Confirmation bias is, speaking simply, the psychological process where you seek out things that agree with your opinion and dismiss those which do not.

It's most commonly acknowledged among market traders, who seek to be ever alert to the prospect that they could be wrong, and try to remain open to contradicting views. The reason they do this is because if they didn't, they'd quickly lose a lot of money.

But for most of us, confirmation bias isn't something we worry about. We like our own opinions, and we like those who share them, mostly. Sure, we might like people who disagree with us too. But being around them all the time would eventually become... disagreeable. So we don't.

Confirmation bias is one of the things that makes people interact with the media they choose. It's a long-standing canard that tabloid readers buy the redtops in order to confirm their own neanderthal point of view on the world.

In fact, it's much more likely that the very people levelling this argument, smug broadsheet readers, are themselves the biggest victims of confirmation bias.

Tabloid readers are very aware that the world consists of more than X Factor, celeb affairs and premiership football. They read them like some women read Hello! or Elle - for the escapism away from the humdrum reality.

Broadsheet readers, however, do not have the same level of disconnect with their chosen media. Let's take, as an example, the following piece from today's Observer, entitled 'US shaken by sudden surge of violence against gays.'

According to the title, there is a surge of anti-gay violence sweeping across America, which is a shocking prospect, not least to the gay-friendly readers of the Observer.

Yet, the evidence doesn't remotely support that. Within the article, the entire evidence offered consists of one suicide (well-reported, and subject to legal action towards alleged bullies), one quite vicious beating of a gay man and some vaguely euphemised 'other youths' in New York, a group of men who had a bin thrown at them, and a customer of the Stonewall Inn who was robbed.

I don't wish to diminish the seriousness of any of those individual acts, but frankly, all of that and much worse likely happened in any single Dublin housing estate last night. It doesn't add up to anything close to a surge of violence against gays in a country of 300 million people.

The article opens with the poignant scene of one brave man's 'lonely vigil' protesting for civil rights for gay people. Then swiftly moves on to inform us that, like him, 'Liberal America looks on aghast as virulent homophobic prejudice seems to have returned to its streets and cities.'

'Seems' is the key word here, the mealymouthed weasel word which excuses the writer from offering objective fact and allows him to present biased opinion in its place. It's a technique pioneered and perfected by the dark minions of the Daily Mail, where insinuating invective has been house style for many years.

'Seems', 'may be considered to be', 'is now thought by many' - such phrases are bullshit euphemisms. They are shorthand, telling the reader - here is what you should conclude, here is what you should be thinking.

Ironically, the very people who would be impervious to this technique in the Daily Mail are suckers for it in their own favoured papers, like the Observer.

This is confirmation bias in action.

The issue isn't whether there is a tidal wave of anti-gay violence in America or not. Clearly there isn't, and even the article is forced to concede in a single hurried line that the US is set to overturn the ban on gays in the military and Florida has just introduced gay adoption.

The issue is that the Observer, for some reason, has thought it legitimate to pretend that there is, using all the Daily Mail's rhetorical tropes of insinuation to depict skewed opinion in place of objective fact, when those facts do not add up to support their argument.

Journalism is becoming ever more debased, and nowhere is this more evident than in the broadsheets. Don't let confirmation bias blind you to that.

I never was mad on Moliere when I studied French. It all seemed too archaic, his plots (an underrated element of any fiction-writing) far too contrived.

The French loved him of course, and consider him their Shakespeare. It's one of the few aspect of French cultural life, along with Raymond Domenech and their penchant for air traffic strikes, that leave me baffled.

But by God is he on the money when he defined journalism:

Writing is like prostitution. First you do it for the love of it. Than you do it it for a few friends. And then you do it for money.

He's also spot on with a number of other observations too. On drinking:

Let us drink while we can. We cannot drink forever. (from Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme.)

And: Of all the noises known to man, Opera is the most expensive.

Mind you, he probably hadn't heard the whining of Irish bankers and developers. Compared to NAMA, opera is a total bargain. Not to mention much more tuneful.

'Journalist asks question at press conference shocker!'

Seriously, I'm not making this up. About four national newspapers have all covered this non-story.

A journalist went to a press conference, plucked up the courage to ask a question, got an answer, then left.

