PRESENT TENSE:WELL, THAT GOT out of control. We've all done something humiliating at some point in our lives, that thing that makes you shudder privately at quiet moments, that stain you wish you could erase from your record. But this week's e-mail at PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC), in which some male staff drew up a "shortlist" of "hot" new female staff, ended up on the front pages of the newspapers not for its importance but because everyone involved found themselves thrown into the front line of the war between new and old media.
Its escalation got the whole country involved. The e-mail was circulated externally, it reached a newspaper, then it was circulated more widely and some papers became so giddy as to become unwitting satires of themselves.
The ‘Daily Mail’ described the PwC men as “chauvinistic” and “crass”, and the women as “victims”. “Rated like prize cattle,” growled the headline. Then it printed all the women’s pictures, just to give you a look.
Yesterday it asked readers to judge the men supposed to have sent the e-mail, based on pictures of them at a party that “underline the laddish culture that the high-fliers revel in”.
It wasn’t the only paper to print the women’s pictures on the front page. Others did too – though ‘The Irish Times’ has not printed them at all. By doing this, these publishers carried on what the original e-mailers had done, but on a national scale. They did it because papers are now in competition not just with each other but with anyone who has an e-mail address.
They did it also because, online and offline, humiliation is valued currency. Over the past fortnight it has already been a topic of conversation in the media, in office kitchens, in homes. Neil Prendeville’s act on an aircraft brought him national notoriety, epitomised by Ryanair throwing together one of its cartoon adverts. (The result was as close to dignified as one of the airline’s airports is to the supposed destination.)
There has also been much coverage of the case of Donal Kinsella, a businessman who says a naked sleepwalking incident in Mozambique led to a humiliation that he alleges had more conspiratorial undertones. By taking a case against his former employer he has knowingly presented himself for a nightly appearance on the RTÉ news programmes and for daily newspaper coverage, thus reminding everyone of something that most people would wish to have wiped from the public’s memory.
The Prendeville and Kinsella cases can both be considered newsworthy: one of the men is a popular and opinionated radio host, the other has brought his case to court (although there was initial press coverage before he did so, in 2007).
This week’s PwC coverage, though, is more curious. There is something mildly newsworthy about an in-house investigation of several staff by one of the world’s largest accountancy firms, but beyond a report of the outcome the story merits few column inches. Instead, as office banter was opened up to the world as representative of sexual politics in the workplace, any true sense of proportion was quickly lost in the battle for readers, and the innocent parties became collateral damage.
Whatever their initial intent, and the possible consequences of their actions in a viral-media era, the men under investigation didn’t put the women’s pictures on the front pages of the newspapers and so, implicitly, invite the rest of the country to make a judgment of their own. So why is it that the women’s humiliation could be displayed, printed and sent to every corner of every county?
It’s partly because there’s a challenge to modern newspapers – a day behind on most stories – to plug in to the national conversation, even when it’s just national gossip. The e-mail was out there. Once it hit the newspapers it gathered a momentum that saw it spread even more widely, by e-mail and across the web, so that by the time it was printed in the paper it had already been seen and spread by a lot of people.
The editorial decision in this case was clearly to jump in and grab the opportunity. It made for striking front pages, and, for all the outrage some will have felt about those editorial decisions, we shouldn’t be naive enough to think that the photographs didn’t sell some papers at a time when many people had not yet seen the full, photographic detail of the mail.
It’s likely that such situations will become increasingly common. Because you are now a disseminator of news.You are a publisher. And newspapers are in competition with you.