Just seeking an emotional reaction is a crying shame

I’M not a marketing guru, and while I might have dabbled occasionally in PR I know my limitations. I take my hat off to people who are good at it and can only admire their craft as they take the most mundane of occurrences and turn them into epic events.

In their hands, the unveiling of a new slurry spreader can seem like the launch of an intergalactic voyager.

These spin doctors put 21st century f lesh on the ghost of Kavanagh’s poem, ‘Epic’ as they transform the local into the global. The Inniskeen man’s words capture their craft:

Homer’s ghost came whispering to my mind.

He said: I made the Iliad out of such

A local row. Gods make their own importance

Anyway, drawing on my paltry knowledge of the dark art of the PR guru, can I be so bold as to offer some advice? After more than a half century of avid media consumption I have distilled for myself this drop of wisdom: if you want to be seen or heard on local, national and indeed international media be sure to cry. If your event, your opportunity or your crisis is described as ‘emotional’, you’re on the modern equivalent of the pig’s back.

I would advise anyone preparing for a media interview to at least ‘tear up’, and this will launch you and your cause into the orbit of the national consciousness. After that, go on to develop a lump in your throat, and if there is a camera in sight gently touch the outer corner of each eye with your little finger. With red eyes and a lumpy throat you could make the Six O’Clock News; you might even get a call from Joe Duffy. Just produce a hankie and sniff le.

Now, there are events that are tragic beyond belief and go deeper than tears and into that painful place we call heartbreak. The media of course has to report on these things and bring them to the attention of the community, near and far.

However, the preoccupation with turning every event into an emotional tsunami puts everyone’s pain into the one category without regard for the profundity of certain suffering in comparison to others. It is akin to the current practice in theatres of giving standing ovations to every production no matter how wonderful or how awful it is.

Let me continue with my PR advice. If you find yourself in front of a microphone or sat beside a member of my profession with pen in hand, don’t worry if you are finding it difficult to plumb the required emotional depths — journalists are there to help you; they can get tears out of a turnip, they will verbally poke and pull at you until you collapse in an ‘emotional heap’.

(Actually, some of them make the most stony-faced of editors cry on a daily basis, tears brought on by chronic spelling, poor syntax and tired clichés.)

I have some research work for you. Over the next week keep an ear to the radio, keep one eye on the telly and the other on the print headlines and the extent of this mad longing for raw emotion will be clear.

You might read something like, ‘Varadkar challenges Martin in emotional outburst’. This longing for tears can even put the words ‘Varadkar’ and ‘emotional’ into the one sentence.

Another headline might tell you, ‘Offaly’s golfing hero weeps as he wins €1m in prize money’, and wouldn’t anyone weep if they got that much money for walloping a few white balls into a series of holes?

No matter what the occasion, we in the ‘meedja’ love to get the emotional bit out of it. Listen any day to interviewees on local or national airwaves as they are fed question after question designed to turn on the waterworks, “And how did you feel when you