whispers "How to spend it"
whispers "How to spend it"I buy the Financial Times on a Saturday and it has really great writing on a variety of issues including very good long reads on current topics.
Brendan
I did have an IT sub for years, and got rid of it, largely because of poor quality writing from Mullally and that awful O Connell woman who is equally poor. I saw UM "interview" someone live at a Web Summit evening session years ago and she was very poor - really interesting interviewee but she just couldn't get out insightful questions to draw the person out.Una Mullally is the anti-Fintan O Toole.
O Toole writing on a topic he knows is awesome, read anything he has written on theatre. Reading his review I know I have seen the same play, but he saw it in much greater complexity than I did, his was a much richer viewing, and he can share that in his review.
However, he often strays into territory where his lack of understanding of the basics leads him into embarrassing errors, in his most recent piece he says that if the West is to win (in Ukraine against Russia) 'it has to commit huge resources into military industries for many decades to come'. Whereas in fact the US has resourced Ukraine to date with less that 5% of US military spending. €50bn over 18 months out of an annual military budget of €750bn. The financial cost of the war in Ukraine is peanuts to the US if it wishes to achieve a generational shift in geopolitics.
Fintan O’Toole: The West must help Ukraine to define victory differently
If Putin died tomorrow, there’s no chance a democratic peacenik would replace him. The war has reshaped Russian society in ways that make autocracy even more securewww.irishtimes.com
Una Mullally on the other hand writes uninformed drivel on her core topics. She is often accused of being an SF mouth piece, but really all she does is look at the surface of whatever hot topic attracts her attention that week and reflect it through her own narrow worldview. Her prejudices are much more visible than her intellect.
This week however she has a piece on the future of commercial property prices in Dublin. I read it for a laugh, but it is not at all bad. Probably because she recognised that she had no expertise she made an effort to do some research, and the resulting article highlights several relevant factors for the future of the office market. Many finance correspondents have produced worse.
Una Mullally: It looks like a commercial property crash is looming for Dublin
If workers were going to return to offices five days a week they would have done so by nowwww.irishtimes.com
Currency is good.A bit niche but the WSJ have a good deal too, if thats your thing, €24 for the year.
The societal shift towards self aggrandisement, identity politics, catastrophising everything and looking to take offence at everything and on other people's behalf is epitomised by the Irish Times and the so-called liberal media, and I say that as self described liberal, but the conservative/right-wing media isn't far behind it.I get the Sunday Times delivered each week - nice to wake up on a cold, wet winter's Sunday morning to find it in the letterbox - it even arrived during the very bad snow of 2018! I read it mainly for the business and culture coverage. Other than that I tend to read individual articles from all of the main papers (and quite a few online ones - even Gript!)
Good and bad journalists seem to be spread quite evenly across the main papers, depending on your tastes and point of view. Though I tend to go for the straight-talking types - who don't write in riddles leaving out obvious facts.
Would agree that the Irish Times has gone very left-wing on politics, the economy, immigration, housing and er, "gender" issues. They really showed how "woke" they were by printing that ridiculous "Fake Tan is Racist" article a year or so ago. The fact that it got through the editorial process was astonishing to me - and proved how dangerous that kind of group-think is. But it ticked so many of their right-on "culture wars" boxes that they couldn't help themselves. Here's a snippet for those who missed it:
"When an Irish women wears fake tan, she is wearing a costume that allows her to experience a fleeting taste of a more exotic identity, with none of the obstacles people of colour face.”“By artificially darkening skin, fake tanning culture inadvertently perpetuates the fetishisation of high melanin content, without acknowledging the struggles faced by those who naturally possess it.”
(They still write stuff like that although The Journal is giving them a good run for their money editorially and The Examiner which is Irish Times owned is not too dissimilar.)
I also tend to follow particular stories or debates and read as widely as I can on them. To give just one example, I'm currently fascinated with the recent coverage of the Lucy Letby case in the UK and the growing feeling that she might have been wrongly convicted based on the mis-interpretation of statistical evidence. For another thread perhaps!
On a broader note, the current hysteria over the influence of the so-called Far Right among almost all mainstream media outlets is getting very tedious and their calls for hate speech laws seems more like an act of self-preservation than anything else (Matt Cooper on Newstalk this morning was at it in spades.)
Those newsroom photos of them all holding up "Je Suis Charlie Hebdo" signs a decade ago ring very hollow in the current climate. They clearly didn't mean a word of it...
I get the Sunday Times delivered each week - nice to wake up on a cold, wet winter's Sunday morning to find it in the letterbox - it even arrived during the very bad snow of 2018!
Same here.I subscribe to IT despite its totally unbalanced left leaning as there is no alternative.I tend to avoid the usual lefty opinion articles as tend to induce nausea.
If you want to read a selection of yesterdays international news from other newspapers then it's the paper for you. It's a different kind of disappointing.The Irish Independent used to be a decent paper 20 years ago but is now staffed (by and large) by individuals who likely use crayons to "write" their articles. It's sister paper the Sunday Independent finally poisoned it.
Wow ! You must have a whopper of a letterbox.I get the Sunday Times delivered each week - nice to wake up on a cold, wet winter's Sunday morning to find it in the letterbox
Borrowbox is great for audio and ebooks but the newspaper/magazine section is a distinct disimprovement for Pressreader for International newspapers. Washington Post is still available on BorrowboxWow ! You must have a whopper of a letterbox.
The free access to Pressreader from the Public Libraries has ended.
There is a new free service called Borrowbox. The newspaper selection is not as good as the Pressreader service.
Reuters isn't bad but every news source has an editor and so has a bias of some sort. If it doesn't have an editor it isn't a news source. There's no "mainstream media", there's just the media. The rest is just opinions and noise.Given the tone of the thread and various opinions on IT/Indo/Sindo and others can anyone recommend a a good news paper which is...
a. unbiased (neither left nor right leaning basically)
b. has content which is soundly based on rigorous fact-checking and not misinformation
c. Is available online and in paper form (with or without a subscription)
d. Doesn't have a political or social agenda to push.
Soft left wing and old-school liberal. I say that because I find myself agreeing with so much of what they say.
We use cookies and similar technologies for the following purposes:
Do you accept cookies and these technologies?
We use cookies and similar technologies for the following purposes:
Do you accept cookies and these technologies?