And now for the media analysis stage of the Gerry Ryan story

PRESENT TENSE: IF YOU WERE suffering Gerry Ryan fatigue before his passing, then you’ll be pretty much floored by now.

PRESENT TENSE:IF YOU WERE suffering Gerry Ryan fatigue before his passing, then you'll be pretty much floored by now.

Standing over pallets groaning under the weight of Sunday papers last week, the decision was between sensationalist coverage of Gerry Ryan’s cocaine habit or the merely salacious; finger-pointing or feigned shock.

By midweek there were reheated leftovers, financial problems and the nostalgia-clobbering news that he took cocaine before presenting the Eurovision Song Contest. Yesterday, Pat Kenny had some discussion about it and RTÉ’s general silence. By tomorrow the bandwagon may finally have packed up, although the Sundays will no doubt try to keep it running through the weekend at least. But until now it has been the story that just kept on giving.

Now, of course, you’re getting some media analysis. I cannot pretend I haven’t been fascinated by the story, or at least by how it’s been told. When it finally washes out, this will have been the third wave of Gerry Ryan coverage, and each time has been about surfing public sentiment.

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At its most basic it has gone like this:

(1) Symbol of excess Gerry Ryan and his greedy RTÉ pals should be hounded into pay cuts or quit.

(2) Much-missed legend of broadcasting Gerry Ryan’s sudden, untimely death was exacerbated by RTÉ hounding him into a pay cut.

(3) Symbol of excess Gerry Ryan died of cocaine addiction having been let down by RTÉ and his pals, who should have predicted it.

Collectively, it was a story with all the angles. There were celebrity, money, tragedy, two grieving women, a grieving public and the chance to complain about RTÉ.

Then it was invigorated by cocaine, a revelation that opened up a whole other range of editorial options: criminals, Garda investigations, morality tales, the lucrative idea that Irish society is freewheeling out of control.

It was simple and convenient. If it had been a result of his lifestyle – which he regularly admitted was unhealthy and which mirrored wider societal problems – would there have been such rampant coverage?

Even the early days after his death were marked by a convenient use of the phrase “untimely”, which was akin to asking: “Why does God always take the over-eating, hard-drinking ones first?”

Yet there was a collective rush away from the idea of personal responsibility. Instead the search was on for an outside agent. Even with the inquest’s announcement of his drug use, much of the story switched to blaming those friends and colleagues who had supposedly allowed it to continue, or the dealer who gave it to him.

Here’s a line from an Irish Independent editorial: “The state of Mr Ryan’s mind in the last days of his life suggests that he was easy prey to the vile instincts of the death peddlers in the drug trade with no fear of the law.” (This mirrors the Katy French coverage, which turned the late model into a victim rather than someone whose personal choices had unintended but terrible consequences.)

One phrase in particular stands out: the wide reporting that Ryan’s cocaine use was “an open secret” in RTÉ. If that was the case, then it’s pretty shoddy journalism to have discovered that only a week ago. So maybe every journalist who has pursued that angle since Ryan’s death really didn’t know the truth. Or maybe it instead emphasised a concern less with reporting what they knew and more with what the public wanted to hear.

Why does that matter? Because when the rest of the media is having a go at RTÉ for its silence, it would help if it hadn’t been complicit for several months in advance.

This doesn’t absolve RTÉ, of course. Pat Kenny – with a panel of print journalists – finally talked at length about this yesterday. He described RTÉ’s silence as being “no conspiracy” but of his colleagues not wanting to add to the upset of the family. In a sense, though, this only confirmed a conspiracy of sorts, even if it was informal rather than organised. The Ryan story has emphasised the narrowness of an Irish broadcasting media dominated by the State broadcaster, where personal relationships have been allowed to affect editorial content. Much of the print media may have talked too much about it, and often about the wrong thing, but it doesn’t mean it wasn’t worth covering.

It confirmed what we knew, that RTÉ has been taking taxpayers’ money but making decisions on personal grounds. If a presenter had concerns about their personal interests, then that presenter should have been replaced, at least for one show.

It is not just a case of RTÉ deliberately refusing to indulge public sentiment at a time when much of the media is doing little else, but of dropping a previously important story when it became inconvenient. But, ultimately, everyone has told this story in a way that suited themselves rather than its truths.