By Staff Reporter

The iReport.ie racist incident reporting system says it logged 37 reports of media racism relating to the recent Irish Times opinion piece on the so-called ‘alt-right’ movement by Nicholas Pell, an American freelance writer living in Ireland.

“We would normally expect one or two racist incident reports daily, and about two or three reports per week relating to media racism,” said Enar Ireland director Shane O’Curry, who added that the extraordinary response from iReport users put media racism figures “off the charts”.

The single-day total amounts to 30 per cent of what the site would expect to log over 12 months, he added.

“The complaints are a reflection of the public opprobrium The Irish Times has provoked in giving a platform to a blogger with far-right sympathies and uncritically furnishing readers with a lexicon devised by the far-right as though it were fact,” said O’Curry. 

“The Irish Times’ clumsy attempts at justifying its editorial line notwithstanding, this is precisely the type of shoddy journalistic standards which facilitates the slide into a ‘post-fact’ world. 

“The question needs to be asked: is this a sign that The Irish Times has ceased to be a newspaper of record?”