Sinead’s lousy treatment at hands of media a real cause for concern

WHOEVER gets to be health minister in the reshuffle should pay attention to Sinead O’Connor. Her proposal for a national de-lousing day has a lot going for it.

A single day devoted to exterminating head lice would be a great improvement on individual parents being mortified by periodic “your offspring is lousy” notes from the local school. Even when parents obediently pour stinky chemicals on said offspring, half the time, re-infestation happens a few months later.

A national de-lousing day could interrupt the life-cycle of the louse and stop its onward crawl. Instead of car-free day (which, I’m convinced, causes cars to breed like rabbits and come out to park on motorways) we could have a national day that actually achieved something.

I can’t see a down side to it. If she had proposed exterminating ladybirds, the designer insects, it would be a different kettle of pesticide. Ladybirds are the best-dressed insects around. Ladybirds are the dolphins of insect life. Mention ladybirds and everybody goes “ahhh.” Nobody goes “ahhh” about head lice. They go “yuk”.

The problem was not the proposal. The problem was the proposer. Because of who she was, the evening paper headline called her plan “wacky” and then re-hashed her unusual history to date. This led to Sinead O’Connor running an impassioned full-page advertisement in the Irish Examiner last Friday, picked up by newspapers all over Britain, which should be a cut-out-and-keep for third level teachers of journalism or media studies as a demonstration of the personal consequences of media coverage.

Coherent and stylish, the ad is not. Emotionally powerful, it surely is. It knocks a hole in the widespread assumption that if you’re rich, talented, beautiful, successful and opinionated, you’re immune to media slings and arrows.

The singer’s ad is an important reminder that many showbiz stars are often drawn from such damaging backgrounds that their hunger for fame derives from an emotional neediness which, in turn, makes them more, not less vulnerable to attack.

As does another common trait, summed up with simplicity in O’Connor’s ad, where she says “I grew up in public.” Other than Shirley Temple, it’s difficult to name stars who, having grown up in public, managed to become integrated adults. It’s dead easy to name those who didn’t. Starting with Michael Jackson. Moving on to Macauley Culkin. Going back to Lisa Minelli and her mother.

The problem with growing up in full glare of media is that what media says about you becomes your self-definition. You may hate it, but you believe it. Or worse, you believe everybody ELSE believes it.

The biggest and most naive consumers of media are media people. They read each other all the time, whether they be political correspondents or singers or TV presenters. They take their own vital signs each day by scanning their own coverage. They experience any printed criticism, picked up by radio programmes, as an irrefutable megaphone announcement of their personal worthlessness and lack of a future.

As Sinead O’Connor’s advertisement underlines, for the famous individual, repeated bad coverage can outweigh any good coverage, any market triumphs, any amount of affection from fans.

It’s disproportionate. As disproportionate as an anorexic looking at their skeletal self in the mirror and seeing obesity.

Here’s why it’s disproportionate. Let’s say I make a nasty crack at you in this column this morning. You’re shrivelled by the belief that everybody’s read it, accepted it and is repeating it to everybody else.

The objective reality, however, is that a swatch of benighted people in this country don’t read the Irish Examiner (they’ll learn).What’s worse, a fair swatch of the ones who DO take it consume sections like news and sport and don’t read me at all (sob). Of those who DO read the swipe I take at you, some will dismiss it at source because they like you and they don’t like me. Finally, by tomorrow, EVERYBODY except you and my mother will have forgotten what I wrote, and the paper currently in your hands will be under two bales of briquettes protecting the carpet in the boot of your car.

Yet someone as famous and successful as Sinead O’Connor clearly feels destroyed by clusters of negative coverage. She feels singled out, pursued, pilloried.

Of course, she undoubtedly has had much harsh coverage, some of it provoked by the kind of actions which, while perhaps driven by the best of intentions, created a context of impatience and dismissal. Bluntly, if you don’t want to be portrayed as a head-banger, it helps if you don’t behave like a head-banger.

But her despair is still disproportionate, given that she’s 38, beautiful, talented, a mother and a much-loved singer.

The disproportion may come from childhood abuse. But it also demonstrates the need for anybody threatened with fame to get a grasp of how the media machine operates before they find themselves in the middle of the hot cycle.

“Ye [in media] are causing an awful lot of real pain to real people whom you think of as mere pieces of paper. Because ye have not met these people and ever sat with them. Nor walked a mile in their shoes,” O’Connor writes.

That’s true. Fame turns the famous into a commodity. Time-pressure and competition force journalists to summarise and stereotype: “She’s the one who tore up the pope’s picture and thinks she’s a priest.” Finding yourself so summed-up and stereotyped is unnerving to people have not been stress-inoculated against this possibility.

It happens constantly in politics. Last year, for example, Enda Kenny was a no-hoper and Pat Rabbitte a witty winner. This week, Kenny’s a man of judgement and strategy and Rabbitte (in O’Connor’s phrase) is “getting boxed”.

None of which is to suggest that all Sinead O’Connor needs to do is laugh off what’s happened to her. Or take the blame for all of it. Or - as she did towards the end of the ad - promise, with some pathos, that “I’ll behave” when she is self-evidently dyslexic about what counts as normal behaviour.

Her ad raises legitimate questions for media to address - and we should address them.

But it raises more immediate concerns about its writer. Disproportionate despair is one of those concerns. The other is mis-reading cues from people who care about her.

Sinead speaks warmly of the way Gay Byrne allowed people to tell their stories. In his interview with her, after her ‘ordination,’ he did more than that. He told her, with great kindness and heavy emphasis, that she should take care of herself.

She should. And not in media.