Sir, - I am surprised (almost) at Vincent Browne's priggishness. Seriously, though, news is an update of matters interesting, to the general public, and all media must carry a fair bit of it or die. RTE's "public service" rem it has to be joined on and off the news slots with all the other stuff which competing channels cover.
Does Vincent want a merely public service channel, worthy and dull, or to hive off the juicier bits to later in the evening schedule, perhaps? Maybe what's needed is a "Courtwatch" daily update of what he wants excluded from the news. Then who'd watch the news?
The chattering ones don't like the top echelons of their own class exposing themselves, so to speak, in public. They surely don't like us, hoi polloi, seeing/hearing/talking about it either.
Whereas we are enjoying a variation of Schadenfreude; what happens us poor sods happens them too. And if they want to get satisfaction, they've got to submit to the same public show the rest of us have to face in similar circumstances. There's no way you can buy some kind of private justice; skeletons and linen of all ages and conditions tumble out in public, and we enjoyably wonder what the jury of peers representing us will make of it. What a wonderful affirmation of democracy.
We can see/hear that we're all the same under Benetton or Ben's best, the OK or the carbolic. Justice, publicly administered and reported, is, with death, the great leveller and the assurance of both a true cement of social order and cohesion. - Yours, etc.,
Rathmichael,
Co Dublin.