‘I forked out $700 for my Emmy Award statue the other day’

When the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences announced that Donie O’Sullivan had won an Emmy Award for outstanding news coverage, they neglected to mention one small detail.

“It was nice,” the world’s most famous Kerryman says down the Zoom line from his New York pad. “They make you pay for the statue, though.”

Hang on – what?

“$700. I mean, the team that worked with me, there was, like, 30 people on the team, so I guess they can’t hand out 30 of them, but it’s $700, yes. I just forked out the 700 quid for it there the other day.”

There’s no such thing as a free lunch, but setting aside the costs of the statuette, O’Sullivan’s success has been both swift and years in the making, achieved through hard graft while making it seem easy. 

The 32-year-old is a mere whelp compared to some of the big beasts of coast-to-coast US broadcast news, yet he finds himself in a front row seat at a unique time in American history, and at a juncture where convincing people of the value of facts over conjecture and lies has never been more important – and difficult.

Donie O’Sullivan recently won an Emmy Award for outstanding news coverage

It was in his current role as Senior Correspondent for CNN that Donie secured that Emmy win for his work on MisinfoNation for the Anderson Cooper Show, but he has been an expert in tackling fake news for years. O’Sullivan was among the early employees of Storyful, the Irish company which back in those innocent Noughties days became one of the verifiers-in-chief of the various clips and scraps that emerged from the ever-expanding internet. It’s clear we are now living in a very different and more uncertain landscape.

“I didn’t predict this,” Donie says of the incessant internet churn of news and content, where many people cling to their own version of reality. “It’s not that I want to totally crap on the internet. I mean, we all love it and use it every day. But it makes you wonder where we’ll be in another 15 years.”

As ever, America tends to be the lead story. While TV audiences here have long been fascinated by the unique strains of American weirdness, covered by the likes of Louis Theroux and Michael Moore decades ago, many of those conspiracies and fringe beliefs have now become mainstream. It’s a central plank of O’Sullivan’s new podcast, called Persuadable, in which he takes a personal and empathetic look at why people fall for conspiracy theories and misinformation, through discussions with cult survivors, psychologists, and experts. The man from Caherciveen can see why we are where we are.

“If you just think about it from the perspective of having the phone in your hand, most of us are spending most our days on on these devices now, and we have the feeling that we’re connected, this perception that we’re connected, but actually, we’re quite isolated,” he says. “Normally we’re on our own when we’re looking at this,” he continues, dangling his own yellow-covered phone to the camera.

Conspiracies and fringe beliefs are a central plank of O’Sullivan’s new podcast

“People are hanging out less. You can see the data for that in the US, particularly younger people, they’re not going out as much. They’re not joining clubs, they’re not joining sports groups, whatever. So, one, there’s that isolation.

“Two, in the Nineties all of these fringe ideas and pockets existed, but they were ‘over there’, whereas now people with these fringe beliefs can easily connect, can
easily spread their message, build a community and become much bigger.

“We’ve all always been, just throughout history, predisposed to wanting to believe ‘crazy things’. The thing about conspiracy theories is they do offer sort of easy answers to complex questions. They make you feel good because you have an understanding of something that nobody else gets. And then, of course, there’s that community aspect built around them. I think it’s just the fact that we’re now all connected through these devices.

“If you’re a regular news consumer now, especially in the US, it’s very hard. I mean, you’re really up against it, to try and determine the truth, right? I mean, there’s obviously the mainstream press and things like that, but there’s declining trust in institutions, in that as an institution, and you have just all these competing narratives online every day. It’s really difficult.”

That said, Donie’s naturalistic style in front of the camera is obvious, and it’s clear he is also able to get his interviewees to engage. To again use the Theroux yardstick, where Louis’s slightly baffled English schoolboy approach seemed to defuse potentially volatile scenarios, Donie’s Irish accent appears to be an advantage.

“Yeah, it helps to be an outsider, a bit of an outsider in that way,” he says with a smile. “I mean, I should point out I’m a US citizen, my mom was born and raised here, but yeah. I mean, clearly, you know, I’m Irish.” 

Donie O’Sullivan: ‘It helps to be an outsider.’

That said, he believes the very nature of Irish-Americanism is changing, and not necessarily in obvious ways.

“Especially going to conservative type, Trump type events, [being] Irish I think means something different to a lot of conservative America than it might to a lot of people back in Ireland now. I think in Ireland, we like to think of Ireland and America, it’s JFK, it’s the Clintons and Northern Ireland, it’s Biden and all that. 

“But actually, if you look at it, I mean, Irish and Irish Americans, there isn’t an Irish America vote, there isn’t a monolith, Irish America is not a monolith anywhere. But for a lot of Irish Americans, they’re Republicans, they’re ardent Trump supporters, they’re conservatives, they are very religious, and that makes sense; if you think of some of the most prominent Trump supporting conservative people in the US, it’s people with Irish names: it’s Sean Hannity, it’s Bill O’Reilly, it’s Steve Bannon, Kelly-Anne Conway. So sometimes there is this confusion.”

