‘Donie O’Sullivan: Capitol Man’ could have aired only on Irish TV

Donie O’Sullivan: Capitol Man (RTÉ One, Tuesday) breaks what used to be a cardinal rule of reporting: that the journalist should never be centre of attention. The job was to be invisible and interchangeable, so as not to distract from the story. By this rule, the last place a reporter should wish to be is on Twitter’s trending topics.

But for many in today’s media landscape, that rule no longer applies – certainly not for Kerry-raised CNN reporter Donie O’Sullivan, now a charming presence on our rolling news feeds.

O’Sullivan brings to his work the rigour of US journalism without the attendant po-facedness and self-importance. And, though clearly grateful to be doing well, he doesn’t seem hungry for fame. His response to the strange celebrity bestowed on him back in Ireland has been a perfectly-pitched mixture of humility and bafflement.

Capitol Man is really two films bundled together, one far more interesting than the other. O’Sullivan (30) is a talented reporter whose common touch has facilitated up close-and-personal exchanges with Trump supporters. He also brings a keen insight to US culture wars as he reflects on the assault on the Capitol Building on January 6th, 2020, where he was one of the first journalists on the ground.

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Alas, Capitol Man loses the thread slightly when it degenerates into something akin to an episode of RTÉ’s Nationwide. O’Sullivan’s family and friends back in Cahersiveen are endearing, and their joy at his success infectious.

But perhaps as a nation we should be past the point where somebody doing well for themselves in the United States becomes headline news. Would the BBC have aired a documentary about a journalist from a small English town landing a job on NBC?

Ironically for a documentary about a news reporter, Capitol Man might also have benefited from more journalistic rigour. O’Sullivan talks movingly about the panic attacks that almost derailed his career but it would have been useful to learn more about what prompted them. Was it work pressure? Personal issues? As presented on screen, O’Sullivan woke up one morning struggling for breath. The sense is of a story not fully told.

It would also have been beneficial to interrogate the part played by CNN in the transformation of news in the United States into glorified entertainment. US rolling news has become a Punch and Judy show where people watch the channel that most closely mirrors their political allegiances.

Nobody would claim CNN is as guilty of this as right-wing propaganda machine Fox News. And yet it was surely worth putting to O’Sullivan the argument that all of the news networks have played a part in America’s retreat into political silos.

None of which is to detract from O’Sullivan’s feel-good story. There are interviews with his parents back in the old sod, and with CNN luminaries such as John King – though not with the network’s A-listers Anderson Cooper or Wolf Blitzer.

We hear from other Irish people who have made it big in the US: Samantha Barry, who worked with O’Sullivan at CNN before going on to become editor of Glamour magazine; and Mark Little, the ex-RTÉ Washington correspondent who gave O’Sullivan his big break when hiring him for his former social media verification start-up, Storyful.

This is in many ways a documentary that could have aired only on Irish television – one that mixes the New York media glamour of Succession with hometown parochialism. Whatever that says about us, O’Sullivan seems a likeable sort and only a churl would begrudge him his success.