I mean, OMG!!! All those scary old dudes there, asking about, like football and stuff. No wonder plucky Lisa has her hand totally to her chest in shock at what she's done (while posing for a photo, natch.) She, like, TOTALLY asked a question at a press conference?

I know! Like, who knew journalists did that? She should get a medal or something. Probably Fianna Fail are already tapping her up to run in the next general election.

Let's remind ourselves - this chick went to university. She trained as a journalist. Her daddy was a journalist before her. So she's seen her dad do this, she's educated and trained to do it. Why is it so shocking that she went as a journalist to a press conference and asked a question? It's her JOB to do that!

What so-fucking-what yawnathon will the Irish media treat us to next? 'Man rose early and drove electric cart to deliver milk'? 'Sun expected to rise in the East tomorrow morning'? 'Moon disappointingly not made of cream cheese'?

The media rightly get it in the neck sometimes for their sense of whats worthy of reporting and what isn't. People see endless tabloid headlines about Jade Goody, or Jordan, or David Beckham, and despair.

But this article is a spectacular classic of an even more debased genre - journalists puffing themselves and each other.

People do their jobs everyday without expectation of public acknowledgement, and many people do a damn sight more important work than asking Cristiano Ronaldo about his shorts.

Where are their articles?

People who perform surgery, fly airplanes, teach children or cure cancer, take note. Here's what a REALLY difficult job is like:

"It was mortifying from my point of view," said Lisa Cannon, "but at the end of the day that's what I was sent there to do."

Well done for spotting that, love. Yes, you went to a press conference and did your job. Congrats. Do we have to read about it in the paper everytime you do your job properly?

"It was a pretty difficult interview because I couldn't ask him any of the questions I really wanted to but I'm glad I did it," she continued.

Oh, hold on a minute. She didn't ask any of the questions she wanted to? Why not? Isn't asking some questions the sum total of her task? What stopped her? Did someone overpower her and clamp a chloroform cloth over her mouth before she could get the words out?

Perhaps she didn't do her job so well after all, if she couldn't ask questions at a press conference when your job is to do exactly that.

I don't mean to knock the girl - she's probably very nice and might well be generally excellent at her job, which I understand involves talking about clothes and make-up a lot on TV3. And it wasn't her decision to put this tripe into the national press.

My only questions remain for the national press themselves:

Why should the public give a fuck about this?

What is it doing in a newspaper?

How many 'Journalist did their job' stories do you reckon you could print before gangs of brain surgeons, airline pilots, firemen, nurses, teachers and other actually relevant people storm your newsroom and gag the lot of you with chloroform cloths?

The next big non-thing thrown up (literally, quite possibly) by teh interwebz is, as I'm sure you all know by now, Twitter.

I'm not going to link to it because it's already ubiquitous.

Basically, it's a retrograde medium which reduces the expansive capacities of the world wide web and mobile communications technology to the paucity of a phone text message.

Now, while 140 characters is just about sufficient to let the other half know you're running late in the car, it's clearly not that big a canvas for people to generally communicate to a wider public in any meaningful fashion.

The mobile texting experience might have implied this anyway, but nevertheless that seems to be the appeal to many, oddly enough. People are hanging out of Twitter, updating frantically every few minutes with admittedly brief inanities.

It's the internet equivalent of when a child starts narrating in the present tense, with their limited capacity to communicate meaningfully.

"Mummy, I'm running! Mummy, look at how high I can jump! Now I can reach the branch, Mummy. Look at me, Mummy!"

Yet it appears to have sucked in punters like Jonathan Ross, George Hook and various Hollywood celebs, but since they're all just shills with careers to promote and products to sell, that is only to be expected.

What isn't to be expected or welcomed is when journalists crawl so far up their own arses while using it that they start demanding other people communicate with them using only this vapid medium.

Clearly the prick involved lost sight of his own actual importance (not a lot - he edits a Business website, for crying out loud) a long time ago.

But while you might sympathise with his clear and utter hatred for the oxygen thieves who earn a living in public relations, by demanding that people only access him via Twitter, he's outted himself as a complete twat.

Ironically, he announced his twattish decision in an email - not a tweet (seriously, people, they're letting you KNOW that this is akin to birdsong in terms of relevance).

If there's any sense left in the world, people will respond to him in kind, by refusing his phone calls and emails too. That way, he should be out of his job by, ooh, Monday lunchtime.

If this is where journalism is going, it's even baser than I thought already.

