‘I was once proud of RTE, but I’d be ashamed to be involved now’
This once-vibrant organisation is run on the principle of chat that is generally shallow, mindless, ill-researched and biased, writes Bruce Arnold
IHAVE been a regular contributor to RTE Radio and Television since the early 1960s. I made programmes about the arts, culture, politics and literature, and did interviews with people, as well as being interviewed myself, over a wide spectrum of Irish life, sharing whatever the station offered. I did it with pleasure and a degree of pride. I felt I belonged to a vibrant and proud organisation.
Half a century later I would be ashamed to take part in virtually any of the programmes broadcast, on radio or television, on the issues that once attracted me. RTE has become a moribund organisation. Generally speaking, it is floundering over what it stands for and where it should direct its energies.
I say this with great sorrow. It was once so good; it is now so frequently very disappointing. RTE contains talented people and with the right leadership could not only survive but thrive. But, at present, it is not shaping up that way at all.
To make a case against it, I need to be cool, calm, collected and balanced, not easy where RTE is concerned... I will endeavour to achieve that by analysis and judgment, leading to a justification of what are very serious charges. I hope to make a case for a future for RTE as well.
The central case against the station is intentionally muted. And it is this: the radio and television station known as Raidio Teilifis Eireann, overall and including all its component parts, is run on the principle of chat. Chat is a favourite Irish occupation and Irish people engage in it constantly. But professionally it should be followed and used very sparingly. This is far from the case at present.
There is a time and a place for chat. Ryan Tubridy does reasonably well on The Late Late Show and on his radio show. Marty Whelan also does it well on Lyric and it is appropriate. His whimsical sense of humour acts as a tonic for anyone who has had the misfortune to listen to Morning Ireland.
Older readers will remember that Morning Ireland replaced Mike Murphy’s relevant early morning radio show. The decision to replace Murphy’s programme with one hour, and later two hours, of news was perhaps intended to replicate the BBC, which has lengthy and authoritative news programmes. The UK, however, is a large state with global interests and extensive reach. Ireland is quite different; the smaller state does not have a similar reach nor does it need two hours of morning radio.
Chat should not be the basis on which a broadcasting station operates. Although we might have something of a gift for chat, we don’t have a gift for listening. Guests rudely interrupt each other, presenters constantly and rudely interrupt their guests and, needless to say, guests talk at, not to, each other. Programmes involving chat generally include too many guests thereby preventing the presenter and a more manageable number of guests from having a meaningful, courteous and calm debate.
RTE’s presenters tend to be patronising. They often lack a sense of decorum. Interviewees are often referred to by their first names instead of by their titles or positions. This misses the point that it is their title or position of interviewers in society that explains why they are being interviewed.
Presenters are also, quite often, ignorant of their haphazardly chosen subjects.
The unique combination of patronising and hail-fellow-wellmet seems to be a strong feature of RTE’s culture. It is unprofessional, the overall impression irritating and even grim.
Chat permeates the broadcasting of sport, one of the main outputs of RTE. Most sports require intelligent reporting, and sport is the last place where chat should feature. Chat before a game, chat at half-time and for 10 minutes afterwards is more than sufficient but RTE’s sports panels drone on and on. Grim doesn’t even begin to describe it.
Chat is the basis on which the whole of Lyric runs. Jazz Alley was axed by Lyric. I can’t understand why the best programme on the station, and one that stood out from the blandness that now largely defines Lyric, was removed from the schedule.
Music is one of the great services to mankind. The version of it on Lyric is as bad as it can possibly get — trite, repetitive, interrupted by constant inanities and ignorance. The endlessly repeated musical extracts are given in chat-sized portions and are interspersed with chat about birthdays, anniversaries, the weather, bite-sized summaries of the news and much briefer and more superficial descriptions of the music itself.
Furthermore, the sound qualities of the music are variable, often indifferent, and simply not good enough for the audience. Even the timing of pieces is careless. Those who explain — for want of a more truthful word — what we hear, seem to be relying on the trivial words on the vinyl or DVD packaging and lack either pro- gramme continuity or any depth of knowledge.
If grim defines Radio 1, dismal blandness defines Lyric. As for 2FM, my age fortunately entitles me to by-pass that station entirely.
Chat as a principle is not suited to current affairs. A discussion on current affairs should never replicate a discussion in a pub. However, on RTE it does so, often adding in bad language, interruptions and noises off. Groups of people give their views, not even modulated by interviewers. Such broadcasting allows interviewers to become part of the message, and, if they so wish, to join one side or the other in the argument.
