MEDIA & MARKETING: From analogue farewells to Olympic torch welcomes, the media was kept busy with the surreal in 2012
Notwithstanding the fine efforts of RTÉ’s Irish Pictorial Weekly, satirists had a hard time in 2012, for the simple reason that reality was doing such a good job.
“You couldn’t make it up!” newspapers used to be fond of declaring in professional amazement. This year, they didn’t have to. Inkgate, Pastygate, Gategate. The continuing adventures of Boris Johnson, Mitt Romney and Mick Wallace. The plot of Homeland. Ciara Quinn’s wedding cake.
It was hard to know what was real, what was tedious hoax, what was elaborate wheeze and what was just Prince Harry being Prince Harry.
Did I really just watch a 40ft Voldemort puppet do battle in the Olympic Stadium with an aerial deployment of Mary Poppinses? Did Rupert Murdoch genuinely refer to hacking victims Charlotte Church and former policewoman Jacqui Hames as “scumbag celebrities”? Did MailOnline just use the phrase “quasi-masonic nexus” in a headline?
LOL FAIL OMG WTF. . . and those were just the reader response buttons on BuzzFeed.
It’s little wonder, then, with so much weirdness everywhere, that the media industry itself was a cacophony of craziness; a ventilation shaft of strange happenings.
From the Fox News US election coverage, dubbed “avalanche on bulls**t mountain” by Jon Stewart, to the crushing lack of self-awareness exhibited by Samantha “women hate me because I’m beautiful” Brick, the media lieutenants of 2012 seemed happy to spend as much time trolling for attention as they were getting on with the things that count.
But as this run-down of 12 of 2012’s most curious media moments suggests, there’s the gloriously rough-around-the-edges, and then there are things that are just, well, odd.
1 Psychic Flathan hits TV3 screens . . . and it’s all the fault of Government broadcasting policy
With “an accent that is part Zsa Zsa Gabor, part eating-something-really-hot” (copyright: Shane Hegarty), Flathan was the star performer in TV3 infomercial slot Psychic Readings Live, on which he predicted the future for premium rate callers with all the accuracy of a Daily Express weather headline.
There wasn’t long to wait between the psychics’ June debut and their destiny as the subject of multiple upheld complaints to the Broadcasting Authority of Ireland, and by the end of 2012, their reign of graveyard-slot telly was over. But why was this tarot-fest on screen at all? “It’s a tough market and we have to monetise our business any way we can,” said TV3 chief executive David McRedmond. “We would love to do everything we can to have higher quality programming, but in the middle of a recession, we don’t have the luxury RTÉ has to run up a deficit.”
2 Pat Rabbitte gives analogue TV viewers a parting image
Wednesday, October 24th, RTÉ – the closing minutes of the analogue television era. Enter Pat Rabbitte, Minister for Communications, with one final contribution to make. RTÉ presenter Mary Kennedy had, seconds previously, reminisced about a girlhood spent tweaking the “rabbit’s ears” – in other words, the indoor aerial – on her family’s television. Cue Rabbitte: “Thank you very much, Mary, for that introduction, and, eh, you can tweak my ears any time.” Get a good mental picture, as Mrs Doyle would say. Indeed, if you hadn’t already upgraded to digital, mental pictures were all you had left once RTÉ ambassador Miriam O’Callaghan did the switchover honours.
3 Facebook stock market razzmatazz makes CNBC a must-watch
May 18th was a big day for business news channel CNBC – the $16 billion initial public offering (IPO) of social media's wayward teenager, Facebook, had arrived. Its shares would be "muppet bait", predicted Henry Blodget of BusinessInsider.com, who believed the Nasdaq stock listing was less of an investment opportunity than it was a media event.
And what a media event it was. Over at Facebook’s headquarters in Menlo Park, California, they were cheering and whooping like, er, billionaires. Soon after, frenzied CNBC pundits were picking over the “amateur hour” that delayed trading and then there was that awkward moment when the shares had to be propped up by its bankers. Analysts cackled with Schadenfreude.
Pretty soon the words “Facebook IPO” were appearing in the same sentence as the words “botched” and “bungled”. Investors lost out, and the class-action suit lawyers have been too busy to update their Facebook statuses ever since.
4 People talk about the Olympic flame as if it’s human
On the Olympic flame’s arrival in Cornwall, BBC News anchor Jane Hill cheerfully pointed out it felt “like sedition” to say that most of the crowd were there to see official “greeter” David Beckham and not this magical symbol of all things Olympic.
It was a remark that hinted at the suspension of journalistic critical faculties that was to come. By the time it reached London, the flame’s mythical status had compounded to the point that Boris Johnson oversaw a special ceremony “welcoming” the flame and “wishing it well”, as if it was a foreign dignitary, and no one rolled about laughing.
No amount of pointing out that the modern torch relay tradition dates back the “Nazi” games of 1936 could dent the popularity of the “golden cheese-grater”, as the torch design was labelled, and it was something of a blessed relief when the actual sport began.
5 Rebekah Brooks, David Cameron and the story of LOL
David Cameron used to sign off his frequent texts to Rebekah Brooks with “LOL”, until she informed him it meant “laugh out loud”, not “lots of love”.
So the former News International chief executive, with a smile and a little pause, told the Leveson inquiry as she was questioned under oath about the closeness of her relationship to her neighbour (and fellow “Chipping Norton set” member).
