This day last week I shared a platform with Gerry Adams at the Ennis book festival. Arriving slightly late, he explained he’d been finalising the Sinn Fein response to the killing of two soldiers in Northern Ireland the previous night. He’d been delayed by inability to access the internet where he was staying.

Although the statement was issued before 11am, the Sinn Fein president was bothered by the delay. National news bulletins and breaking news websites had gone out without input from the party. While SF silence might not be construed as consent to the killings, it would not be positively interpreted by media outlets always hungry for objects of antipathy. Accordingly, speed was imperative.

I was struck by the changing nature of the speed demand, having decades earlier witnessed the bombing of Nassau Street. After talking to people who’d been closest to the blast, I went to the newspaper offices where I worked, told the duty editor what I'd seen, and started to write. Every few minutes a copy boy tore off what I’d typed and ran to a typesetter with it. Speed was of the essence if the story was to make the following morning’s first edition.

But it was a different concept of speed to the current one. It assumed that TV news bulletins that night would have, at best, footage of damaged buildings and victims being evacuated, not shots of the explosion itself. It assumed that people would tune in to only one radio station, RTE, because no others existed. It assumed that the main deliverer of the story would be the following morning’s newspapers. Above all, it assumed a 24-hour news cycle.

These days, the pressure is to meet the next hour’s radio news bulletin or to get information onto a website. A bombing on Nassau Street today would be captured on an iPhone and uploaded for broadcast within minutes. A journalist can write a feature into a BlackBerry wherever they happen to be, and have it on their editor’s desk computer half a minute later.

During the frenzy about the Anglo 10 list, journalists found themselves having to choose between talking to the latest rumour-peddler or pulling the phone away from their ear to read the texts and emails popping onscreen about the same issue.

The increasing speed and variety of media can paralyse or empower. An under-fire politician can squelch the attacker by fast response. Remember what happened during the US presidential election when the Clinton campaign came up with a TV ad showing children in bed, with a voice-over to the effect that when your kids are asleep at 3am and an international crisis erupts who do you want to answer the phone?

Cut to shot of Hillary, all calm, motherly and stateswomanlike. Implication: our girl’s up to here in foreign-policy experience, whereas that lad Obama has none at all. Your kids could be dead under their duvets before he’d work out what to do.

The Obama camp saw red; they also saw an opportunity. The Clinton ad aired at breakfast time. By noon, the Obama organisation had produced a rebuttal TV ad, transmitted it to broadcasting stations and newsrooms around America, and uploaded it to websites frequented by political nerds.

Their speed and professionalism took the legs from under the original ad, prompting commentators to infer that No Drama Obama would be precisely the man you’d want answering the phone at 3am since he was demonstrably likely to orchestrate a smart, speedy, effective response.

The problem about the increased speed and variety of media, according to Tony Blair, is that a supercharged context is created in which heat and impact are valued above content; attack outweighs exposition; and politicians, instead of acting as legislators, are forced to spend more and more of their time mounting defences against incoming media missiles.

The end result of the hunger of the media beast, he suggested in a speech delivered as he left office, is that the relationship between the political process and journalism is now in serious need of repair. “The damage saps confidence and self-belief,” Blair said. “It reduces our capacity to make the right decisions, in the right spirit, for our future.”

The media, of course, immediately accused the exiting British prime minister of shooting the messenger . . . while doing the same thing themselves. The significance of Blair’s observation was discounted as spin from an unequalled media-manipulator who could no longer control information conduits.

However, Howard Rosenberg and Charles S Feldman, two American journalists, were sufficiently exercised about Blair’s thesis to use it as the starting point of their recently-published book, No Time to Think. “Some of his remarks had bulls-eyed a deserving target,” they wrote. “In his crosshairs — transcending nations’ borders, partisan rhetoric, and the usual back-and-forth between the outgoing Blair and his critics — was something that continues to beguile and bedevil US media at least as much as it does their counterparts on the other side of the Atlantic. That something is speed. Reckless speed.”

The speed demanded of journalists gives new meaning to Mark Twain’s comment that a lie can be halfway around the world before the truth has its boots on. Consider the case of the judge who didn’t stand up quickly.

“ABC News legal reporter Jan Crawford Greenburg speculated in her blog that US Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg was ready for retirement after she was seen taking a long time rising from her seat after a hearing,” Rosenberg and Feldman write. “That thesis hurtled through the blogosphere before New York Times reporter Linda Greenhouse put it to rest, reporting that Ginsburg had gotten up slowly because she couldn’t find a shoe she had kicked under the table.”

Professional journalists — such as Greenburg — pressured by the requirement to feed the gaping maw of multiple outlets, do make mistakes. They consciously walk a daily line of tension between urgency and accuracy. The so-called “citizen journalists”, who have electrified the grapevine of gossip, rumour and opinion, have no such fears. Their uneven contribution adds to the speed and pressure of news gathering and selection.

The fact that these new speed-freaks have become hero figures was put in context by Don Hewett, an American current affairs TV producer, quoted in No Time to Think. “Yeah, I’m for [citizen journalism],” he said. “And I’m for citizen brain surgery, too.”

terry.prone@sunday-times.ie

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