RTE ANALYSIS
When it comes to holding struggling or poorly run businesses to account, RTE judges itself by a very different standard, writes Eilis O’Hanlon
‘Viewers are now presented with endless choices and can no longer be held captive’
IT was telling that the news of RTE’s latest cost-cutting plan was delivered on Morning Ireland by the broadcaster’s arts and media correspondent rather than a business reporter. When it comes to other ailing companies struggling to keep pace with a changing economic climate, it’s generally financial journalists and experts who are called in to diagnose what’s wrong. RTE is treated differently. Because it’s a media organisation, yes, but also because, deep down, RTE doesn’t think it should be looked at the same way as other companies.
It’s different. So it thinks. It’s special. It should be judged by its own rules, not the grubby realities of the competitive market.
That’s why the new restructuring plan, hurriedly released midweek after being leaked, and which proposes a raft of measures aimed at reducing costs by €60m over the next three years, is still being portrayed as some great national tragedy and mystery rather than a logical outcome of years of terrible decision-making.
It’s instructive to look at how RTE has reported in recent weeks on other economic bad-news stories, such as the recent job losses at electronics component maker Molex and pharmaceutical giant Novartis in counties Clare and Cork respectively. Both plants are due to shed more than 800 jobs.
Writing on the website, RTE’s business editor Will Goodbody identified a failure to keep up with the “rapidly changing nature of work and technology”, adding that “those that cannot reinvent themselves on a rolling basis to meet those demands... face a difficult future”. It’s rare to find such uncomfortable truths applied to RTE itself. Instead the same lame excuses are trotted out. It’s because not enough people are paying the licence fee, even though there’s a near 90pc compliance rate, or because the Government won’t allow RTE to demand more money from the Irish public. If only those two problems could be fixed, RTE pretends, the future would be rosy.
The lack of self-awareness is remarkable. When it comes to explaining its own parlous economic situation to licence fee payers, RTE suddenly forgets all these basic business lessons. There was precious little criticism of the state broadcaster for not keeping up with the pace in a world in which viewers are presented with a blizzard of choices and can no longer be held captive, as they once were.
It was left to Heather Humphreys, the business, enterprise and innovation minister, to say that RTE needs to look again at its fundamental business model.
Morning Ireland presenter Audrey Carville put it to the Fine Gael TD that the Government had “done nothing” to help RTE recoup the estimated €50m which is being lost each year because of unpaid licence fees and people watching TV on their phones and tablets. While accepting that public funding has a role to play, Minister Humphreys pointed out that the country would be in an impossible position if failing companies came looking for a bail-out from the government every time they couldn’t make ends meet. But of course this point wasn’t being made elsewhere on RTE, perhaps because the thought simply doesn’t occur to anyone in the building that it is worth making.
RTE’s director general, Dee Forbes, was challenged forcefully by Bryan Dobson during an 18-minute interview later in the programme, but his strongest focus was on the way that the report was released before staff had been fully informed. He then moved on to asking whether the 15pc cut in star presenters’ pay was merely “symbolic”, considering that it was a drop in the ocean of RTE losses.
When Forbes tried to broaden out the discussion by saying that RTE needs to “look at our cost base”, Dobson’s immediate answer was to ask again what exact contribution would be made by cutting the pay of top presenters. The broader economic and business argument about how to run an organisation with such a massive deficit was simply not explored, as it would be for any other business facing the same challenges.
Even when Dee Forbes unilaterally said that “we have to change with” the emerging media world, Dobson didn’t press her on what that entailed. Instead he asked how RTE’s stated commitment to the regions was compatible with cutting the Limerick studio.
Likewise, when she tried to talk about the “more on-demand world”, and how all programmes needed to be “more aligned to the (RTE) Player”, Dobson again honed in on seeking reassurance that RTE Two wouldn’t be shut down. It’s understandable that journalists at RTE are concerned about colleagues losing their jobs, but RTE is a business and needs to be analysed, forensically, as such.
The veteran presenter did give his boss a tough time, not least by asking why, if the situation was so grim, it had taken three years to come up with a plan, but not on the figures, not on the economics. Consistently throughout the week, this was presented as a media, rather than a business, story.
The same pattern continued on Today With Sean O’Rourke. In the studio to discuss the programme of cuts being proposed by RTE were the deputy political editor of the Irish Times, the leader of the Green Party, Siptu’s divisional organiser, and the head of the School of Journalism in Dublin’s Technological University. Panellists were barely out of the blocks before the union woman was calling for the “public (to) demand that the public service broadcaster is supported”.
The Irish public begging the government to take more money from them? Good luck with that.
Come News At One, it was again left to RTE’s arts and media correspondent to report on the story while Will Goodbody got 90 seconds to report on the creation of 600 new telecoms jobs in Dublin, which was important but fairly basic reportage. Why not ask him about RTE’s financial mismanagement? That is his field, after all.
The idea that public service broadcasting should be above soiling its hands with grubby economic realities lies at the root of this problem.
On RTE Radio One’s economics programme The Business last weekend, there was a long interview with David McRedmond, now head of An Post after previously being in charge of TV3. Asked about RTE, before any details of the current plan had been revealed, he said that the state broadcaster had “better come up with a new model” because the licence fee wouldn’t last forever.
He’s surely not wrong. Channel Four announced last week that it was joining the BBC and ITV in BritBox, the UK’s subscription-based answer to Netflix. RTE is going to get left even further behind if it’s not careful; but, while he expressed admiration for Dee Forbes’s international expertise, McRedmond also admitted surprise at not even being interviewed when the job of director general came up for grabs, despite keeping TV3 afloat during the recession and finally getting it back into the black, as well as turning round An Post.
Clearly his face doesn’t fit at RTE. Was he too “commercial” for its refined sensibilities?
The main lesson McRedmond took away from his time at TV3, he said, is that television is “not for you, it’s for your viewers, it’s for their lives, it’s for what fits into their lives at certain times”.
If RTE had the same fixation on delivering for ordinary viewers, rather than a small coterie of self-satisfied “opinion formers” in Dublin, it might not be in such trouble. Once again, though, Dee Forbes wasn’t challenged when, after saying that the national broadcaster needed to be the place where Irish people come together for big events, she immediately trumpeted the upcoming series of programmes about climate change, which will include a special live broadcast from the Dail of RTE’s Youth Assembly on Climate.
Is it really for this that Irish viewers, with all the choice in the world at their fingertips, are crying out? We’ll find out soon enough. If it turns out that they weren’t, it will be another small fortune flushed down the drain because RTE decided that it knew better than the general public, ignoring all the tried and tested evidence of business that the customer is always right. Opposition TDs inclined to weigh in behind RTE’s every demand would do well to consider whose side they’re on.
In his article for RTE on the job losses in Cork and Clare, Will Goodbody eloquently described the reality of manufacturing industry: “In the cut-throat world of international business, sentiment will only get you so far and numbers on the balance sheet will always win out”.
If only RTE applied that lesson to itself, rather than thinking sentiment will win out in the end just because Irish viewers have some fond memories of Bosco or The Late Late Toy Show. RTE is just having to do what everyone else has already done. The difference is that everyone else just gritted their teeth and got on with it, instead of presenting it as an outrage to be forced to live within one’s means.