RTÉ and Public Service Broadcasting

 
A call for a debate

Arising out of concerns at the level of licence fee increase just granted by the relevant Minister, RTE's Mr Charlie Bird, in an article in The Irish Times  (10 July 2001), called for a debate on RTE.

This of course is to be welcomed.

He suggests, however, that the first people to engage in this debate must be the RTE workforce, who, he says, are not happy with the licence fee increase now granted. (from £70 to £84.50 (21%))

Might I humbly suggest that, on the contrary, the debate would need to be something more than an extension of the RTE canteen debate he mentions, with the customers merely as onlookers?

What is needed is something altogether more fundamental.
 

Why no tenders for a £44m pa contract?

The public currently pays a licence fee to RTE amounting to a net £44m per annum, a figure RTE would like to see doubled.  Regardless of any change in the licence fee, it would be absurd to contemplate continuing, willy-nilly, the granting of this major contract to the same organisation, year in year out, without competitive tenders, and without objective assessment of performance.
 

Basic issues

Two basic issues need to be examined:

1.  Do we (the people, as distinct from the government) need public service broadcasting?

If so:

1. What do we want from it,
2. How should the objectives be achieved, and
3. How much are we willing to pay for it?

2. How has RTE performed in the past as a public service broadcaster?
 

Towards a debate

Rightly or wrongly, RTE has evolved into the principal interlocutor between government and governed.

In order to ensure that any discussion on its performance did not become an RTE-controlled PR exercise, the public would need to be put in possession of rather more information than is presently available.

They would need to know:

How does RTE operate;

What has the public got for the £1.5bn paid to this organisation over the last 40 years;

Has RTE handled its position of power in a responsible manner; and, most importantly,

What is its real relationship with the government of the day, ie, does RTE work for the government, or is RTE the government?

The only way of getting at all this, and thus creating the condition for an in-formed public debate, is to establish some form of independent public inquiry.
 

The task before us

The task before us couldn't be more important to the health of our democracy.  That task is not just about selecting either a national entertainer on the one hand, or a Praetorian Guard on the other.

The task is to select a national watchdog, committed to working fairly, objectively and professionally on behalf of the people, and only the people.

End

(Published in  Irish Examiner, Irish Independent, Irish Times and Sunday Business Post in July 2001.)

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Comment at 17 January 2002:

Since the date of publication of the above letter,  RTE initiated a programme called MEDIA VOX in October, 2001, a new weekly series on RTE 1 on Saturdays at 1.30 pm, exploring  the world of publishing, broadcasting, PR and advertising.  "[T]he programme will help to make the media more accountable to those they serve."

This initiative may have been prompted more by the publication during the year of a new book, Maverick, by Bob Quinn, former member of RTE Authority, who resigned on principle following RTE's reluctance to address child-targeted advertising, and his dissatisfaction with RTE's decision to appeal the High Court decision in the Coughlan case. (Brandon, E20.30).  Mr Quinn's book contains much material relevant to the issues set out above, both relating to RTE and to public service broadcasting generally.

However, if coverage of the referendum in the early part of January 2002 is anything to go by, the hoped-for effects of the MEDIA VOX  programme have yet to reach RTE itself.

In the meantime, Brendan O'Regan writes a weekly article on Radio and Television, frequently with refreshing pungency, in The Irish Catholic.

Critical columns also appear in The Irish Family and Alive!
 

Apart from these contributions, we are a very long way from any form of the public inquiry that is so sorely needed.
 

See also:
"Public Service Broadcasting: Theory and Practice"
"Government Green Paper on Broadcasting"
"Power without Responsibility"
 

End

17 January 2002