FF singing out of tune over claims of orchestrated media campaign

NOW that Bertie has issued a statement about his house, together with receipts for bath taps, it’s a good time to examine Fianna Fáil’s take on the whole house controversy.

It was definitely an orchestrated campaign, they suggest, designed to do Bertie and Fianna Fáil damage.

“Orchestrated” usually means what happened when a concert pianist like Peter Tuite (the next Big Thing) takes the stage, as he did at the National Concert Hall last Friday night. A big bunch of disparate personalities playing different instruments came together to support him, under the direction of a conductor, all of them committed to playing the same compositions.

Applied to Bertie’s house, “orchestrated” suggests that a bunch of disparate media personalities in constant mutual competition and employed by rival media outlets, got together under the direction of one conductor to damage the Taoiseach.

The evidence for this proposition is thin.

Let’s look at the sequence of events. The tribunal, quite properly, closed itself down once the election was called, lest its proceedings interfere with the electoral process. However, the fact that about two weeks before the inevitable calling of the election, the same tribunal issued copies of transcripts of evidence to a large number of witnesses, does argue a willful disregard of the Law of Unintended Consequences.

The tribunal knows that, despite the instructions on discretion peppering such transcripts, what always happens is that, within days of their issuance, stories based on them appear in newspapers. The chances that this latest instalment of transcripts would NOT generate such stories were somewhere between slim and none.

One journalist, at the beginning of the election campaign, duly published material from those transcripts sufficiently damaging to Bertie Ahern to cause the PDs to go into emergency session. This, nonetheless, falls short of orchestration. The tribunal gained nothing. The journalist involved gained a scoop and created a media feeding frenzy that, in turn, led to Vincent Browne’s dramatic intervention at a Fianna Fáil press conference devoted to a quite different topic. Now, whether you love or loathe Browne, you must concede that by nature and track record, he is chronically immune to orchestration.

That’s the first point. Now, accepting, for argument’s sake, that the publication of material from Bertie Ahern’s evidence was designed to damage the Taoiseach, the next question is the extent of its real impact on him and his party. Starting with the party.

With the exception of a brief high following the Budget, opinion polls have shown an unsteady but indicative decline in support for Fianna Fáil that, if it continues during the coming week and is borne out by actual voting patterns, could generate the worst general election results in living memory for that party. If that were to happen, it might suit the party to attribute the disaster to the coverage of Bertie’s refurbished house, but that attribution would not be supported by the evidence.

The coverage began last autumn, culminating in the Brian Dobson interview on RTÉ Television. It did Ahern and the party no harm in the opinion polls. Rather the reverse. As Pat Rabbitte ruefully observed, Rabbitte had taken no money from anybody, yet his opinion poll ratings went down as a result of the Taoiseach receiving a dig-out from his pals.

The bounce Bertie got from the autumn controversy effectively silenced a section of the potential anti-Fianna Fáil orchestra. The leader of the Opposition and the leader of the Labour Party, deciding that discretion was the better part of valour, took a vow of silence on Bertie’s bath taps. Trevor Sargent continued to articulate his concerns, but not even the most virulent Fianna Fáil hater of the Green leader would see him as part of an orchestrated campaign.

Fast-forward to this month, and it can be seen that the clustering of media interest around the issue in the first week of the campaign was caused by a number of factors, not least of which was the monumental lack of creativity in, or significant difference between, the policies adduced by the big power blocks. The press conferences to present policy documents had the excitement of slowly setting cement.

Journalists (apart from the reporters lucky enough to be out in the sunshine following the Opposition leaders) dealt with the policies, but — like someone who for a whole day cannot shake a tune they’ve heard early in the morning — kept being drawn back to the one big controversy. In musical terms, it wasn’t so much that they all wanted to sing off the same hymn sheet as that none of them wanted to be caught singing off the WRONG hymn sheet. If the Taoiseach was going to be revealed as a money-laundering crook, no journalist could afford not to be in on the revelation.

The concept of covert orchestration against one’s own party is not, of course, confined to Fianna Fáil. It happens within every party during election campaigns. Elizabeth Kubler-Ross identified a series of phases through which most terminally-ill people tend to progress: denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance. That sequence applies to more challenges than approaching death. Political parties whose showing in the opinion polls is poor go through their own version of it during a campaign.

Which is not to suggest that the parties favoured by the opinion polls don’t have their own predictable panic pattern. They do.

That pattern is characterised, among the candidates, by a) conviction that HQ favours the other candidate on the ticket, b) isn’t getting the message out and c) doesn’t know its arse from its elbow.

At HQ, it’s characterised by a) fury at individual candidates who, to save their own seat, go off message and start attacking their colleagues, b) rage at media, c) conspiracy theories ascribing hidden affiliations to any journalist who writes even the mildest critical story about their campaign.

Notwithstanding all evidence to the contrary, however, Fianna Fáil continues to show fidelity to its theory of an orchestrated campaign against Bertie run by politically motivated, satanically clever media conspirators.

Which brings us to the final evidence against such a campaign. Its lousy timing.

Because it happened so early in the campaign, it dominated the first week’s coverage, and — when Bertie was refusing to answer questions — looked as if it would crumple him. It actually ended up doing more damage to the Progressive Democrats and may also have squeezed the Greens in terms of coverage. It went into enough detail to confuse and bore the general public while giving the Taoiseach time to consider his options, prepare his documentation and time its publication.

How effective his choices will turn out to be is in the lap of the gods.