This removes the possibility of RTE doing its duty, which is to present current affairs in a scrupulously balanced and neutral way. Chat is not balanced, nor is it neutral. There are good people at chat, and bad people at chat, and they can make a mess — indeed they do regularly make a mess — of balanced, probing, objective interrogation of those it seeks to interview.
Instead of careful, prudent, planned and researched preparation for an interview, which is what good broadcasting should deliver, we have regular absurdities, where the two contestants are on the same side.
When it comes to the great issues of the day such as Brexit, RTE does not appear to make any effort to present both sides of the argument. It is difficult to believe that this happens accidentally, day after day, week after week,
What should have been designed to strip away the protective intellectual arguments in current and international affairs, and investigate them with the primary interest of informing the Irish public, is turned all too often into largely one-sided debate. This is inexcusable and abandons the primary purpose of a national broadcasting system.
Such a broadcasting approach is in keeping with the one-partystate nature of the Republic. We have changes of personnel in government but we never seem to have a change of government. RTE’s approach, ethos, style and output reflects this reprehensible situation.
This was widely in evidence over Brexit. You do not need to be a psychiatrist or a psychologist to recognise, in the hysterical establishment reaction to Brexit, the fear on their part that their rejection of two referendum decisions, in which the people urged them to pull back from over involvement in the dangerous game of creating a Europe state, would come back to haunt them.
The politicians were luckily confronted by people who shared their culpability for landing the Republic in a situation, as a result of Brexit, that would have been avoided if the decisions of the voters on the Nice and Lisbon Treaties had been respected.
The same failure to get to grips with historic events can be seen in the failure of RTE to probe the extent to which morality and legality have been abandoned by the West/ Nato in the Middle East. No one in RTE seems to question the right of the US or Nato to do what they please wherever and whenever they please, something that the culture of RTE takes for granted.
Its failure to probe the implications of the US military’s use of Shannon Airport is particularly worrying. RTE’s failures in current affairs have been massive.
The fault lies in the multiple failures of RTE to achieve and run, in the national interest, a fair, balanced, well-researched machine, designed to deliver serious interpretations of the world we live in. Instead, the station gives us chat.
It is generally shallow, mindless, ill-researched and hopelessly biased chat, wrong in the first place, and further damaged by being badly handled.
Is there a solution? Does it require action by the responsible minister, Denis Naughten, who has had nothing sensible or of value to say so far?
As for RTE Director General, Dee Forbes — has she shown any intelligent approach to her team of dismal, arrogant, overpaid and patronising team? So far they have not featured at all in her views about her role.
We, her public, see a large team of broadcasters many, but not all of them, arrogant and patronising performers, overpaid broadcasters, immoveable executives, third and fourth-rate programme-creators, clumsy and inept timing of programmes, all backed or interspersed by terrible use of bad music. Ms Forbes has a background in communications. She appears, however, to be much more interested in money, believing that more of it will make her job easier and improve what comes out of RTE. It won’t. If anything, it will add to the already high level of confusion that passes for the State’s broadcasting capacities.
From what I have said here, it will be clear to my readers that money is not the answer.
A drastic and penetrating reform of RTE’s understanding of its own function and purpose is urgently needed. And to make things worse, social media is pounding on the heels of these self-satisfied broadcasters.
The money that RTE is losing in advertising revenue should suggest to Ms Forbes that maybe, just maybe, something is wrong in RTE. The station she heads was never going to admit that, but presumably the purpose behind bringing in an outsider to lead RTE was intended to address that.
In the classic Irish tradition of recent decades, however, Ms Forbes appears to be leading from behind, which is another way of saying she is acting as a mouthpiece for the RTE establishment.
Ms Forbes is in the privileged position of being able to bring about major change at RTE. Ireland is a small state and cannot expect to throw up sufficient numbers of talented people to keep three radio and two television stations going at the standard required on a 24x7 basis. Ms Forbes could begin by asking herself what real talent is available to her, and can she master it, direct it and lead it forward?
Nothing she has said so far would reassure me, and I have a long memory of how good it once was to work in.
RTE is incapable of delivering well in terms of the current number of stations and hours broadcast. She should remind herself that there is nothing wrong with the sound of silence at certain times of the day or at night. Silence, particularly when the noise is so awful, is a much underrated feature of life and can be welcome. What takes its place has to be better.
Ms Forbes could take a long, hard look at RTE’s sports coverage, the mix of current affairs, and many other issues facing her. Above all, she must focus on standards. RTE must not only reflect Ireland but must also do so with style, integrity, balance, coherence and a dramatic raising of its present terribly low standards.
In order for it to do this and deliver something better, Ms Forbes has a great deal of thinking to do.
‘Presenters are also, quite often, ignorant of their haphazardly chosen subjects’ ‘There is nothing wrong with the sound of silence at certain times of the day or at night’