Funnily enough, the next days’ newspapers were packed with headlines recounting this hilarious textspeak misunderstanding on the part of foolish Cameron. Ha ha ha. LOL. Brooks, as former editor of both the News of the World and the Sun, probably could have predicted as much.
6 The last tweets of Jessica Ghawi
The public nature of most Twitter feeds combined with the use of the social network by news gatherers means the final tweets and conversations of the recently deceased are being retweeted even as the circumstances of their death are still being digested.
Jessica Ghawi, a 24-year-old up-and-coming sports journalist, who wrote and tweeted under the name @JessicaRedfield, was one of the 12 victims of the Aurora cinema shootings in July. Brimming with excitement as she was about to watch a midnight showing of The Dark Knight Rises, her last tweets personalised the tragedy of her death in an immediate way like no third-party tribute ever could. It’s a phenomenon that is at once illuminating and eerie. It is also here to stay. Last week, Sandy Hook principal Dawn Hochsprung’s Twitter account revealed a woman who dedicated her life to her pupils.
7 James Osborne points out the emergency exits
“I’ve been asked to point out all the exits. But to be quite honest, I can only see one,” announced James Osborne, chairman of Independent News and Media, shortly before he was pushed out the corporate door. “I can see a lot of windows over there, so I suspect we’ll probably be all right,” he surmised to the shareholders and guests assembled in the somewhat low-ceilinged agm venue.
With INM shareholders Denis O’Brien and Dermot Desmond voting against his re-election, health and safety were the least of Osborne’s problems, but his first and only agm as INM chairman was a droll performance. One shareholder took it upon himself to quote Benjamin Franklin: “Tricks and treachery are the practice of fools that don’t have brains enough to be honest”. Osborne replied that he quite liked the saying. It was the second consecutive year of agm drama at INM.
8 Bill O’Herlihy relives badminton’s sectarian past
There was a time when the phrase “badminton controversy” was an oxymoron, but with eight badminton players thrown out of London 2012 for trying to lose matches, all bets were off.
Filling airtime in the match between Ireland’s Chloe Magee and her Egyptian opponent, RTÉ’s veteran sports presenter Bill O’Herlihy stumbled into a micro-storm in a shuttlecock. Badminton, he recalled, used to be “played by Protestants, mainly”. When he was growing up it was considered “a Protestant game”.
There were complaints – well, 15 of them out of 370,000 viewers. One was considered and then rejected by the Broadcasting Authority of Ireland, which concluded that O’Herlihy was simply expressing “satisfaction that the sport has gained in popularity in recent years”. Yes, even Catholics play now.
9 The Daily Telegraph relegates Hillsborough to the inside pages
Even given that the Daily Telegraph’s alter ego is the Torygraph, the newspaper’s decision to opt for a Hillsborough-free front page the day after the damning findings of the Hillsborough Independent Panel were released seemed utterly bizarre.
A later edition added a blurb drawing attention to coverage of the findings in its sports section – an even more questionable decision, for the whole point of Hillsborough was that it was not merely a sport story, but a disaster caused by the “multiple failures” of the police, emergency services and other authorities and then compounded by decades of corruption and prejudice.
To most other British newspapers, and indeed many Irish ones, evidence that the police had doctored the statements of witnesses and performed blood alcohol tests on the deceased was big, scary news. But the Telegraph was in a giddier mood, with the alternative stories gracing its front page that day in September including one headlined: “Thief hid 20 mobile phones in his tights.”
10 It turns out everyone knew Jimmy Savile was a paedophile all along
No sooner had an ITV documentary – and not, notoriously, the BBC’s Newsnight – revealed that Jimmy Savile was a prolific paedophile, but dozens of light entertainment veterans and showbiz hangers-on were declaring that this, in fact, had been something of an open secret throughout the 1970s and 1980s.
Later, when difficult questions started being asked about why they personally hadn’t done a thing about it, it swiftly became de rigueur for anyone who was around at the time to insist that they never heard a whisper of an accusation against Savile, and even if they had done, it was all just unverifiable rumour and gossip. The Media Guide to Self-Preservation was another top-seller this year.
11 ITV manages to keep the plot of Downton Abbey a secret
How many times have you seen the words “SPOILER ALERT” in all-caps and still gone on to catch that particular plot point out of the corner of your eye, spoiling everything? Well, this is one of those times. In October, Lady Sybil Crawley snuffed it on the massively high-rating Downton Abbey in a shock death that prompted column inches of viewer outrage – Downtonites hadn’t seen Sybil’s demise coming. Indeed, nor had anyone.
ITV had not released the episode to previewers, meaning for once there were no hints dropped that anything big was about to happen. There were no spoilers to avoid. In an age when most dramas have either already aired somewhere else or are otherwise well-trailed before broadcast, it made a refreshing change. Not that angry Sybil fans could be consoled.
12 RTÉ airbrushes TV3 out of existence
As RTÉ mistakes go, it’s hardly up there with Tweetgate. But when the station airbrushed out a TV3 logo on a microphone in a picture used to illustrate a news story about Jedward’s non-victorious Eurovision homecoming, the big question on everyone’s minds was why. Was RTÉ claiming exclusive branding-rights over the 19th-placed peroxide twins? Was it worried the TV3 logo might provide a subliminal reminder to viewers that other channels are available?
The broadcaster’s response was negative – it was against editorial policy to remove rival media logos and the rogue airbrushing had been done by a non-editorial member of staff “not instructed to do so”. Still, to paraphrase Louis Walsh, RTÉ has really made that song contest its own.
