RTE and politicians are playing us all for fools
The Government likes to pretend that it’s getting tough with RTE, but its actions tell a different story, writes Eilis O’Hanlon
AT Christmas, it’s traditional to raise money for the less fortunate in society. This December, RTE appears to have launched a festive appeal on behalf of its favourite charity — itself.
Appearing before the joint Oireachtas committee on communication, climate action and environment last week, the station’s director general, Dee Forbes, even responded to criticism of salary levels at the national broadcaster by going out of her way to stress what a “difficult” job presenters do.
Their heartstrings duly tugged, people across the country will surely be digging deep this Christmas to make sure Ryan Tubridy, Ray D’Arcy, Marian Finucane, et al, are kept in the manner to which they’ve become accustomed. RTE will be asking Bono to record a charity single next.
In insisting that TV and radio presenting is “not something that anybody can do, despite sometimes what the public think”, Forbes veered perilously close to suggesting that the public who pays all those wages is stupid, which is a curious way of convincing them to cough up more money for the privilege of being patronised. It’s a straw man argument anyway.
No one said being on TV or radio was an unskilled occupation. It’s not as hard as being a community nurse or a beef farmer, but those who can make a connection with listeners and viewers, such as the late Gay Byrne, have a rare and special gift. Most people on TV or radio are just journeymen, though, and what the public recognises is that the salaries paid by RTE to fill those positions are out of proportion in a small country where there are plenty of people who could do as good a job for more reasonable reward.
Forbes’s contention that the €160 annual licence fee is “fair value in comparison with the subscription costs to other media services” was an equally complacent response; media bigwigs in Donnybrook seem constitutionally unable to grasp the concept of a free choice, and can’t understand why people are happy to pay for Netflix but not for RTE.
What keeps coming through is a conviction that they deserve every cent they get from captive licence fee payers, and that the peasants should be grateful they’re getting it so cheaply.
Even after being given an additional €10m annually by the Government for the next five years, the immediate response from the broadcaster was not gratitude, but to insist that it wasn’t enough. The money is pocketed, then it’s gone, never to be seen again.
Was any of this put under the microscope by RTE itself last week? Don’t be silly. Forbes’s appearance before the committee was reported in the headlines, but analysis, in my view, was thin on the ground.
For RTE, the only question that matters is when the Government will give the broadcaster what it has demanded in the shape of a broadcasting charge on all devices that can access television programmes, regardless of whether or not they’re used to watch RTE.
Questions of more radical reform of Irish broadcasting are pushed to the sidelines, never to be spoken of in polite company; and what’s reprehensible is that the Government consistently lets them get away with it.
Forbes went to the Oireachtas last week with no detailed costings on RTE’s plan to save €60m, simply saying that the plan was sketched out in “broad buckets”. In response, the Government gave RTE more money, and kicked the issue of funding into touch by establishing a commission on the future of public service broadcasting. It’s the classic response of a Government which doesn’t actually want to do anything, but knows it must be seen to want to do it.
All the Taoiseach got in payback for the €50m over five years was a temporary pause in the relocation of Lyric FM from its Limerick studio, and even that message didn’t seem to get through on the first attempt. It needed further clarification before RTE agreed to even that modest request. If that was meant to prove the Government had put its foot down, it was a very small foot and it was put down with very little conviction.
The Irish public is way ahead of the politicians on the issue of the licence fee, but politicians can safely ignore them, because it’s never going to be a vote clincher one way or another. Elections are about the economy, housing, health, rightly so. How to fund broadcasting can always be put on the back burner. So the stasis drags on for years.
One reason the Government never gets tough with RTE is because the status quo works for them. Ministers may be put on the spot in a news studio now and again, but it’s all part of the great game. The Government gets to pretend it’s hanging tough by only giving RTE half of what it demands, as if that fools anyone, and in return RTE gets regular injections of other people’s money. All this is then reported with a straight face as if everyone can’t see the mutual back-scratching going on.
Next year there will be an election, and still the issue of how to fund public sector broadcasting remains untackled, despite Finance Minister Paschal Donohoe publishing new guidelines last week on the so-called “Public Spending Code”, which is supposed to determine how Government gets value for money in return for the billions which are pumped into public services.
The new code has been “reviewed and updated”, to “increase transparency”, and comes into effect from January 1; but what are the chances of RTE, which refuses to subject its own finances to proper scrutiny, ever holding the Government to account for how it spends public money?
Will it ever independently hold the public sector to account for how it spends the money it receives either? Instead, being part of the same problem, RTE broadcasters are happy to peddle the myth that the public sector disproportionately bore the brunt of austerity, when in truth it was protected from many of the commercial realities which swept like a tornado through the private sector.
Throughout the recession, the media analysis in RTE was to just put down the head and get through it in the hope of a return to the good old days of spending. They seem to have decided that time has come. The boom’s back, baby, and this time it’s even boomier.
Only for one sector of the economy, though. Incredibly, the latest report on trends in the public sector by the Institute of Public Administration (IPA) shows that there are now more public servants — 335,000 in total — than there were before the crash, while spending on public service pay and pensions continues to grow to €20.8bn in 2018.
It’s remarkable that this creep back to the ‘‘Hey Big Spender’’ days of the Celtic Tiger has been allowed to happen under the radar, without any discussion whatsoever.
To some extent, that’s because the Irish public is largely content with the service provided by the civil service, as the IPA report also shows, but also because it’s just taken for granted in media circles that recovery must mean another spike in public sector workers, rather than doing more with greater efficiency of numbers.
It’s for this same reason that RTE will never initiate a debate about radical reform of the health service, because, if one creaking institution that’s not fit for purpose in the 21st century can be deconstructed and put back together root and branch, why not RTE? It’s too risky. Best to leave that Pandora’s box unopened.
The political class plays into this mutually beneficial silence. Forcing a vote of confidence in Housing Minister Eoghan Murphy was a way of saying it’s all about one man or one party. Now the Opposition is planning a similar vote of no confidence in the health minister. There are many reasons to have little or no confidence in Simon Harris, but there’s also no reason to suppose that replacing him, or Murphy, would make much of a difference either way.
It’s theatre. Making it all about this person or that party, while never tackling the structural deficiencies in the system, simply allows other persons and parties to pretend that putting them in charge will mark a breakthrough.
The Government’s approach to RTE engages in this same devious sleight of hand. A commission on RTE’s financial future will now report by September 2020 — after the election, conveniently.
In the meantime, there may be the announcement of a referendum on capping insurance payments as a way of tapping into unhappiness at the threat faced to small businesses and ordinary families and motorists by rising premiums. If too afraid to make executive decisions, pass the buck back to the people and get them to do your thinking for you. Unless it’s about RTE, because then the people might make the “wrong” decisions.
If there was any doubt that RTE and the Government are in this together, it was the contention this week that the widespread contempt in which RTE is held is partly because it doesn’t praise itself enough. First of all, it does. Secondly, people are perfectly capable of making up their own minds about whether RTE and its star presenters are doing a good enough job to justify demanding money from every single household in the country.
The Government also believes the reason it’s not appreciated enough by the voters is because ministers don’t crow enough about what a great job they’re doing, for an ungrateful country. If they really believe this to be true, then they should both start boasting more about their achievements. Let’s see where that gets them.
‘There’s zero chance of RTE holding the Government to account’