Tears, shame, smoking and PR
While the torrent of publicity around Chrissie Swan’s smoking admission didn’t help Can Of Worms’ ratings last night, Mike Daube has questions about the involvement of her management in the controversy.
The past week has seen a torrent of news coverage about Chrissie Swan, who “confessed” to smoking while pregnant with her third child. The confession was followed by myriad commentators and op-eds criticising her inevitable critics.
Chrissie Swan is a media celebrity and radio presenter who came to prominence as a runner-up in Big Brother. She has previously attracted media attention around obesity, including a stint promoting Jenny Craig.
She reportedly attracted “vicious online comments” after she posed for media photographs with her apparently overweight children. At the time, she tweeted about criticisms that “the easiest thing to do is not read them at all. I never do”.
Chrissie Swan’s PR team have been simply awesome. You could even see their fingerprints at work with Prof Simon Chapman on ABC 702, when he mentioned the idiotic ‘even Barack Obama smokes’ point that must have featured somewhere on the PR team’s background brieing notes. I hope he looks back on his participation in the ensuing ‘debate’ as a career low-point. I was so deeply disappointed that he didn’t even remotely mention the human rights of the foetus, which of course was missing from most of the articles and comments.
When you are pregnant, you DO lose a degree of autonomy because you are the life support system for a defenceless, hugely vulnerable baby human. If you aren’t prepared to make the sacrifices, don’t exercise your choice to bring another life into the world.
If she could give up smoking for the Big Brother house she can give it up for her own child, surely?
I’m not an internet troll, but she gets no sympathy from me. She’s not an idiot, so she would be well aware of the health risks associated in smoking when pregnant. And she admits that she’s “not really a smoker” so addiction is no excuse. I call bullshit. she’s only after publicity- which after looking at the ratings from last night- are crumbling
As a woman struggling with infertility, who has already sacrificed much more to experience the joy of pregnancy than Chrissy Swan would have if she just gave up the fags; I am outraged. It makes me angry, and incredibly resentful, that she has been given life’s greatest blessing and treated it with such disregard.
She should be ashamed, and I have no sympathy for her – just disdain. I couldn’t agree with Nell’s comments more.