Addressing fake news and conspiracy theories does mean engaging with those who can see you as an enemy, both online but also in everyday life. Donie laughs that “there’s plenty of people at all these events that come up to us and tell us fuck off in real life as well”, but he reveals that at an earlier stage in his career, there was one potentially serious scenario.

“I don’t know if I’ve ever shared this before and I don’t know if my mother knows it, but there was early on, actually one of the first times I really did a deep, reported piece on a conspiracy theory, the conspiracy theorist – I think it was back in 2017 – actually showed up in New York. 

“I feel like he had travelled across the country, or somewhere from out of state, and was streaming live, saying he was coming to CNN to confront me. And at that point I had never been on TV, I was a writer, a reporter. It was quite early on. So there have been things like that.

Donie O’Sullivan: A conspiracy theorist actually showed up in New York to confront me.

“Obviously, CNN and I need to take precautions at times. And I have a daily deluge of, like, someone said something to me on the internet. But I will say, I’ve probably been very lucky in that regard, because it’s not something that consumed my life in any way. 

“I think part of that is to do with – I don’t think it’s a ‘woke’ thing to say – the fact I am a white man; being on the internet as somebody who is anything other than a white, straight man makes things immediately more difficult. If you’re a woman, if you’re brown, if you’re queer, that just automatically turns up the hate.”

For O’Sullivan, the idea in his work is to present a kind of “truth sandwich”, whereby he outlines the context of a particular conspiracy theory, see how it’s impacting people’s lives and society, and can counter the theory factually, but without necessarily trying to change the mind of the person holding the conspiracy theory. As he puts it: 

I can ask some probing questions, I can push back, but … I’m not going out there to change anyone.

We are also living in the era of the podcast and Donie believes that people are “more motivated by feelings than they are by facts”. He says Persuadable is a “humble attempt” to present and document the problem without necessarily trying to present a solution; at the very least, it opens up a conversation, he says. 

As for the broader media world, he says the likes of Fox News is pushing its own editorial line because it is profitable, and in an increasingly longform, podcast-obsessed world, he sees legacy broadcast media as having to reshape how it presents its output.

“What journalists need to get better at, and I think we as an industry need to get better at is, [is] how we are presenting news, how we are presenting facts and talking to people. If you listen to radio interviews, or, you know, TV news interviews, oftentimes just because of the medium, they’re short [segments]. 

“You know, with a politician, it could be seven minutes [long], the questions can be really informed, sometimes there’s gotcha questions in there, it all feels a bit rushed out and fast and soundbitey. And then you have [podcast kingpin] Joe Rogan, who sits down with somebody for three hours.

“They’re sort of almost two extremes. It’s like seven minutes or three hours. And seven minutes with, like, massive fact checking, holding a person’s foot to the fire, and three hours, basically, with just sitting back and being, you know… like Joe Rogan is quite good at times, at pushing back, but a lot of the time he’s clearly done no research and so it shouldn’t be that hard to have a sort of longer form format.”

Donie at Capital Hill

Through his attention-grabbing reports such as being on the ground at the January 6 storming of the Capitol and more recently his reports on Tuam, Donie’s profile has risen, but he says he is wary of that developing into full-blown celebrity.

“I wouldn’t want to be [a celebrity] for the kind of work I do,” he says. “Being too recognisable, it’s not a hazard, but, like, it’s not kind of you. It doesn’t help you do your work, because if you sort of become that distraction. Especially if, essentially, you become a meme. Then people just have all these assumptions about you.”

American broadcast media is performative, but he says he has never been tempted to go the full Kent Brockman or Anchorman. 

“I don’t think I fit the moulds, I don’t have the looks or the height or the physique to be the Ron Burgundy type,” he laughs. “But no, I’ve been very lucky that CNN has just sort of let me do my thing and not try and make me something that I’m not because I couldn’t really do that and I wouldn’t want to do that. I think some of it I did sneakily over the years, just started showing up on TV reports without necessarily all the bosses realising who I was or what was happening.”

There’s no danger of that happening now; an Emmy win will change that for you.

He will continue reporting on the “Black Mirror” realities of modern-day America and the unique challenges of the Trump White House.

Securing – and paying for – that Emmy gong even drew a congratulatory message from his old GAA club back in Kerry, St Mary’s of Caherciveen, which praised its former underage star before advising him: “There’s plenty of time for the South Kerry Championship Donie – training starts next week!”

“I might need to tog off,” he says, “I have to see about the hamstring though.”

Somehow, you imagine he’d glide his way through.