Why is RTE wasting my €160 licence fee?
IPAID TV licence this week three months late, as per usual. The postmaster nearly took my hand off in the excitement which is probably understandable given how the number of licence payers has fallen off a cliff. I handed the €160 over, duly pocketed the documentation and once again rued the day almost two decades ago when I naively handed over my personal details to the powers-that-be.
My husband cunningly withheld his name and address on that occasion so I became the fool responsible for coughing up the annual charge for, if he has anything to do with it, as long as I live.
We have bickered about many things over the years but the singlemost recurring domestic issue is definitely the TV licence, namely his intransigence in the matter and my deepening well of bitterness.
To be honest it didn’t seem like such a bad deal back in the day, when we channel-surfed for hours on end, waiting for an episode of Frasier, or Friends, or to see who might pop up on the Late Late Show.
But no-one watches television like that any more, in fact many of us scarcely watch it at all. It’s all devices now and Netflix and instantaneous entertainment.
The changed media landscape, the cacophony of news bulletins and chat shows and dedicated sports and movie channels vying for our attention makes the licence fee seem about as obsolete as the trusty television set, parked in the furthest corner of the living room.
As Mark Griffin the secretary general at the Department of Communications told the Public Accounts committee this week, the TV licence system is ‘broken’.
In its place a new household charge or culture tax that factors in laptop computers and tablets has been suggested as part of a radical overhaul of the current funding model.
But on what grounds do politicians believe that the public will be any less hostile to a new-fangled levy than it is to the current licence fee or that mass resistance won’t be orchestrated like that which
SURE the national broadcaster produces many fine documentaries as well as fair and balanced news coverage and current affairs which in the era of fake news and billion-dollar advertising behemoths like Facebook have never been more important.
On the other hand it produces shows that fall disgracefully short of its public service remit.
You don’t have to look further than Caitlyn Jenner’s appearance on its flagship Late Late show for evidence. Why should taxpayers’ hard-earned euros subsidise a trashy reality TV star in the middle of a global book tour? The role of public service broadcasting is to provide an alternative to the lowest common denominator vulgarity that is routinely served up on commercial channels whose sole imperative is to make money.
RTÉ’s defence for slavishly reproducing lame reality TV shows is that it has to chase ratings as aggressively as TV3 because the licence fee can never support its ambitions. But if it trimmed its operation, tackled the chronic overstaffing and heavy bureaucracy that draws scarce resources from its core operations, it could do more with less.
It should also decide whether it wants to be a small but influential news and cultural broadcaster or the TV version of Heat magazine. Only then should it look to its funding model.