Bad spending habits show RTÉ is all talk
With all the shenanigans in RTÉ it’s hardly surprising that six in 10 Irish people want to see the licence fee scrapped, as a survey by Taxback.com revealed this week.
Taxback attributed the backlash to massive public disquiet about pay and governance at the national broadcaster, as well as concerns around how taxpayer money is being spent.
And the controversies just keep coming as the public learns more and more about how RTÉ spends our money.
The €240,000 contract for a photographer to take a few snaps of Fair City was one example that shocked many people.
Others in the audio visual industry are well aware it has two types of quotes: one for RTÉ and another (much lower) for anyone else.
I enquired a few years ago about hiring a sound studio for a project I was working on and was quoted what I thought was a fairly extortionate sum.
When I pointed out who it was for, I was told ‘Oh, that was the RTÉ price’, before being quoted a sum over 50% less.
The Taxback.com survey also showed around a fifth of people did not care about ‘public service broadcasting’.
Little wonder. It is so vaguely defined as to be practically meaningless.
An RTÉ statement waffles a bit about ‘diversity’, ‘creativity’, ‘universality’, ‘excellence’ and ‘innovation’. Sure what commercial company wouldn’t aspire to those ideals?
It also declares that it is ‘independent from political, commercial and other influences’.
Really? It is raking in €152m in commercial income every year. Yet it doesn’t have any commercial influences on its behaviour? How is that even possible?
And how does it increasingly depend on ever vaster sums
from the Government yet remain independent from political interference? The Government holds a sword of Damocles over RTÉ’s head. Has it never had to take that into account? Wasn’t a highly respected health policy critic dropped from The Late Late
Show once after a phone call, for example?
RTÉ’s excellent news and investigative units are cited as examples of its public service broadcasting. But any big organisation worth its salt would do the same. There are many other excellent news outfits run for a fraction of that money – and often braver too when it comes to legal and other threats RTÉ should be better able to deal with.
What else is there? The Angelus? Party conferences that few want to watch and are now being cancelled apparently?
All of that costs a pittance out of €196m in licence fee money. Most of this seems to go on commercial television like sending Dermot Bannon off to oogle rich people’s homes around the world. Or splashing out millions on glitzy BBCoriginated shows like Dancing
Even the notion of paying stars like Ryan Tubridy more than half a million a year – while hiding additional benefits – runs contrary to what most people would regard as ‘public service’.
TG4 and Virgin are much tighter ships run for a fraction of what RTÉ costs while delivering plenty of public service broadcasting by RTÉ’s definition (and arguably more than RTÉ in the case of TG4).
RTÉ is caught between two stools: commercial and public service television.
Its heart – spending patterns would suggest – seems to be more in the former camp, while paying lip service to the latter.