https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/grip ... -6k7fchws3It was after the Repeal referendum campaign of 2018 that John McGuirk decided to launch Gript, a right-wing news service. He reckoned the tone of the media coverage had pushed people towards removing the ban on abortion.
“I felt that over the course of the campaign the media in Ireland had taken a collective view,” he says. “That referendum had been lost 15 years before it was run. Politics has always been downstream of culture. I felt we needed to create a space that would show people there is an alternative viewpoint on a range of issues that just doesn’t get an airing in the mainstream press.”
That’s what Gript does, not just on abortion, but on climate change, vaccines, lockdowns and economics. It has broken some decent stories too, such as revealing a series of tweets that Fianna Fail’s Lorraine Clifford-Lee posted in 2011-12 in which she said nasty stuff about Travellers and a Brazilian immigrant. They got a cache of emails and WhatsApp messages from within the Independent Scientific Advisory Group that suggested the zero-Covid advocacy group was saying different stuff in private to what it was saying in public. More recently, Gript revealed how much Kinzen, a media tech start-up founded by Mark Little and Aine Kerr, has been paid by the state to “combat misinformation” about Covid.
Not that Gript, or its chief reporter, Gary Kavanagh, ever get much credit. “The challenge for us is reputational,” McGuirk admits. “There is a significant part of Irish society which does not believe we are respectable people. We have well-known people writing for us who insist on using a pseudonym. Our aim is to grow the audience and demonstrate we are closer to the mainstream than the extreme.”
In the past five or ten years each of the state's main media outlets, the IT, Examiner and Indo in particular, all largely sing off the same hymn sheet. Gript does offer something different and will tackle issues that the broader media shy away from, and as Burns states above, have broken some decent stories. They also clearly approach things from a centre-right social conservative position, something which is in marked contrast to most other outlets. Despite the hysterical hand-wringing from some quarters (strange how when some decry Gript they rarely seem to be able to actually point to any specific articles, rather it's a general "they are bad people") I think a diverse media is a good thing, and Gript has made a contribution in that regard. Does this mean that Gript are necessarily brilliant or that I personally would be paying for premium content? Of course not, but our society would suffer if perspectives that a considerable amount of people have are not aired in the media.
