RTÉ in the dock – but what’s to blame?

» Robbie Smyth

Contradictory attitudes to money are at the heart of the crises the national broadcaster finds itself facing as it is assailed by its private sector competitors on one side and an assortment of other political and media interests on the other

WHAT IS the biggest problem facing RTÉ. Ireland’s publicly-funded, state-run, free-to-air TV, radio and online broadcaster?

Is it inefficient management structures, editorial bias, bad programming planning, or errors in reporting and representation?

It’s none of these.

So is it ‘Tweetgate’ and Seán Gallagher’s not-so-stoic moaning or the report on the Primetime Fr Reynolds libel?

These are important issues but they are not the root of RTÉ’s problems.

Money is the first problem. It drives the thinking (often wrong and blinkered) across the output of the organisation. Contradictory attitudes to money are at the heart of the crises the national broadcaster finds itself facing as it is assailed by its private sector competitors on one side and an assortment of other political and media interests on the other.

RTÉ has a growing list of enemies and competitors who want a slice of their audience and the advertising revenues that come with it. There are many pundits who deride RTÉ (often rightly) but they cannot detract from the audience stats that RTÉ1 is the most-watched TV station in Ireland: 19 out of the top 20 most-viewed programmes in Ireland in 2011 were broadcast by RTÉ, and 47 out of the top 50, according to figures from Nielsen and Tam Ireland.

In radio, commercial competitors have impacted on the broadcaster’s three radio stations but in the most recent Joint National Listenership Research (JNLR) figures, covering January to December 2011, RTÉ radio had a daily share of 33.4% of the weekday audience.

Online, RTÉ.ie is the most visited news website in the country with monthly traffic of 4million-plus unique visitors (the Irish Times’s Ireland.com web site is the only near competitor for audience share).

This doesn’t mean all is good in the Montrose HQ complex. There is seriously muddled thinking throughout the organisation beginning with the failure (until the past couple of weeks) to rein in the six-figure annual salaries of the station’s presenters such as Pat Kenny, Miriam O’Callaghan, Joe Duffy, Ryan Tubridy or Marian Finucane.

RTÉ has created an elite media caste it doesn’t need while slowly stripping the programme-makers of the resources to make quality programming. Content creators at the station are driven by the need to boost audiences that attract sponsors and advertising.

In both the case of The Frontline Presidential debate and the Prime Time Investigates documentary, it was hype and drama first and foremost – so was it any surprise that there were lapses in editorial procedures?

In the Frontline case, we still don’t officially know why the production staff didn’t check the veracity of the tweets they were putting on air as fact, why they didn’t rectify the sourcing error of the ‘McGuinness4President’ twitter account live during the programme, and (most critically) why the error was not picked up by the Morning Ireland journalists and editors some nine hours later.

One conclusion is that it is a money issue. RTÉ either doesn’t have the editorial resources to have a joined-up news team or its focus is on audience share rather than the quality or veracity of the content. Frontline (like many other RTÉ productions) is a stand-alone programme. It has its own budget, producers and editors distinct from the RTÉ newsroom. It is now clear that the flagship Frontline did not communicate with its lowly newsroom cousins.

Similarly, the now suspended Primetime Investigates team are a standalone entity driven too by audience share. So we had a programme titled ‘A Mission to Prey’. Is this type of ‘investigation’ what was really needed or was it thought this sort of Sunday World sensationalism would make the programme pull in a bigger audience?

We await the final outcome of the Fr Reynolds inquiry but it is clear from the evidence so far in the public domain that the programme makers put a transmission deadline and the supporting promotion of the programme above editorial judgement. Could this be the money issue again?

RTÉ’s money fixation is driven partially by cutbacks, €25million more of which are being proposed for 2012 and 2013. It will close its London office and seek to cut another €15million from payroll costs. Spending on imported programming will fall by 10% with a 25% cut proposed for buying sports content

But RTÉ’s money problems are also driven by a legislative regulatory vacuum. RTÉ has powerful competitors in emerging entities such as the Denis O’Brien control of Communicorp, which gives us Today FM, Newstalk, Spin, 98FM and Phantom while also having a 22% share in Independent News and Media. It also competes with significant international competitors such as BSkyB, the BBC and ITV, and in Ireland the radio and TV stations owned by UTV. It also has competitors in Ireland such as TV3 who (owned by an equity fund) don’t have to create anything near the quality of home-produced programming that is demanded of RTÉ.

There is a regulation vacuum across Irish media. At the moment, we have the Broadcasting Authority of Ireland (BAI) for TV and radio and ComReg for cable TV and phone companies but nothing for print or online media.

Specifically, there is no discussion on the double standards that impose significant production costs on RTÉ in terms particularly in the context of the home-produced programming it is required to generate while none of its competitors faces the same programming criteria. It is interesting to note that many of the media outlets leading the charge against RTÉ come from the print sector, which in Ireland has little regulation of its output.

RTÉ is a cross-media company; so are its competitors. We need to see the media market in its totality and regulate it across that broadness. Most importantly, we need to recognise the need for an independent, public-owned broadcaster. It won’t be cheap but we need it not to be a slave to money and committed to accuracy and fairness.

We’ll keep watching.