“It’s the pace of it,” says Deirdre McCarthy, RTÉ managing director of news and current affairs, and the woman in charge of Ireland’s largest newsroom.
Even as stories are being tenaciously verified or debunked, fresh misinformation and disinformation – misinformation’s deliberate, more pernicious sibling – keeps rolling in. There are, as McCarthy says, “a lot of opinions online all the time”.
Inside her office on the first floor of the RTÉ television building, there’s a bank of four television screens, with RTÉ and Virgin Media showing daytime programmes and BBC and Sky News gearing up for UK chancellor Rachel Reeves’s spring statement. The screens are always on, she says.
I’m here to “get clarity on Clarity” from McCarthy, who was appointed to the top news role at the national broadcaster in December 2022, having done the job on an interim basis since the departure of her predecessor, Jon Williams, that July.
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Clarity is a new RTÉ “mark” that will appear on journalism aimed at countering misinformation and demystifying complex news issues. First teased by director general Kevin Bakhurst last August, some of RTÉ’s digital output is already being classed under the Clarity strand, while television and radio audiences may hear it referenced there too.
“It’s about challenging disinformation. It’s about verification. But it’s also about explaining to audiences what we do, why we do it and how we do it,” says McCarthy.
Much of the Irish media has been working on this task, she acknowledges, and in RTÉ’s case, this has meant holding weekly meetings with digital teams and key correspondents “for a long time now”.
“I have heard remarks over the years, ‘but sure, fact-checking, isn’t that what you’re there to do anyway?‘. And, yes, standing over stories, reporting clearly and accurately, that’s what we do. But tackling disinformation has to be much more of a focus now.”
One side effect of the proliferation of news sources and online platforms is that younger audiences no longer have a unified sense of how or why news is produced the way it is.
As a result, what was once done automatically behind the scenes must now be much more overt. Reporting conventions, legal restrictions and the requirements of impartiality all need to be spelled out. Audiences need to be shown how the news-sausage is made.
McCarthy gives the example of court reports where the media is unable to name a person for legal reasons.
“I think older audiences understand the legal reasons, because they believe and trust in the institutions, but for younger audiences, they’re thinking, ‘What does that mean?‘”
I suggest that in this situation it might be claimed online that this is just RTÉ being soft on a particular type of crime.
“Yes. Or you will hear that we’re a mouthpiece for the State, or that we’re only representing a certain view. But I think it’s up to us to push back on all the things that legacy media are accused of and tackle this head on.”
Has the tide of both online misinformation and uninformed pushback to accurate reporting put the media on the defensive?
“I actually think it’s an opportunity. It allows us to open ourselves up and be transparent,” she says.
“There’s a reason for us being here. But has that got lost in translation? We need to find that space where we come in and say, ‘No, there’s a reason why journalism exists.‘”
Whereas once audiences came directly to media outlets for news, now the process is reversed, with everyone desperately trying to catch the attention of younger audiences mid-scroll.
For RTÉ, this has involved a concerted effort to increase its followers on TikTok, owned by Chinese company ByteDance, and Instagram, part of US social media giant Meta, while this year’s big focus will be Google-owned YouTube.
“We know the audience is out there, but they’ll not necessarily know about Prime Time, because they don’t watch TV schedules,” says McCarthy.
It’s “not about telling lighter or fluffier stories” on social media platforms, she stresses, but distilling complex news into shorter forms – sometimes as short a form as an eight-word push alert.
Unlike BBC Verify, the UK broadcaster’s “pull back the curtain” brand, Clarity (or Soiléire in Irish) has no dedicated staff, drawing instead on the RTÉ newsroom’s existing resources, existing teams.
“Proving disinformation takes time, it’s resource-heavy,” says McCarthy.
“It would be an easy one to look at Donald Trump’s administration and say an awful lot of the information coming out is misinformation or disinformation. But you can’t keep focusing on that because we don’t have the resources to do all that.”
What if, hypothetically, there’s a candidate in the upcoming presidential election who spouts untruths, will RTÉ set out to fact-check their claims?
In an election situation, all candidates must be treated equally, she says: “But that doesn’t stop us or any media organisation deep-diving into some of the claims that are being made. In fact, we have to do that.”
The phrase “within existing resources” pops up again, though McCarthy is conscious that she is “privileged” to oversee a large newsroom.
RTÉ News and Current Affairs currently has about 300 people working on television bulletins, radio news programmes including Morning Ireland, the RTÉ Investigates unit, Prime Time, Upfront, The Week in Politics, Nationwide, the RTÉ News app, special events, Nuacht RTÉ and – for now – Nuacht TG4. (Talks are continuing with TG4 for it to take editorial control of its own news service.)
[ Deirdre Ní Choistín appointed director general of TG4Opens in new window ]
The division’s headcount has been “consistent” of late, though will likely come under pressure as RTÉ seeks to shrink its total workforce by about a fifth by the end of 2028. Resourcing is already a union issue.