What happens when the irresistable blog meets the immovable earner?

The thought crossed my mind recently as I noted the passing of two of Ireland's more popular blogs - Sigla and Present Tense.

Both are now firmly in the past tense, as their authors move on to pastures new and, crucially, paying.

I can appreciate the difficulties for a journalist who has a blog. You write for a living, which is hard enough. Getting paid for writing is even harder. So where's the motivation in doing it for free? A blog is in a way only encouragement for people to expect your work for nothing - including that nefarious species, editors.

I don't think it's a coincidence that both Sinead and Shane were functioning hacks before they blogged. I get the sense that blogging was something they tried and found ultimately incompatible with the day job.

Other hacks, like Richard Delevan and Sarah Carey, seem able to keep both plates spinning in the air. But then again, Sarah came to journalism via her blog being noticed by the Sunday Times, while Richard has long mastered the high wire act of keeping both in balance.

Maybe he manages it because his articles tend to be lengthy, considered pieces of work, whereas his blog is often home to much shorter items that have come to his notice.

There are other blogs by Irish journos. But by and large they're either by youngsters starting out on their career or they're done under pseudonyms.

Perhaps the former are just looking for an outlet, somewhere to practice their chosen trade, maybe even get noticed. Perhaps the latter are looking to put things into the public domain which their paymaster won't publish. I'm speculating here, of course.

The clash of cultures between 'old' media and 'citizen journalism' has become a somewhat hackneyed topic for debate, and to me it seems defunct as we're still in some sort of transitional arrangement wherein both forms are seeking to find a way to marry into each other, like a messy corporate merger.

But the intersection between blogging and the media does seem to produce regular casualties, and those casualties are nearly always the blog, which doesn't pay, as opposed to the media work which does.

It would be great to see more established journalists commence blogging in Ireland. But sadly the trend seems to be going in the opposite direction. Anyone remember this from one particular Irish media titan?

And he got paid for it. Just not enough, presumably, for it to continue into the present.

When the need and opportunity to progress a career in the media clashes with blogging, it's the blog which is the first casualty. Because they take time and consideration and thought, and they don't pay.

This isn't restricted solely to hacks, of course. Other good blogs have fallen by the wayside as their authors lacked time to blog because they were busy earning elsewhere.

And even though blogs are free to read, we're all a little poorer for that loss.

It strikes me that the payment available to bloggers (other than a pittance of adsense revenue or similar) is in the interaction from reader comments. You don't get that in the mainstream media (letters pages and radio phone-ins just don't carry the same capacity for initiating a considered debate instantly.)

It doesn't compare to getting a cheque in the mail, but it is a small reward when someone notes something you've blogged about and takes issue with it, or agrees fervently, or says you've opened their mind, or merely links to it from a blog of their own.

So if we're not going to pay bloggers cash, then it might be nice if more people left more comments as they bounce around the blogosphere. It won't pay the rent, but it will add further relevance and vitality to the medium, while also giving the authors some form of payback.

Next time you open up the Indo and see a vomit-inducing hagiographic puff-piece about His Royal Highness 'Sir' Tony O'Reilly, remember this.

Or when you wince as the Irish Times lectures you like a prissy maiden aunt about how you should vote in a referendum, remember this.

Or when you peruse the rows of red top tabloids and sneer at the garish pictures of scantily clad starlets and schlock headlines in a superior manner, remember this.

Freedom of the press is a privilege we enjoy. With it comes things we are interested in hearing and happy to be informed about. With it also comes lectures, preposterous opinions, spin, fluff, puff and outright nonsense on all too many occasions.

But that's the point of diversity of opinion and press freedom. It permits all sorts of truths to be told, in a free and open manner.

So please remember that, and remember Mohammed Omer, the young and talented award-winning journalist from Gaza who was this week tortured by the Israelis for having the audacity to speak the truth about his homeland to the world and be acknowledged for doing so in an exemplary manner.

And remember him the next time you hear the Israeli propaganda machine kicking into gear with another well-rehearsed bout of lies about how peace-hungry, reasonable, beleaguered and free Israel is.

Because Mohammed Omer's neck bears the mark of the jackboot that says otherwise. Literally bears the mark.

Everyone over a certain age (let's say 30) can recall the harrowing impact of Michael Buerk's first reports of a famine in Ethiopia in 1984.

