Those who identify it as just another publicity stunt exploiting lazy journalism are 100% correct. As well as O'Leary another past master at this type of thing is Sir Richard Branson. Although his strategy is slightly different to O'Leary's in that he tries to get good publicity rather than simply any publicity as O'Leary does, there is the same tendency by newspapers to print Virgin's press releases pretty much verbatim and present them as "news."
Every so often Virgin will do a press release, e.g. about some futuristic project, and the media will slavishly print it, even if the "story" is pretty much identical to what was being reported (as the result of a previous Virgin press release) a few months or even a year or more ago.