Who's doing the Spinning?

Sunday Business Post by Paul Allen.

Did you survive St Patrick’s Day? Well if you did, count yourself lucky. Riot fever was rampant in the national media after the events that marred Dublin city a number of weeks ago, suggesting our streets could once again resemble a war zone.

‘‘Batten down the hatches - it’s St Patrick’s Day,” cried Wednesday’s Irish Independent, as the media tried to stir up some good old-fashioned hysteria.

Bird flu panic has been momentarily sidelined as the current obsession with crime and lawlessness, post the O’Connell Street riots, grips the media.

And it seems more than ever our newspapers and broadcasters grab a story, run with it and squeeze it out of all proportion.

But is this because, in a media-saturated environment, the media is running out of ideas?

Take the Daily Star’s front-page headline on February 22 - ‘‘Bertie’s Booze Boast’’. The story went on to tell how ‘‘8-pints Ahern’’ was ‘‘left red-faced’’ after commenting he could ‘‘drink a gallon of Bass’’.

It was only after turning to page four the reader realised that these quotes were taken from an interview with the Taoiseach way back in 1986.

Now that was a story that took awhile to percolate to the front pages - 20 years to be precise.

Public relations professionals have been vilified ‘‘as spin doctors’’ by the press here and in Britain. None more so then my dear friend Alastair Campbell. But it seems now as if it’s the media itself that has become the spin doctor extraordinaire.

The tabloids have recently gone into a frenzy over the likely killers of Rachel O’Reilly. Trial by media seems to be a growing trend and now appears almost as an Irish Olympic sport. Innocent until proven guilty now seems an old-fashioned concept.

The pressure of 24-hour news, reporting and breaking stories seems to have resulted in the rules surrounding hard facts and solid stories becoming, at best, blurred and, at worst, totally abandoned. Indeed, it is now more credible than ever to ask - can we believe what we read or hear in the media?

The scurrilous coverage surrounding Liam Lawlor’s death in Moscow during the summer was rightly described by the Taoiseach as part of a race to the bottom.

Many of the Sunday newspapers tried to outdo each other with salacious stories that had little, if any, bearing on the truth.

But this was not an isolated incident. In recent times we have reached unquestionable levels of madness in our media.

During February we witnessed the media spin yet another story that seemed to have little if any relevance to the state of the nation. The bizarre tale of Sean Haughey and his failure to land the post of junior minister at the Department of Transport suddenly became big news.

Political writers seemed to have convinced themselves that Haughey was a natural for the job and showed their outrage by whipping up a political storm.

Yes folks, the position of junior minister suddenly seemed like a position second only in importance to the job of the Taoiseach itself. Here’s a little quiz: turn to the person nearest you and ask them to name two junior ministers. Yes, as you might have guessed, not quite such a high profile position after all - but this did not deter the media.

This ‘manufactured’ story, which had clearly no foundation, quickly took flight. Some journalists sought to outdo other political writers, adding more sensational twists and turns than an Agatha Christie novel.

In all the outrage and coverage, it was interesting to note that no tangible evidence as to why Haughey so deserved the position was put forward. And it was not just newspapers, but our national broadcaster that propagated this non-story.

So was it a case of hurt media egos spinning a story because they got their predictions wrong on who was going to get the job? Or maybe it was all because the public truly cared that Haughey failed to land this ‘junior’ ministerial position? You decide.

But while you ponder the rights and wrongs, there is a bigger picture. In the modern media industry, the public relations industry constantly gets lambasted, sometimes rightly, but more often wrongly, for its role in so-called spinning.

But rather than constantly pointing the finger of blame at public relations, ask yourself who the real spinners in today’s ultra-competitive media world are.

The answer is more complex than you might imagine.