, as is proposed in the European Alcohol Charter to which the Irish and German Governments are signatories. Or do they know? And don't you? -Yours, etc.,
DR Michael Loftus, Leon O'Morchain, Dothain, Crossmolina, Co Mayo.