The sheer biblical images of starving black children - their hollow eyes pleading for food to placate their empty, distended bellies, their ribs stretching their thin skins, their limbs shrivelled to mere bones and skin - shocked the West in our relative affluence.

What followed was Band Aid, Live Aid, and the growth of global consciousness in relation to the appalling poverty suffered on the African continent.

Since then, charities have reported 'donation fatigue' and the diminishing returns of shock footage of African carnage or disaster. Mass rape and child slavery in Darfur barely stirs us now. Burma is flooded, and we can barely bother to put a hand in our pockets.

But surely it is a new low in the quest for ratings to actually invent a famine where none exists?

This is the allegation a Norwegian TV documentary team have levelled at the BBC.

After the documentary aired in Norway, it won awards and raised serious questions about the BBC's role in reporting a famine in Niger in 2005. It accused the BBC and the United Nations of acting in tandem to create a climate of intervention where none was required.

That suited the UN, who apparently wanted into Niger, and suited the BBC who wanted a good exclusive story, as journalists are wont to do.

Niger is a desert land in the Southern Sahara. But it is rich with uranium and other resources, and its population are predominantly nomadic, like the Touaregs (see above). They are used to moving around to obtain food. It's not like the pasture lands of Ethiopia failing at all.

But after the documentary aired in Norway, the BBC pulled the rights to their own footage, meaning that the documentary had to air in Sweden in a shorter, much less impactful form. It hasn't been seen elsewhere yet.

Auntie Beeb pleads innocence, and claims all the Norwegians need to do is ask politely for the rights to the footage and they can have it.

So perhaps we might yet get to see this interesting Norwegian film, controversially titled 'The Famine Scam.'

I fervently hope that the buyers in RTE will make a point of picking up this documentary and showing it during prime time viewing.

Then we will be able to decide for ourselves if the BBC and UN were right and there was a famine in Niger.

Or we might find that 'Niger's prime minister, local residents, doctors working in the region, a US aid organisation spokesman and other journalists' are more plausible when they say that no famine ever occurred.

I love property porn. You know the stuff: it comes in a colour supplement in your weekly regional paper that's longer than the paper itself is.

Before they get to the actual adverts, which funds the whole thing, there's a few pages of blatant fluff masquerading as reviews of newly available property.

No matter what the economic climate, never mind if there is an enormous property bubble popping around your ears, what you'll read in property porn is always universally positive.

If prices are collapsing, then property porn will tell you 'this house should be of interest to investors and first time buyers, offering unprecedented affordability in this much sought-after area."

If it's a derelict flat in a slum redlight district, it will be described as "offering a unique opportunity for a developer in an up-and-coming area of town."

If you're particularly gullible or unintelligent, you may not have worked out that all this property porn is either directly written by the estate agents themselves or else has been lightly adapted by hacks and shills masquerading as journalists.

But most of us are a lot smarter than to be taken in by this gushing, lying, overwritten shite about shoddy, sub-standard, overpriced housing.

It's a lot of fun noting how shrill and desperate the tone of property porn has become, how the page lengths are dropping alongside the prices, and how terrifyingly upbeat the tone remains, reminiscent of the grin on the face of a Club Med holiday rep watching helpless as a load of boozed-up lager louts pick her up to throw her into the pool.

But even more fun is this hilarious pastiche of a contemporary property ad, produced by Maxdiver, one of the regular posters on HousePriceCrash:

Great new property investment schemes now available. You've seen it on TV - now experience the joys of Property Investment.

With Mulligan Property Investors all your dreams can come true. In the North Coast's most popular investment Village - Causeway Glen a new way of life is coming. A great new development will be opened in 2009 - and it's surely the most popular residential concept Northern Ireland has ever seen.

The demand for these great Nest Egg investments has been extraordinary. With all units having been snapped up within minutes of having been up on sale - we aren't making this up. But don't worry - you can still get in on the action.

To help the savvy beginning professional Property Investor get rich quick we Mulligan Property Investors are giving 1,000 lucky investors who thought they missed out on the bargain of a lifetime - the chance to share in the success of Causeway Glen.

Listen to this great deal: For someone starting out in the making money business, Pay only £500 per month + the cost of the £249,950 loan for a 1 bedroom town house and you will buy this great high quality life-style investment in 2009 when the development is complete for the same £250k.

