DUP and Sinn Féin boycotts of Stephen Nolan are cynical, aggressive and a little bit sinister.
The SDLP’s boycott is just stupid.
Mr Nolan’s Radio Ulster show has 150,000 regular listeners and reaches over a fifth of Northern Ireland’s population. The SDLP had this huge audience effectively to itself from mid-2020, as the sole representative of nationalism, after Sinn Féin threw a huff over coverage of the Bobby Storey funeral.
Since last May’s assembly election, the SDLP has led Stormont’s official opposition, a role in which it can speak not just for nationalism but for everyone. There are few better platforms for this than The Nolan Show, even in devolution’s absence – perhaps especially in its absence.
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Yet this March the SDLP also took a huff with Mr Nolan, withdrawing from his programmes just as the council election campaign began.
Who is managing the SDLP’s media strategy? Greta Garbo?
The party’s boycott started when its assembly leader, Matthew O’Toole, was cut off on air while discussing comments by Loyalist Communities Council spokesman David Campbell.
The BBC says Mr Nolan had concerns about “potential legal jeopardy”. It has stood over this decision, which has just been cleared by its top-level internal complaints body.
The SDLP can escalate the matter to Ofcom, but it is complaining about more than its assembly leader being cut off. Mr O’Toole was arguing with Mr Nolan over giving a “media platform” to “certain voices”.
The SDLP has kept this argument going, referring to “the balance of editorial decisions” and platforming “unelected spokespersons”.
In other words, it is the cliched complaint about Jim Allister and Jamie Bryson being on air out of all proportion to their mandates.
This belief is partly mistaken – Bryson rarely appears. Ironically, when hardline unionism is over-represented, it is often due to boycotts by the DUP.
For full disclosure I am an occasional contributor to The Nolan Show, although for reasons understood to have been conveyed to the programme, other figures associated with this paper are not.
The DUP first fell out with Mr Nolan in 2008, after he challenged Iris Robinson over her views on homosexuality. Although the Robinsons later made peace with the broadcaster, other figures in the DUP carry a grudge to this day.
RHI caused the party to fall out with Mr Nolan all over again. A total boycott was observed for almost two years, broken in 2018 by Jeffrey Donaldson. A partial boycott continued for a further three years and Arlene Foster never spoke to Mr Nolan again. Ex-minister Jim Wells spent a lot of time on air, once he was freed to do so by losing the DUP whip.
In 2019, DUP MP
, especially because of the biased way in which we believe the DUP were being singled out... we took the view ‘what is the best way of hurting him?’"
From 2018, Sinn Féin also declined to appear on Nolan’s shows. It would not explain why but denied it was a boycott. It also denied orchestrating a social media campaign for a listener boycott, although party members were involved.
Republican sources briefed the press that Sinn Féin felt Mr Nolan had given too much airtime to hardline unionist critics of the 2018 near-deal on an Irish language act, causing the DUP to pull out at the last minute.
However, the DUP was not available to defend that deal because it was boycotting Mr Nolan over RHI.
If Sinn Féin’s concern about balance was initially sincere, it has since cynically extended it to shun Mr Nolan over the Bobby Storey funeral. It is easier for Sinn Féin to let misperceptions of bias fester than to admit it is in a huff over an incident where it was completely in the wrong.
Erroneous criticism of Mr Nolan still rumbles away online, on sites that are noticed by politicians and journalists but which have far smaller audiences than his programmes. The SDLP has cut itself off to pander to this and to the DUP and Sinn Féin’s self-serving fictions.
Boycotts have done Sinn Féin no electoral harm, of course, nor did getting The Nolan Show to itself for two years do the SDLP much electoral good.
However, the purpose of Mr Nolan’s programmes is holding power to account, not influencing elections. His audience figures are also unharmed. All the current boycotts are achieving is denying nationalism a voice and the opposition a platform to hold power to account.
So others will step in, of course. Broadcasting, like history, is made by those who turn up.
