The Government’s failure to devise a credible long-term funding model for public-service media has been extensively dissected in the 10 days or so since Minister for Media Catherine Martin announced its plans. There’s no value in rehearsing those critiques here, except to note that they have focused almost exclusively on the implications for RTÉ. That makes sense: public attention over the past year has been on corporate failings and financial fiascos at what we are still supposed to call the national broadcaster.
And after all, when it comes to cold, hard cash, the decision to “guarantee” (although no government in its final months of office can do any such thing) funding totalling €725 million to RTÉ over the next three years dwarfs all other public-service-media funds, which tend to be counted in the millions of euro rather than the hundreds of millions.
But in this respect, as in others, the decision to retain the anachronistic and inadequate television-licence fee and top it up with direct State funding remains rooted in a depressingly limited understanding of the contemporary media landscape. That should not come as a surprise; look back at comments by Ministers and members of Oireachtas committees on the subject and you’ll find few references to such pressing issues as the collapse of traditional ad revenue, the hollowing-out of local journalism, the decline of public trust or the as yet uncertain but undoubtedly profound implications of generative AI. The political class do know about the dissemination of hatred and abuse on social media, because many of them experience it every day, but their proposed remedies – if they have any – tend to oversimplify or misunderstand the challenge.
The decision to retain the licence fee is an explicit rejection of the recommendation of the Future of Media Commission that public-service media be directly funded from the exchequer. But, as the commission’s chairman, Brian MacCraith, pointed out to the MacGill Summer School two weeks ago, the commission did make 49 other recommendations, all of which have been accepted and many of which are now being acted on. These include a local-democracy-supporting scheme, support for digital transformation, a news-reporting scheme and a community-media project.
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Despite little fanfare, some of these have already gone live and could play a significant role in ensuring future coverage of courts, local democracy and other currently under-served areas of legitimate public interest. A new strategy on building resilience to disinformation is also on the way.
Meanwhile, there has been much comment on RTÉ‘s plans to move two flagship programmes off-site. The two, Fair City and The Late Late Show, may also be outsourced to the independent sector. Some critics, including my colleague Fintan O’Toole, see this as a deliberate stripping-down of RTÉ. I’m not so sure. As Laura Slattery pointed out this week, there may be good pragmatic reasons for the Fair City decision in particular, including the possibility of attracting section-481 tax incentives via an independent production.
Regardless, the real question, as MacCraith points out, is not whether to maintain RTÉ as the stand-alone entity we now know but what the overall media sector, of which RTÉ forms an important part, will look like in the future. In particular, how can it be supported and incentivised to produce those types of content that are of value to the public but not necessarily commercially viable? What can be done to stop the spread of US-style “news deserts” across rural Ireland? Or to make sure that a broad range of voices is heard? Those questions are what underpin the classic argument for support for public-service media, not whether a soap opera should be produced in-house or externally.
There are, of course, legitimate concerns about RTÉ’s plans. If, as its director general, Kevin Bakhurst, has indicated, the 1960s and 1970s listed buildings on the Montrose campus are too expensive to refurbish, what exactly is the plan for them? Two intriguing senior-management appointments, of BBC Scotland’s Steve Carson as director of video and Newstalk’s Patricia Monahan as director of audio, suggest that significant changes in work practices could be on the way. That looks like a signal of intent by Bakhurst that the next few years will not just be about salami-slicing and cost-cutting.
But, as MacCraith is at pains to point out, the time for talking about a public-service broadcaster is over. We need instead to talk about public-service content, wherever it happens to be produced.
