It is a universal truth, across all western countries and societies, that the media’s most favoured topic when it comes to a good controversy is other people in the media. There’s a simple reason for this: The bigger a media scandal is, the more important the media must be. And if you are in the media, hyping up a scandalous incident for its importance is a back-handed way of elevating your own importance in the process.
Thus the Irish state has found itself amidst the current farrago: Ivan Yeats, a podcaster, media trainer, and sometimes radio host, is now the subject of a Comisiun na Mean investigation and the biggest political scandal of the day because – and wait for this now – he provided some media training to Fianna Fáil politicians and didn’t declare this to his audience.
We’ll start with the obvious: Yeats should have declared his interest. It was unethical not to do so. But had he declared his interest, there would be no story here at all. He could simply have said, on his former podcast with Matt Cooper, that he had been approached to provide some media training for Jim Gavin, and that as such his views on Gavin might be tainted. Give the audience all the information and let them decide for themselves. I have some personal experience of this because it is precisely the situation I faced in last year’s EU elections when my own co-host, Sarah Ryan, was also advising a candidate in that election. We simply declared it up front, and I ribbed her about it on the podcast. Job done.
I’ll make another declaration here (a declaration of lack-of-interest, for want of a better phrase) in case anyone is wondering: I do not really know Ivan Yeats at all, other than having appeared on his show a few times when he was a full-time host for Newstalk and Virgin Media. I have no personal interest in his fate, and I’ve always found his particular brand of “sources tell me” schtick to occasionally stretch the bounds of credulity. But equally, he has parlayed it into a successful career, bolstered by the fact that he is clearly an intelligent, curious, and engaging personality.
It should also be said that the case against him is bound up with notions that border on the conspiratorial: The thinking of some people appears to be that his “smear the bejaysus out of her” comments about Catherine Connolly were actually designed to damage Heather Humphreys at the behest of Yeats’ undeclared paymasters in Fianna Fáil. But to believe this – since the comments were made after Jim Gavin’s withdrawal – you must believe that Yeats voluntarily put himself at the centre of a Fianna Fáil plot to elect Catherine Connolly as President just to stick it to their coalition partners. It is not immediately obvious how either party to this confected conspiracy would benefit from it.
The other thing here by the way is that Yeats’ real sin here is to expose the glass walls that exist right across the political-media nexus: Thus it is a scandal that Ivan Yeats advised a Fianna Fáil candidate for office on how to deal with the media, but not a scandal at all that Hugh O’Connell, former Independent Media political reporter, now works (along with an entire phalanx of ex-hacks) for the Government he was covering as a news reporter just a year or so ago. The transition without any kind of cooling off period from reporting on the Tánaiste to being his official spokesperson can be accomplished without a bat of a media eyelid.
That’s the other reason, if we’re really frank, for the coverage of Yeats: Personal resentments and jealousy. Two reasons for that: First, that Yeats is one of the few politicos to successfully travel in the opposite direction, having demonstrated that untrained imbecile politicians can actually do media-ing just as successfully, if not more successfully, than our armada of DCU journalism madrassa graduates. Second, because Yeats has always been one of the few in the media with a genuine licence to say what he thinks, never being particularly reliant on politicians for career advancement. The average Irish reporter might have an eye on being the next Hugh O’Connell, but Ivan Yeats never had to be.
As to the actual facts of the matter: Clearly, Yeats’ media training of Jim Gavin didn’t do the latter much good, given his abysmal outings in the debates Yeats had prepped him for. Clearly too, his comments on Humphreys didn’t make much difference to her odds of victory, given what a wooden and useless candidate she proved to be. If anything, the lesson we should take from all of this is that media training (an area I used to dabble in, before Gript) is over-rated. Or at least, Ivan Yeats’ services in that area are over-rated.
For all that though, he remains a capable and well-liked broadcaster. The campaign to end his career over this relatively minor matter is ridiculous. He’ll be back, I suspect, and whatever he does do will prove much more popular than his erstwhile co-host, who appears to have forgotten that few enough people were tuning into Path to Power to hear from Matt Cooper.