Prices range from £249,950 for chic 1-bedroom town houses to £1,499,950 for a 6 bedroom Mansion with Double Garage.

You stand to benefit enormously from this limited offer - with house prices having risen and according to respected commentators in the media - to keep on increasing - you need to sign up with us today.

Imagine how great it will feel - knowing that for only £500 per month you can share in ever growing prosperity.

Hurry - this is a limited offer - and any Property Investor worth their salt is rubbing their hands with glee.

And if that isn't enough - all investors will recieve a free iPod shuffle and 10% off the cost of fitting upstairs curtains!

MPI have over 100 years experience in making people fabulously wealthy through property - with over 30 eager staff - give us a call and see if you are the type of person who knows a good deal when they see it. Call us now on 02890-xxxxxx. You'll be glad you did.

Rumours of imminent job cuts at Independent Newspapers are reaching my ears. Hopefully they aren't true, but the rumours do appear to be consistent and substantial.

The Sunday Business Post and Roy Greenslade have already hinted at this, but what I'm hearing is genuinely disturbing.

Is Gavin O'Reilly really intent on outsourcing the production tasks (taking journalistic copy and pictures and turning them into newspaper pages) on his national papers to an office in Armagh, where ad copy is already processed?

Job adverts have already appeared in Armagh, offering salaries approximately half of what staff in Dublin currently receive. And if this is what's going on, then what will happen to the 200 or so production staff set to lose their jobs in Dublin?

Not that the management like it, but the Indo Group is unionised, and I understand that the NUJ may already be involved at this stage.

If jobs are to go, then hopefully the union will be able to negotiate fair settlements for all.

But the scale of these cuts appear to be on a level much higher than had been previously forecast.

And if this is the case, it translates into a further death knell ringing for the Irish Independent, Sunday Independent and Evening Herald, which would be well on their way to becoming mere copy generating shops in the capital, while the backroom work of assembling newspapers is done outside the state.

The Ian Bailey libel action against five newspaper groups has ended suddenly. It seems that the eight year action, which Mr Bailey took when the newspapers suggested he may have been considered a suspect in the murder of Sophie Toscan du Plantier, was settled out of court yesterday.

The newspapers' defence was always that they had not said he was the murderer of Ms du Plantier, but that he was considered a suspect by the Gardai. Bailey sought to argue that they had attempted to pin the blame for the murder upon him.

But following the sudden end of the action yesterday, when the newspapers agreed to pay some of Mr Bailey's costs from a previous action which he lost in the Circuit Court and waived the costs they themselves had been awarded, the allegation that Mr Bailey was a reasonable suspect in the case, for which no one has ever been charged, remains standing.

Cutting through the jargon for a moment, it seems that either Mr Bailey murdered Ms du Plantier or he did not. If he did, then the correct forum for these debates is in the criminal court, not in a long-running libel action. If he did not, then he has been tried in the court of public opinion.

Either way, the call from the newspapers to reform the libel laws is correct. But they should have added that a full review of the competence of the investigating Gardai in this murder case is also necessary.

It is now over a decade since Ms du Plantier's death. The fact that no one has been charged and tried for her murder is yet another indictment of the Gardai. A woman died in hugely dubious circumstances. Ten years on, her family still do not have the facts of her death.

That should not be lost in the legal to-ing and fro-ing between a ruined former hack with a penchant for spousal abuse and the red-tops that fingered him as a likely murderer without his having been convicted of the offence.

According to RTE, Justice Minister Michael McDowell launched another unwarranted attack on the media last night.

Apparently, the Minister believes that truth is becoming a casualty in the reporting of politics in Ireland. He also warned other politicians against courting cheap headlines.

Obviously the hypocrisy of the man has few limits, if any.

Wasn't it McDowell, after all, who used Dail privilege to accuse prominent investigative reporter Frank Connolly of travelling to Colombia on a false passport, and being involved in a plot to provide FARC guerillas with IRA explosives?

His accusation has been vociferously denied by Connolly and disregarded by the Gardai. But that did not prevent McDowell leaking his non-story to a pet hack at the Irish Independent.

But the end result of this appalling smear was that funding was withdrawn for Connolly's Centre for Public Inquiry, a thinktank unpopular with the government due to their exposure of state and corporate corruption.

