Article by Jenny Holland.

From the moment Brits voted for Brexit and Americans put Donald Trump into the White House eight years ago, there has been a lot of talk about just how divided and polarised Western publics are.

Yet while the public is divided, it appears to be a different story for mainstream journalists. In multiple different countries across the West, they tend to hew to the same themes and offer identical analyses. They tend to be globalist in orientation and ‘progressive’ in outlook. This means that even if they are from different national cultures with different political systems and histories, they are often singing from the same hymn sheet – a hymn sheet that is at odds with millions of their compatriots.

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Irish journalist and commentator David Quinn sees the selective reporting of Casey’s statement as an example of a broader problem among Irish media. ‘You can’t go off script, even if your fiancée has been brutally murdered’, he tells me. ‘I think some of it is old-fashioned snobbery’, he continues: ‘Journalistic consensus is rigidly enforced on pain of being socially ostracised, with many in the Irish media thinking, “This makes me look good, it makes me look respectable”, like drinking a particular kind of wine.’ And the result? ‘It’s basically propaganda we’re getting.’

Quinn explains the Western media’s shared worldview in terms of writer David Goodhart’s distinction between those who come from ‘Somewhere’ – rooted in a specific place or community, usually socially conservative and less educated – and those who could come from ‘Anywhere’ – urban, ‘progressive’ and university-educated. ‘Journalists are Anywhere people’, Quinn says. ‘They despise people who are attached to their place, culture, traditions and customs.’

Ian O’Doherty, writer for the Irish Independent, concurs. ‘It’s class contempt’, he tells me. ‘It’s very rare that you’ll see any overt editorial interference’, but the pressure to conform is huge. Irish journalists, he says, ‘are all middle class… They all know each other, they all go to the same dinner parties, they all have the same opinions.’

And these ‘same opinions’ cross borders. Those who work for Ireland’s national broadcaster, RTÉ, O’Doherty says, ‘would have much more in common with someone from the New York Times or the BBC than with someone from Crumlin’.

Similarly, Paddy O’Gorman, a retired RTÉ reporter and now a successful independent podcaster, points out that when it comes to what gets covered in Irish media, the ideological slant only goes one way.