The National Union of Journalists (NUJ) told the Oireachtas media committee last April that RTÉ staff were concerned about their ability to cover last year’s string of elections, while Emma O Kelly, who chairs the NUJ’s Dublin broadcasting branch, said journalists were “absolutely stretched to breaking point already”.
Does McCarthy think RTÉ journalists are overstretched?
“Look, that is not the case, in so far as that is not what we’re asking them to do,” says McCarthy.
“It’s about making decisions earlier in the day, it’s about prioritising. You can’t ask someone to work 24/7. It’s always a challenge when there’s a breaking news story, because everyone is looking for everything asap, but that’s where we need to decide early whether to assign a second reporter or whether we need to prioritise.”
A correspondent “can’t do 10 platforms” but “can do five, maybe”, she adds.
Are you finding there are some stories that you just don’t have the resources to touch?
She sighs. “Hey, if I’m offered more people, and resources and money, of course, yes, we could always do more.”
It’s poised to be a busy 2025. The arrival of Clarity will be followed in the autumn by the long-trailed introduction of a new RTÉ News app, another element of Bakhurst’s strategic plan. Between now and then, it will introduce a news podcast called Behind the Story presented by David McCullagh, Katie Hannon and Fran McNulty, the trio who hosted election podcast Behind the Ballot.
Although the predicted surge in AI fakery did not materialise, it was “very much a digital general election”, according to McCarthy, whose previous roles during her near 30-year career at RTÉ include a stint as its political coverage editor at Leinster House.
RTÉ became part of the story during the election, not in relation to its future funding, but when Sinn Féin’s manifesto pledged to commission a review “into the objectivity of coverage by RTÉ of the Israeli genocide in Gaza and other international conflicts”.
The NUJ expressed “grave concern”, while then taoiseach Simon Harris said it was “an effort to undermine media freedom”. A “trust and confidence building matter”, was how Sinn Féin leader Mary Lou McDonald saw it.
McCarthy seems sanguine about Sinn Féin’s intervention. “It’s a manifesto, and it’s in the middle of an election, and things are said. Our job is to report,” she says.
How does she see media freedom in Ireland? Is it in a healthy place?
“I do think it is, actually. I think we are very different from other countries.”
Does she regularly field phone calls from Government people?
“I’ve been around politics a long time, and it hasn’t really changed. Fielding calls and attempts to, you know ... there isn’t more of that now. Sometimes very valid questions or queries are raised about headlines or particular stories. There’s always agendas, there’s always slants.”
She is comfortable with RTÉ’s use of the Global Ireland Media Challenge Fund, a Department of Foreign Affairs grants scheme designed “to support coverage of international issues”, which has been accessed by several Irish media groups. RTÉ has used it to help fund three international postings, two of which – held by New York-based global security reporter Yvonne Murray and Liam Nolan, its Warsaw-based eastern Europe reporter – remain in place. It has reapplied to the fund this year.
“It doesn’t interfere in any way with our journalism and what we do,” she says.
RTÉ, alongside the rest of the media, is waiting on the Government to make good on its promise to pass the Defamation Bill, which will reform a regime widely regarded as being weighted in favour of the wealthy and powerful.
McCarthy says RTÉ’s reporting is driven by the public interest and “that can, at times, mean you’re going against legal advice”. But lessons were learned from the Prime Time Investigates defamation of Fr Kevin Reynolds in 2011, with “a very robust editorial chain of command” put in place.
RTÉ must be open about the mistakes it makes, she says. “You come out and you say it, because that’s what builds trust.”
The good news for McCarthy is that trust in RTÉ news – notwithstanding the complaints it receives about its coverage of Israel’s war on Gaza “from both sides” – remains high.
Last year’s Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism digital news report, which was based on a survey of 2,000 online news consumers, found that RTÉ was trusted by 72.4 per cent, up from 71 per cent in 2023. This indicated that RTÉ’s coverage of its own corporate governance scandals – triggered by the discovery of undisclosed payments to presenter Ryan Tubridy – was sufficiently thorough to avoid reputational contagion.
“I can tell you, I’m not complacent about trust, and I do not take that for granted. That’s what would keep me up at night,” she says, before repeating it: “That keeps me up at night.”
McCarthy (54), who is married with three children, the youngest of whom is 18, is from Douglas in Cork and lives in Clonskeagh in south Dublin. As well as heading up news and current affairs – the division many place at the heart of RTÉ’s remit – she sits on the organisation’s leadership team.
One notable entry on her CV is a postgraduate diploma in conflict and dispute resolution from Trinity College, something I imagine must come in handy in her life at Montrose.
“Immensely handy,” she says.
Would it come in handy, perhaps, in the director general position someday?
She laughs.
“I’m delighted Kevin Bakhurst is here, absolutely delighted. I have enough to do with all that I’m doing at the moment.”
