Macrolog
Oh My News, Where Art Thou?
I’ve been trying to find information — any information — about an alleged suicide attempt at my local DART station this afternoon.
Whether it was a suicide attempt or not (that’s what the staff at Pearse station reportedly relayed to commuters, at least) the incident was serious enough to cause suspension of part of the network on the northside for a significant part of the evening rush hour. (I know this because my mum was caught up in it on leaving work, and had to walk across the city to get a bus home instead.) This might be common on complex metro networks in other cities, but the DART is a one-route service; any major delays are out of the ordinary.
So one would expect to find a report about this on the web this evening, or a ‘breaking news’ headline on one of the newspaper websites. But do you think I can find any? Not at all. RTÉ News, the Irish Independent and The Irish Times are all coming up blank on this story. Not even a one-liner, even though it was briefly mentioned on TV at the 6pm bulletin (which I didn’t catch myself). The most I could find anywhere was a travel alert update on the Irish Rail website that referred to an ‘incident’ having occurred this afternoon at Raheny, but nothing more (the message has since been removed from the site).
It’s perplexing, particularly so when one sees reports of a derailment on the Luas line that occurred many hours later, and involved an empty tram at the end of the line. I don’t see why that’s deserving of recogniton while this isn’t, without getting into accusations of southside/northside snobbery.
I thought the web was supposed to expedite the breaking of news in cases like this, not leave us in the dark. Then again, a major part of what my thesis is about is that the mainstream media are recognised as having shortcomings (in terms of the stories and events they cover, etc.) that can, and should, be addressed by news consumers. The blogosphere acts when the news media are lacking - and in this case, they’re definitely lacking.
And that’s why I’m addressing it here. Pray tell, oh my news, where art thou?
Update 25/8: At last, something — a NIB on page 18 of this morning’s Irish Independent:
A man in his 30s was killed after he fell in front of a train yesterday.
The man fell in front of a Drogheda-Dublin commuter train at Raheny at 2:10pm. No Dart trains ran north of Harmonstown for some hours. Trains to Drogheda were delayed.
Still nothing on the web, though, even 20 hours later. My complaint still stands: the internet is supposed to expedite the provision of news, but in this instance our mainstream media are clearly lacking.
Wed 24 Aug 2005 at 23:24 ·
Comments (2 responses so far)
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Posted by anon
Wed 21 Dec 2005
at 16:15
This was a friend of mine who lived in Ashcroft. What else do you need to know?
I don’t actually need to know anything. What I wrote here was only to point out that the media can have strange standards.
A death in any other circumstance would be acknowledged by the press — regardless of the hurt it would cause to family and friends — because it is a significant event, and the job of the press is to report on significant events. But there was a noticeable lack of information on that afternoon which attracted my attention. Somehow a suicide (if this was a suicide) still has a stigma attached to it, which shouldn’t be the case in this day and age.
I received an e-mail from a journalist at the Irish Independent about this entry shortly after it was originally posted. For some reason or another I didn’t reply, but I think I should, even if just to leave something here for myself as a learning experience.
If you come back to read this, anon, I’m sorry for your loss. I only live five minutes away from Ashcroft; I could have walked past your friend around Raheny village any time and never known.
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This is the personal website of MacDara Conroy, a twenty-something journalist, editor and all-round creative type living in Dublin, Ireland.
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You are reading Oh My News, Where Art Thou?, a Macrolog entry by MacDara Conroy. It is filed under Media & Journalism, and was published in August 2005.
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