It is no coincidence that the man dubbed the 'Mad Mullah' by the Irish Star is no fan of the media. His grubby pawprints are already all over the forthcoming Privacy Bill which is aimed at silencing the media and preventing them from doing exactly the sort of digging into the great and the good that Frank Connolly was so respected for.

He also criminalised crime reporting in a previous instance of seeking to gag the pesky fourth estate, by introducing a five year sentence for Gardai who speak to journalists.

Clearly, McDowell would rather exist in a state where the media did not exist to report on his draconian excesses of power.

One can only hope, for the sake of independent reporting in Ireland, that the electorate throw this demagogue out on his well-heeled ear come the next election.

I had promised to stop giving out about Ireland's most pointless journalist, and I was doing well, really I was.

Then my attention was drawn to this new horror. No, not her girth. I mean the fact that Newstalk have given Roisin Ingle airtime outside of the wittering women's hour that is the Orla Barry show.

Fair enough, it's scheduled for during my nap between breakfast and the early cross-channel soccer game on a Saturday, so I haven't suffered having to actually listen to the show, mercifully.

But it was bad enough to read that preposterous biog that you just know she wrote herself, thinking it was witty and self-deprecating.

Share my pain, people. Welcome to the bottom of the Irish journalistic barrel:

Weekend Blend with Roisin Ingle is a lifestyle show that combines chat and fun, with a presenter who’s young and fresh and who doesn’t take herself too seriously.

Fresh? Like a melon that gives slightly when you squeeze, do they mean? And what the fuck's a 'lifestyle' show anyway?

'This week, we've got David Norris, Michael McDowell and the O'Hailpin hurlers around the table and they'll be discussing the difficulties of being gay, fascist and Fijian in today's Ireland.'

Lord only knows.

The show will feature a lively cookery slot with Ireland’s top chefs, with tips and advice listener participation.

You heard that right, folks. Live cooking on the radio! Because you wouldn't, y'know, want to actually see whatever this week's refugee from Guibauld's or Locke's was making or how he made it. Much better to fantasise about what it tastes like while Roisin wolfs it down.

A panel of fresh voices will chat about the week’s highlights and lowlights – it will be anything but dull.

I don't believe you. It will be worse than dull. It will be a swill of fictionalised inanity revolving around Roisin's fantasy life, just like her columns are.

We intend to step out of the studio a lot – meeting characters from all walks of life. We want to reinvent the art of story-telling by forming our very own writing club. Watch this space.

Jesus wept! Their own writing club. God only knows what madness will come of that. An assortment of suicide notes and counselling session transcripts masquerading as poems, and interminable yarns about misunderstood singletons in Dublin who meet Mr Right, in the stylee of Cecilia Ahern.

Only worse, if you could imagine it.

But there's more. There's the biog:

Four years ago, she began writing an increasingly popular column in The Irish Times Saturday Magazine with material culled mostly from her own life. She writes important-sounding stuff about relationships, Reality TV and her mother-in-law-in-waiting’s Incredible Bleach Obsession mainly to disguise the fact that she doesn’t have enough opinions on lofty matters of State to fill a page each week.

A little truth in advertising at last!

Last year she put all of the best columns together, wrote an introduction and called the resulting book ‘Pieces of Me’.

Got to get the plug in where you can. Before the publisher pulps all the copies, that is.

Roisin used to like lazy Saturdays but now much prefers getting up at 7am to prepare for her Saturday morning show on Newstalk. Honestly!

Sometimes it seems as if a flock of migrating birds would display more of a sense of individualism and creativity than the entire Irish meeja. It's like the Dail - once you're in, it doesn't matter how crap you are, how many mistakes you make or indeed if, like my other bete noire Eamon Dunphy, you show up to work drunk or cost your employer a fortune through being wrong.

Once you're in the circle, you've got a job for life.

Think back, those of you who can recall, to the times when Saturday morning radio was utterly essential listening in this country. When Dermot Morgan was the only man in Ireland brave enough to take on that total crook Charlie Haughey, and won every week.

A compare-and-contrast exercise of then and now could not be more illustrative of just how far we as a nation have fallen since those heady days, especially in terms of the quality of our media.

To some people, the concept of a dead tabloid journalist is a good thing.

These people are usually the sort who 'take' the Irish Times at their desk each morning and think that McDowell's forthcoming censorship law, or privacy law as he calls it, is great because it'll stop people from rumbling their off-shore accounts and payments to Fianna Fail in future.

