Terry Prone: Ryan Tubridy needed to own his faux pas, but he totally missed the point

RTÉ presenter needs to demonstrate to his listeners that he is sorry for the slithery secrecy of taking a lot of money 

Ryan Tubridy ‘shirting up’ to get his picture taken demonstrates a complete failure to understand media behaviour. Picture: Gareth Chaney

If you go on the Six One news, being liked by David McCullough shouldn’t be your objective. No, let’s put that more firmly. It cannot and must not be your objective. The person to reach, inform, and influence is the viewer. Any deflection from that wastes taxpayer money and viewer time.

Someone needs to tell this to Adrian Lynch, the new deputy director general of RTÉ.

Because Lynch came home from his travels last week, got promoted, arrived at the news studio wearing a cute lapelled cardigan, and got personal with McCullough.

He called him David as frequently as if they were old pals having a pint. This broke one of the most basic rules in media training: Don’t use the interviewer’s first name more than once.

That first-name advice is not a trick or a tip. It is based on an appreciation of the key relationship implicit in any interview. The interviewer is a conduit, not a companion, a pipeline, not a pal.

The person at home watching is the priority, and you have a duty — particularly if you are a public servant — to work out in advance how much the viewer at home knows and what they feel about the issue you’re on to address.

You further should set out to prepare to add to their information level and confirm or change their attitude. It’s not just that you have rights in a TV studio.

You have responsibilities. At the end of any appearance, you should judge your performance not on how “punchy” you were, but on proven delivery of what you know the audience needs.

The RTÉ man did none of this. He twirled in his chair like a dreidel while delivering weirdly affirming you’re-doing-well murmurs throughout several of McCullough’s queries, which inevitably suggested a relative positioning of him and McCullough as boss and subordinate, which may be corporately accurate, but doesn’t apply in the studio.

Arrogance

In the studio, McCullough’s the boss, and it’s inappropriately arrogant for an interviewee to be approving particular questions he’s asking. Interviewees should stay on their own side of the net and concentrate on what they’re there for.

It is at this point that the fairminded reader will go “Ah, here, the guy in the cardi isn’t used to television. It was his first outing”. True. 

But the guy in the cardi personifies a couple of wider truths. 1) That boards/top management in public service Ireland rarely take crisis management training. 2) That people working in media rarely understand media.

The first is a failure to address corporate risk. The second is a failure to acknowledge one’s own limitations.

Ryan Tubridy’s communication since this scandal broke has been pocked with ill-judged actions, starting with the timing of his first statement. It was issued too quickly and had an aggressive tonal commonality with Noel Kelly’s almost simultaneous statement.

It effectively proposed that the controversy had nothing to do with Tubridy, who was just an innocent bystander into whose bank account chunks of currency landed, unnoticed and unexplained. It missed the point. Pure and simple, it missed the point.

That nearly always happens to the unprepared in a crisis. Just as bleeding tends to be an immediate consequence of a stabbing, the immediate consequence of controversy is the imperative to put out a statement.

This should be but never is resisted. Until you have your content ducks in a row, until you have worked out every implication of every aspect of whatever it is that you’re accused of, no statement should issue.

But even though Tubridy has seen countless examples of the premature statement biting its issuer in the ass like the dingo on the Australian beach, off he went and issued a statement.

The inadequacy of the first statement was speedily underlined by the issuance of a second statement, which was an improvement (in style) that made things worse.

Here’s the issue: Tubridy took a pay cut, along with other RTÉ staff and contractors. He talked about this publicly, indicating his willingness to take one for the team. What nobody knew was that he was getting secret payments in each of five years that the rest of the staff weren’t getting.

That’s it. It wasn’t illegal. But it was secret and — by RTÉ’s own admission — betrayed the trust of the viewer. 

In other words, the viewer thought better of Ryan because of his public willingness to take a pay cut, but the viewer didn’t know that at the same time, he was getting the salary of two Late, Late researchers into his back pocket, nudge nudge, wink wink, mind you, I’m sayin’ nothin’.

Neither of Ryan’s statements addressed that issue. It was like having a bad back itch, asking your partner to scratch it, and them scarifying you neck to waist and missing the crucial bit.

Arts Minister Catherine Martin following her meeting with RTE board chairwoman Siun Ni Raghallaigh at the weekend.

Same thing with Dee Forbes’ statement, which asserted that she was working to RTÉ’s benefit. Great. That’s what she’s paid for. Again, not the issue.

The issue is, did she authorise payments to Ryan that slid around RTÉ’s orthodox compensation systems without telling her executive board or her governing Board? Forbes, too, scratched an itch nobody had.

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It was like a free-range egg-laying contest, the way statements popped out last week. Every time the adrenalin rush looked like it had run its course, another news bulletin based on an emerging statement gave it a jolt and kept it out of the half-life of promised Oireachtas committee appearances.

And then, as the icing on this cake, Ryan shirted up and had his photograph taken. Again, this demonstrates a complete failure to understand media behaviour.

Ryan may have thought that, having effectively been a prisoner in his own home (and for this there can be some sympathy) by snappers for several days, he could satisfy the whole lot of them by going out in his summery shirt and posing. He may also have believed this would help dampen down the story. Uh, uh.

Getting a bunch of almost identical shots is not going to make photographers happy. It’s certainly not going to make them go away when interest in the story is at its height.

Tubridy managed to reignite the whole thing. Those working on Sunday newspapers will have been thrilled to see the saga cresting on the front pages on Saturday. What a set up…

His second statement struck a plaintive note about being off the air. He said he loved his programme. Of course he does. 

But he’s still missing the point. If he’s to continue to do the show, what he needs to demonstrate is that he loves his listeners and his colleagues and is sorry for the slithery secrecy of him taking a lot of money.

If he continues his current disastrous communications pattern, while RTÉ may put him back on the air, him simply walking through the RTÉ canteen will make the Charge of the Light Brigade look easy.