After three decades of providing us with stories that were undeniably interesting to a large slice of the public, The Keane Edge is no more. The timing provides a fascinating contrast.
Last night the last Late Late Show was broadcast. Two long-standing elements of the media have passed away close to each other. One is already being widely mourned; the other not. What separated the two is a principle. What is of interest to the public is not necessarily in the public interest. Gaybo got it. She didn't.
Curiously, what was finally confirmed last Friday night, following 20-odd years of less than subtle hints, was in the public interest. She told us about the affair she had been having with a politician who had speechified during the divorce referendum about the primacy of the family. It is what any good journalist should do. When they discover a figure preaching one thing in public and practising another in private it is their duty to reveal it.
One would like to be able to give her credit for a Road to Damascus style conversion - that, through some mystical or spiritual encounter she realised the error of her ways. That somehow she suddenly figured out that what she had been doing for so long, reporting the details of certain celebrities' private lives, while interesting to some, did not warrant national exposure.
She did, after all, express her regret at what she had done for so long.
But a near-religious conversion does not seem to fit the facts. She said she was prompted into the "Sweetie" revelation because someone else was going to reveal the details in another book. And that is something any journalist, good or bad, can't stand - being scooped. And there's the small matter of a story of her own to sell. And what should we be expecting in her new column with the Sunday Times? And who is going to write it?
You'd never think that Garret FitzGerald's column in this paper would be written by Kevin Myers, would you? Or that Robert O'Byrne, the fashion correspondent, really pens Dick Walsh's articles? If the precedent established and recently revealed is to be built on, I'm quite likely to end up doing the odd nixer ghosting Fergus Finlay's piece in the Examiner. Because now we know that one's byline doesn't stand for anything other than a brand name. Marketing is what counts.
Now we have always known that some sports stars may not actually churn out their own copy, may even answer questions and have a real journalist write it all up. But we don't assume that journalists who have been on the job for 30 years have to get their words turned out by someone else. Perhaps, in future, we will have to make that assumption.
For at least two years, a name appeared on a page written by other people. The political equivalent is personation, and you can go to jail for it. In this instance, there has been no apology to readers for deceiving them. Interchangeability of names is an idea whose time has come.
There are, of course, possible explanations. For example, just as a bank might do extraordinary things in order to prevent the wrath of a VIP debtor falling on them, a newspaper might retain someone who could or would no longer write. Alternatively, when a writer develops moral qualms about knifing people in print, it's understandable that keeping your fingers off the keys and just taking the money for your moniker would be a more comfortable option.
But, of course, it was written by someone. It must, as a result, be such fun to be on that paper now the cover has been blown. Such fun, if you're a fine writer like Gene Kerrigan, to know that people just might think you boosted your earnings by tossing off a few "Sweeties".
Which in turn opens up the realisation of yet another falsehood. The column was branded as characteristic of the writer: satirical, witty, stylish. So characteristic, so witty, so stylish that a single anonymous backroom journalist, or a bunch of anonymous hacks, can forge it for years.
IF those anonymous journalists are the ones who put in the references that humiliated the wife on a weekly basis, one wonders how they got comfortable about that. Perhaps, if you are confecting the output of a brand name, the whole operation takes on the cast of fiction, and you are not troubled by the pain you cause, because none of the people seems real to you.
Or maybe - as happened on the Late Late Show - you announce that everybody loves everybody else. In some unprecedented, bizarre and unbelievable fashion.
The key thing is to position it somewhere between the Sun King and The Commitments. A kept man and a kept woman establishing their self-worth by the way they spent other people's money on brand-name champagne and having deep bonding moments based on him swearing over a slow waiter.
The reality, of course, is that this tacky tale, ghost-written for a household-name journalist, has few links with the great illicit relationships of history. Some mistresses - such as Nell Gwynne - were important enough to be remembered by a king in the last moments before death. Some - like Roosevelt's - were loving, discreet and altruistic.
Some, notably Clara Petacci, Mussolini's lover, died with their man.
In this instance, what we have is a longterm mistress who has brought the concept of "the other woman" into disrepute. Now, there's a claim to fame.