On Friday last, the taxpayer funded national broadcaster, RTE, ran a story that might appear at face value to be a matter of public concern.
The Northern Antartic Peninsula, it said, was “turning green at a dramatic rate”. In 1986, RTE reported, a mere lone square kilometer of the 522,000 square kilometer peninsula had any kind of green plant covering. In 2024, that had expanded to twelve square kilometers.
Often, in media, how a story is reported is as important as the details of the story itself. For example, RTE could have noted that the Northern Antarctic Peninsula had gone from being 0.00001% green to being 0.00012% green over the past 38 years. This might at first glance appear to be a little less of a “dramatic rate” than RTE’s chosen framing.
This might simply be something we could write off as a mere disagreement over editorial framing, had the story not been followed up on Sunday by a bombshell report from Mark Tighe in the Sunday Independent:
“A government expert group that helped award €1.8m of taxpayers’ money to media companies wanted greater coverage of climate change and “the rise of populism” overseas.
Details of internal discussions about the Global Ireland Media Challenge Fund (GIMCF), a scheme aimed at boosting media coverage of “major geo-political developments and the changing nature of Ireland’s role in the world”, have been released following a Freedom of Information (FoI) request.
So far under the scheme, RTÉ has been granted €720,000, Virgin Media €500,000, and Journal Media €231,500. The Irish Examiner, the Business Post and Reach Media, the publisher of the Irish Daily Star and Irish Daily Mirror, all received €100,000 each. Bauer Media, the German owner of Newstalk and Today FM, is to get €55,000. Sunday Independent owner Mediahuis applied in 2021, but later withdrew.”
There is no dispute or argument in the Sunday Independent’s report about what happened here: No party to the story, from the media organisations who accepted funding to the Government department that disbursed it, denies that the State traded funding of media organisations for an expectation that those same media organisations would in turn cover particular stories of interest to the state.
Gript Media, it need not be said, did not apply for this funding. Indeed, there are no circumstances in which this outlet would ever apply for funding tied to editorial decisions about what news stories to cover, or how to cover them. Readers may disapprove – at times strongly – of our editorial decisions, but those decisions are ours alone, and not tied to the funding or approval of the Irish Government or any other.
For a small media outlet, the sums of money being discussed here can be the difference between existence and non-existence. The third-largest recipient of state largesse under this scheme, for example, is Journal Media, which runs The Journal and its various offshoot publications. It was widely reported last year that Journal Media was under some financial pressure. The human imperative to keep people in jobs and keep a business afloat is understandable, but this also exposes a media outlet to schemes like the one outlined by the Sunday Independent. How can readers of the Journal – or any other outlet named above – be certain that when they read that outlet’s coverage of “Climate Change” or “the rise of populism overseas” that they are reading independent journalism, and not the views of the Department of Foreign Affairs laundered through a client media organ?
Then there is the other question: All those media outlets who applied for funding under this scheme knew full well what conditions were being attached to that scheme. Gript Media, which did not and would never apply, was unaware. The Sunday Independent, which did apply but later – to its credit – withdrew, is the outlet which broke this story, which is clearly in the public interest. Of Ireland’s media outlets, only Independent Newspapers looked at the terms of the bribe and, it appears, said “not for us”.
Each of the others named – RTE, Virgin Media, The Examiner, The Business Post, Journal Media, Bauer Media – knew that the state was seeking to tie funding of the media to particular story selection choices. Each of them failed to relay that information, which is clearly in the public interest, to the public.
The public might be forgiven for thinking that the state had bought their silence on a matter of public interest.
This raises another question: When the media becomes reliant on state funding, the very relationship between the state and the media becomes a news story in and of itself, which the media is incentivised not to cover. Instead of covering the spending of public money to bribe media outlets to cover news the state wishes to highlight, those media outlets instead seek ways to serve the very agenda that they should be exposing.
Unfortunately, this pattern is likely to continue. No media outlet in Ireland – except RTE, which has a blank cheque – is insulated from the free marketplace in which we all operate. That marketplace, increasingly, is not delivering revenue for news.
That is why Gript Media has chosen – and will maintain – a subscription model. That model does not come without editorial pressures of its own, including reader boycotts and pressure from some sections of the audience on some news areas, but we continue to believe that this is vastly more preferable than having the state attempt to dictate our coverage of various items.
Those outlets who accepted this funding, by contrast, should not be trusted. The simplest example of why is the fact that each of them had this story, and chose not to inform their own readers. Self-interest, and the state’s interests, trumped the interests of their own audience. That’s what state-funding of the media does, and should do: It undermines public confidence in the very people who bring you the news.