To most right-thinking people, the idea that a journalist should die in the course of their work is abhorrent. It is a frontal attack on the nature of a free press, as well as a personal tragedy for a family.

Hence, after Veronica Guerin's death, there was a stunning public outcry which led to the formation of the Criminal Assets Bureau and stringent new legislation relating to organised crime, as well as a massive manhunt for her killers.

But there was no such response for the other Irish journalist murdered in the course of their work. Today, Martin O'Hagan's inquest heard how he was shot dead by a Loyalist death squad after writing repeatedly in the Sunday World about their drug-dealing activities in September 2001.

Over five years on, not a single person has been arrested for the murder, despite strong suggestions from the NUJ that the police know who his killers are. Why won't they arrest them? They say they have insufficient evidence. The NUJ says the killers were informers and are being protected by the very people who should be arresting them.

Where is Martin O'Hagan's Hollywood movie? Where is the manhunt for his killers? Most importantly, where is the public outcry?

Martin O'Hagan RIP.

How much do you hate lazy journalism? Do you hate it as much as me? Does it make your eyes bug out of your head in despair when completely lazy hacks cog stories and ask other people to do the work for which they get paid?

If so, you'll not be surprised to know that one of the Irish mediaocracy's shining lights, the aforementioned Roisin Bu-, sorry Roisin Ingle, desperately needs your help to do her work for her!

Yes, you too can be a completely forgotten, unpaid researcher for La Ingle, as she seeks to duck responsibility for sourcing her own bloody stories.

Simply email her with suggestions for things she could do on Christmas day, via the linky above. Any suggestions you like. After all, she did ask for it. So give it to her, this once, for me.

Consider it my Christmas pressie.

According to 'Colonel' Kevin Myers, in his forthcoming tome about the Troubles, he was barely able to file copy most days due to the amount of women he was boffing in Belfast.

In yesterday's Sunday Times, we got two self-indulgent broadsheet pages of his Belfast bedpost notches, full of glorious detail about how our hero was paramour to Provos and lothario of Loyalists in the early Seventies.

In fairness, the Colonel didn't have his recognisably pendulous jowls back then, and I've little doubt that to the denizens of Belfast back then, a plummy English accent that wasn't accompanied by battle fatigues and a rifle was a real novelty.

But am I the only person to find his account of love across the barricades more than a tad unlikely?

Let me be frank - some of his Don Juantics simply stretch my disbelief suspenders to breaking point. Let me quote a couple of examples. After being taken back to the Falls Road house of a prominent Provo by his missus, Myers is interrupted in his nocturnal adventure when the aforementioned paramilitary returns unexpectedly. Myers assumes the position (hiding under the bed.)

"And so it proceeded, her nagging and his bluster, until finally he went downstairs to make the tea. I rolled out from under the bed, scooped the remains of my clothes from the floor and without kissing my girl of the night farewell, hopped into the only other bedroom, where the sister was drunkenly slumbering. I had no choice but to slip in beside her and hope she didn’t notice."

The Colonel manages to make his excuses and leave in good journalistic fashion of course, albeit his quick exit means he drives home in his pelt with an accidental armful of the cuckolded Provo's undies.

He manages to get caught in flagrante a second time with 'classically Protestant' Trudy on the other side of town. Her rugby playing hubby returns early from the game, while Myers again assumes the position:

"I leapt nimbly over the bed and lay alongside it, in the small gap between it and the wall beneath the curtained window. But it had taken too long. Erskine had grown impatient and had gone to the front of the house, where he was hauling the unlocked sash window open, just inches above me."

Again, using the quick wit for which he is famed, he makes his escape unharmed by husband.

"This was the second time a husband had nearly caught me, but on different sides of the sectarian divide. With such gallant cross-community endeavours as mine, peace was surely at hand."

Surely indeed, Kevin. What did it take in the end, three more decades? You should have put it about a bit more.

Now, I'm not saying he couldn't have got one or two pity shags. After all, Belfast back then was like that line from Pulp's song 'Common People' - "We drink and smoke and screw because there's nothing else to do."

But does he really expect people to believe all this sleeping with the enemies guff? My arse, he does.

I reckon he's just seeking to take the piss out of a place which he seems to have despised for many years. That or desperately trying to flog his book.