RTE needs critics, not cheerleaders keeping studio seats warm

RTE needs rootand-branch reform. And I am better placed than most to point out the reforms needed because I am free to speak my mind.

RTE’s core problem presents itself to me every week in the course of my work as a part-time tutor in screenwriting.

Few of my students read hard copies of newspapers. Fewer still watch RTE.

They consume news and entertainment online.

The only way RTE could compete would be to make riveting programmes but that would mean recruiting real raw talent rather than their talentless relatives.

How does RTE get away with running a broadcasting model that is long past its sell-by date? There are two reasons: fear of retaliation and love of public sector broadcasting.

Let me start with the retaliation. Because I am effectively banned from

RTE — one outing during my three-year campaign against the backstop — I am able to speak my mind freely without worrying about keeping my chair warm in Montrose.

That worry is the most important inhibition in any public discussion of RTE. It is why RTE’s campaign to stampede us into giving it more public money has not been subjected to critical scrutiny by politicians and political correspondents.

One of the rare exceptions is Mark Paul of The Irish Times who caustically challenged RTE’s financial figures as follows:

“Strip out depreciation and RTE’s cash deficit is a mirage. Its operating costs have broadly matched income in recent years. Not bad for an existential crisis.”

That is why print pundits have confined themselves to populist attacks on presenters’ salaries. Yes, RTE presenters should not be paid more than senior civil servants — especially given their extra earnings from private gigs — but their fees are only a drop in the ocean of RTE’s total spending on salaries and costs.

Because of RTE’s bad reputation for behaving like a political party with friends to reward and foes to punish — and I am a case in point — politicians, pundits or indeed anyone who might need publicity, now or in the future, thinks twice before saying a bad word about a station with a laissez faire approach to broadcasting balance and fair play.

Let’s turn from fear to the love part. Love of a cloudy concept called public service broadcasting, a concept difficult to define.

Boiled down, however, public service broadcasting means the State foots the bill for putting out programmes of public interest that don’t have to make a profit.

I believe in public service broadcasting. But I don’t believe a state subsidy is the only way to achieve its aims.

And I certainly do not believe that RTE is either a role model for public service broadcasting, or the only form that public service broadcasting can take.

Let me give one example. RTE is partly funded by advertising which is why it has never consistently been able to maintain a consumer programme that names and shames.

By wrapping the worthy cloak of public service broadcasting tightly around itself, RTE has been able to attract support from liberals who think it’s just an Irish version of the BBC.

Moya Doherty, of the

RTE Authority, favours Lord David Puttnam to chair a discussion on the future of RTE. But after his recent acerbic exchange with

Ivan Yates on Newstalk, he cannot be considered neutral. In fairness he did not pretend to be in his follow up tweet:

“Well funded and impartial public service broadcasting is an essential cornerstone of a healthy free democracy — my support for #RTE and its independence from commercial or other pressures is absolute.”

Naturally I agree with the first part of his tweet — the concept of public service broadcasting. But I strongly disagree with the second part which supports RTE’s flawed version.

Fergus Finlay is another cheerleader for RTE. He began a recent robust defence by very fairly declaring a personal interest:

“A couple of members of my family work in RTE. They are among the more than 1,800 employees whose futures will be threatened if the company’s financial crisis isn’t addressed.”

His relatives undoubtedly merit their positions. But multiple family connections are common in RTE where something close to nepotism seems the norm.

In recent years some of my most able former film students, with successful careers in the independent film sector, can relate anecdotes about how their applications for RTE jobs were rejected in favour of less-qualified applicants who already have a relative in RTE. Again no monitoring.

Finlay also tells us that public service broadcasting protects us from “forces in the world right now that are both willing and able to interfere in elections and referendums”.

But much interference can be internal and ideological, as Sean Gallagher and Fr Kevin Reynolds (victim of RTE’s Mission to Prey film) found out.

Balance is the basis of public trust in public service broadcasting — the belief that the broadcaster is immune to political, commercial, and these days internal ideological pressures.

To my mind RTE shows scant sympathy for the balance which is the basis of public service broadcasting.

Balance means presenting the two sides of every argument and giving both fair expression. But in recent years RTE has retreated from balance to become a bully pulpit for its own PC fingerwagging — which merely buries issues so they fester.

Airing issues like racism and climate change, in a way that changes minds rather than closes them down, takes more talent than RTE has right now.

Fergus Finlay also misses the point that anything RTE can do, Virgin Media can do as well if not better. He writes: “In the past couple of years, I’ve seen high-quality drama on RTE.”

So have I. But the best drama on Irish television this year was not the pretentious Dublin Murders, but Virgin Media’s Darklands, due to the superb writing, acting and above all the camera work of the great Shay Deasy.

Finally, I reject RTE’s current campaign to stampede politicians and the public into pouring more public money into RTE without first showing us root-and-branch reform.

There are two things wrong with RTE’s approach. First, the classic Irish management style of setting your own goals and investigating your own performance. Second, a cosmetic round of cuts to stir public emotion in its quest for a broadcasting tax.

Let me specify five immediate remedies short of the radical reform that RTE needs to survive streaming.

First, RTE was set up over 50 years ago: it needs a new business model.

Second, it needs a new governance to ensure balance in current affairs.

Third, it needs a public service programme charter which specifies it must make programmes, not stars.

Fourth, it needs constant close auditing to make it live within its means. It gets €189m from the State and €150m from advertising and fails to break even from this vast sum.

Five, as an immediate cost-cutting measure, it should jettison RTE 2 and 2FM.

But these are merely stop-gap solutions. RTE will wither on the vine unless it embraces the kind of radical reforms I hope to return to in the near future.

‘RTE was set up nearly 60 years ago and needs new business ideas, new shows and not old stars’