The Chosen One for the Áras

AND on the seventh day, whilst God resteth, mischievous cherubs created the mass audience news media in TV, radio, print and Twitter, and they did seek out The Chosen One. They then doth anoint and smear and tarnish their Chosen One in an unending odyssey to obtain greater audiences and hence advertising revenue.
By the time you read this, the news and media-fuelled Irish Presidential race rollercoaster will have done another turn, and possibly another passenger will have been thrown to the waiting wolf pack of columnists, pundits, chat show hosts and talk radio presenters. Or maybe a new face is being urged to get on board. We just don’t know.
As ‘An Phoblacht’ goes to print, anxious ‘news’ workers are poised at keyboards, cameras and microphones, hoping to find new ways to hype the non-story that was Gay Byrne’s ‘will he or won’t’ he run for the Irish Presidency. Now that he is not running, one wonders what other celebrity names will be thrown up by the press pack.
Byrne went through the predictable hoops of, ‘Really, little old me?’ and ‘It would be an honour’ and then ‘Only as an Independent, to ‘Consulting with my family and friends’ and now ‘Overwhelmed by support and good wishes’ but not running.
Why is this happening? One simple answer is in the heady mix of media and political power.
The Irish Presidency might be sold as a minor political role (you are not an Obama or Sarkozy and you don’t legislate) but in a society where media pundits are only too willing to tell us that we need a unifying, symbolic leader the Presidency is an important prize in an electoral landscape still reeling from the seismic changes brought about last February.
If one theme is consistent across media, radio, TV, online and social media it is that we love games. The media rights to the Premiership, Champions League, All-Ireland GAA and Rugby World Cup broadcasts cost money, lots of it, but elections are free-to-air.
What if you had a competition with free-to-air rights and a tangible interested audience where the candidates carry the costs? And so we have right now a pseudo race, a media-influenced nomination process. And last February’s Leinster House election showed we definitely have a volatile audience.
So it’s a case of ‘Let the games begin’ and with the current quality of coverage it doesn’t look like we will have much more than an ‘X-Factor’ run-off at this stage.
On the ‘X-Factor’ theme, Louis Walsh entered the fray to pronounce that “Gaybo has the X-Factor. I’d love him to get the gig.” The ‘Daily Star’ had Walsh’s view splashed across the front and inside pages on 8th August, particularly liking the “Gay would kick Áras” headline. Classy.
Byrne’s initial late run bid began with an interview on the Ryan Tubridy radio show and took legs with a phone-in poll on 4fm (which has a listenership of 3% in the multicity area it serves, according to the most recent Ipsos MRBI Joint National Listenership figures).
On 8th August, a second ‘poll’ conducted by 4FM showed a 58% support for Byrne as President except for the small detail that even though 2,735 votes were texted in, it isn’t a poll — it has no methodology and is representative of nothing. The same goes for the RTÉ Joe Duffy ‘Liveline’ ‘polls’.
Also in the voodoo poll business is the ‘Sunday Independent’, which gave substantial positive coverage to the David Norris campaign. However, with their first-choice candidate nobbled, ‘Sindo’  scribes moved on to Gay Byrne; what will they do now?
Their poll of 500 people rung randomly had Byrne at 34% support. Again, this is not a statistically valid poll. But it didn’t stop the ‘Independent’ from having five pictures of Byrne peppered throughout the paper and headlines like “Gay Byrne gets the Norris Vote”, “Polls show former ‘Late Late Show’ host is preferred People’s President”.
‘The Sunday Times’ on 7th August had over two pages of articles, while the ‘Mail on Sunday’ – with a front-page headline of “FF begs Gaybo to stand for Presidency”– had nine pages of coverage.
The ‘Sunday Independent’ voodoo poll was carried in the ‘Herald’, ‘Observer’, ‘Examiner’, radio stations too numerous to mention, and shows the power the news media have in hyping one candidate to the detriment of others.
The tsunami in coverage for Gay Byrne has drowned undercurrents concerning a late dash by Dana, Olivia O’Leary or even Mary Hanaffin. A Red C ‘real poll’ for Paddy Power on 11th August had Byrne at 28% but surely now Fianna Fáil – if it risks one of its own running – will select Munster MEP Brian Crowley, whom the Red C/Paddy Power poll had at 13%.
The missing ingredient in all of this media coverage is the rights of the voter. They play no role in selecting the candidates and are mere spectators to the headline-chasing farce being played out across the news media.
Something is wrong when the unelected, privately-owned and unaccountable news media of Associated Newspapers, News Corp and Independent News and Media (not to mention the state-owned RTÉ) can exert such a huge influence over how this race is shaping up. It gives a new meaning to the term “bad news day”.