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Sat 03 Mar 2007This is not about the North. HonestPresent Tense:A few years ago someone in RTÉ was telling me how delighted the station was with Prime Time's ratings. The current affairs flagship was pulling in big ratings every week, and those jumped even higher for the special investigations. There was just one problem: the North. Any time the story was about Northern Ireland, ratings slumped. From deep within Montrose, you could almost make out the collective click of remote controls as viewers switched over to something else.Around the same time, the Daily Telegraphreported that journalists in ITN had noticed that whenever a bulletin led with news about Northern Ireland, thousands of viewers switched off. It was posing a problem for editors, because putting the North as a lead item was like pulling the plug on a perfectly healthy heart rate.