Why the media elected to get personal

DAVID Norris was in manic form. He leapt from voter to shopper, pressing his bumptious charm on everybody.

It was October 6, and Norris was canvassing The Square shopping centre in Tallaght.

Over the previous 24 hours, two opinion polls revealed that Norris’s vote was in danger of collapsing. The results came after a week in which he was mired in controversy. He was refusing to publish letters he had written 15 years previously to Israeli judicial and government figures, pleading clemency for his former partner, who had been convicted of statutory rape.

Whenever a voter expressed admiration for him on the canvas in question, or pledged a vote, Norris grabbed the reporters and instructed them to take note. Norris and his team felt that his poor polls were down to unfair treatment in the media.

Norris wouldn’t have been alone there. With the possible exception of Michael D Higgins, all of the candidates must have felt the same at one point or another during the campaign. Much of that analysis can be attributed to viewing the media through a subjective lens.

What can be said without fear of contradiction is that the media had a major influence on the election, far more than has been the case for any election in recent years. Despite the rise of cyberspace media, the major impact came through broadcast and newsprint.

The television debates all scored high in viewing figures. Last Monday’s Frontline will probably go down in history as a seminal TV election event.

In print, the impact has been through revelations about the candidates and analysis of those revelations. The narrative of the campaign was largely dictated by news stories based on the background of the various candidates.

For instance, in the polls referred to above on October 5 and 6, Sean Gallagher broke away from the pack, his support rising from 10% to 20%.

At the same time, the figures for David Norris and Mary Davis plummeted. As with Norris, Davis had endured a torrid week of revelations. She had been labelled a “quango queen” because she sat on several state boards. Her income from those boards, as well as private sector boards and the Special Olympics, was all published with the type of breathless headlines usually reserved for the scoop of the year.

One analysis of the figures could conclude that those previously plumping for Norris and Davis drifted away in the face of the controversies and moved to Gallagher. There had been little about Gallagher in the media, simply because few regarded him as a serious contender.

His leap in the polls gave him huge momentum, which he played to its full advantage. If the stories about Norris and Davis had not emerged when they had, Gallagher might never have found himself in the commanding lead that he eventually carved out.

It’s not for a journalist who covered the campaigns to analyse how fair or appropriate was the media coverage. But the context of both the election and the media environment should be taken into account in any such analysis.

There were seven candidates in the election, only two of whom — Gay Mitchell and Michael D Higgins — were established politicians in this state.

Not much was known about the other five. In an election which is policy-free — by dint of the office — character and personality come to the fore.

And so backgrounds were excavated.

Take Dana. The 2008 court case in the US involving her and her siblings was about money for singing. At issue was Dana’s character. The judge cast aspersions on the evidence of all the siblings. There was an allegation that Dana had attempted to hide her US citizenship during the last election campaign in 1997. These issues demanded attention.

Once the case was opened, it was only a matter of time before the allegations of sexual abuse came out. It may not have been appropriate, but in today’s media world, where the editorial gatekeepers of old no longer control the flow, it was inevitable.

Martin McGuinness said he was unfairly treated. He said that his past was of interest only to the media. He was propagating what many in this country believe to be a major lie about his activities for 30 years and he wanted everybody to ignore it. In such circumstances, the tactics deployed by broadcasters Vincent Browne and Miriam O’Callaghan were legitimate.

When David Norris refused to publish the letters noted above, it was inevitable that elements of the media would begin raking over his past with a fine-tooth comb. He may have justification in decrying some of his treatment, but he brought much of the woe on his own head.

Mary Davis was unlucky with timing. The revelations about her role in multiple boards would have had little impact at any other time in the state’s history.

In the wake of the economic collapse, anybody garnering large sums of public money is regarded coolly by the public. State boards have been shown to be stuffed with political appointees.

Davis can reasonably claim that her appointments were attributable to her role in the Special Olympics, but she effectively got caught in the crossfire of a hyperactive media trying to score hits with the public mood.

Her case does highlight one shortcoming in the media during the last campaign. There was a parity of outrage, with every story given the same breathless headlines. In media terms, it was equally damning to be a member of a state board, Fianna Fáil or the IRA.

Sean Gallagher may well claim he was filleted by the media. He can’t have any complaints. He stood on a dual platform of an Independent and an evangelical entrepreneur. The stories that came out about him were largely in relation to his ties to Fianna Fáil and his business. In both cases, all was not as it had seemed from the impression given by the candidate. He was ambushed by McGuinness on last Monday’s Frontline, but that’s all part of the cut and thrust of politics.

It could well be argued that too much effort and space was given to the candidates’ backgrounds, and not a lot to what each of them intended bringing to the job.

Look at the speeches and declarations of the candidates and you will see that they intended bringing a lot of clichés and unattainable promises. There was precious little to distinguish their visions.

McGuinness did pledge to take only the average industrial wage, but that was overshadowed by his past. Gallagher did offer a vision in which the President might be deployed as a surrogate minister for jobs, but he toned it down as his star rose in the polls. Apart from that, there was precious little beyond leadership, change, independence, standing with the people, blah, blah, fill in the blank cliches yourself.

Whatever about the vision stuff for the presidency, there may be some validity in claims that the media in general did not pay enough attention to the two referenda.

This columnist, for one, would have to hold his hands up on that charge.