Here is the News

Ireland has thriving economy, insists Lenihan

It's true, it's on the Irish Times website here.

Ah he said it on the BBC. OK one story for the foreigners and one for home consumption, I see. What a clever Minister he is.

I have grown to despise "The News", that package we watch, or used to watch, at least once a day which purports to be a digest of what happened in the country and the world.

I was talking about this to someone the other night and came up with this wonderful slogan: The News is not the news. Great isn't it. The point I was making is that The News is a television programme just like Home and Away or Who Wants to be a Millionaire, Last of the Summer Wine or Dallas with the same production values and the same need for high audience ratings. It has little to do with what is actually happening in the country/world.

It's great when you find something to agree with a rant of yours straight away. The Irish Times has a short review of the paperback issue of Flat Earth News by Nick Davies (Vintage , £8.99) According to the review "Davies points to the new realities of newsrooms, where 'churnalism', cutbacks and internet-adjusted deadlines have proved so damaging that most journalists 'work in structures that positively prevent them from discovering the truth'".

The Flat Earth News homepage is here.

And then there was this piece in the "Bad Science" column in yesterday's Guardian on the media hyping of so-called "Blue Monday".