New figures released yesterday show that only 40% of the Irish public trust their national broadcaster, RTE. Yet, before you go popping the champagne corks and imagining that the long-dominant power of Montrose over the Irish people has been broken, consider that this was not the only figure in that survey.
In fact, the 40% figure – the four in ten of us who “Trust RTE” – referred solely to the corporate institution. Ask the public if they trust “RTE News and Current Affairs” and that figure skyrockets to 72%. Ask them if they think “RTE is valuable to Irish society”, and the figure grows again, to 81%.
Which means, per the intricacies of polling, that 9% of the public who walk amongst us neither trust RTE as a corporate institution, nor trust its news output, but still think it is “valuable”.
The gulf between the four in ten who trust RTE as a corporate entity and the 72% who trust its news output is easily enough explained: Imagine instead that people were asked if they trust, personally, Miriam O’Callaghan or the recently retired Bryan Dobson. When an RTE presenter who has been in your living room night after night for forty years tells you something, you tend to believe it. You feel that you have a personal relationship with them. And you might still tend to believe it, even as you believe that the “suits” running RTE are an untrustworthy shower of chancers.
The real significance of the figures – if you ask me – is that there is a difference between trust and love. The public, clearly, have fallen out of love with RTE as an institution. They might still trust the news output and the presenters, but that does not necessarily mean that they are any longer willing to tolerate RTE’s culture of high salaries and “stardom”. It will mean, I suspect, that it will be very hard to get TV licence payment rates up again because there is a difference between trusting Miriam O’Callaghan and voluntarily handing money over to her bosses who you do not trust.
The other thing here is that it is often easier to express your views about an organisation than it is to express your views about individuals. There’s almost certainly less risk of social stigma in being a person who doesn’t trust RTE the corporate institution than there is in being the kind of person who says they don’t trust the RTE news. The first position is the kind of thing that a respectable person can say and point to solid evidence for – the Tubridy scandal. The second is the kind of thing that risks marking you out as the kind of right-wing whackadoodle who probably thought that the Covid Virus started with a Chinese lab leak or who doesn’t trust the science on Climate Change.
But on the other side of the ledger, whether it be for genuine reasons of reliance on the biggest free-to-air Irish station, or because of fear of the alternatives, Irish people are still clearly very reliant on RTE. That is the only takeaway possible from a figure of 81% of people describing it as a “valuable institution”. Now, perhaps this is because of RTE’s GAA coverage, or because it does the farming weather forecast twice a week, or because you are one of those inexplicable people who genuinely finds Fair City watchable. Perhaps it is just something you grew up with, that you wouldn’t like to lose.
In this sense I think RTE is comparable to one of its biggest quirks – the televised Angelus. We know we live in a country where vanishingly few people stop at midday and six pm to pray the Angelus. We know we live in a country where fewer and fewer people attend mass weekly. Yet and all, every time the idea of dropping the televised Angelus is mooted, there is majority public opposition. People might not like the Angelus, and they may not even relate to it on a spiritual level, but they like the fact that it is there. Were it to go away, they would feel like they were losing something. And thus we live in a country that has secularised beyond all recognition in my lifetime, but where the Angelus is still there, with no purpose other than to be a little concession to the idea that we are fundamentally still the same country and that not all that much has changed. The Angelus is a psychological crutch.
So too, I think, is the national broadcaster on which it is aired. RTE does not offer better entertainment than Netflix, or better sports than Sky, or news that is any more functional than Virgin Media’s offering. It is a rickety old semi-state corporate that a great many of us perceive to be a gravy train gone off the rails, offering the news and current affairs equivalent of comfort food: The world told through the eyes and ears of people you think you know.
It is, ultimately, an abusive relationship: Think of a marriage in which one person offers the money and the attention and the trust, and the other person takes them for granted and gives them the bare minimum in return. That’s what you have with RTE and the Irish public. There is no real sign that it will change. You have to admit to yourself that you are in an abusive relationship before you can leave it, and you need to recognise a psychological crutch when you are using one.
There’s no sign that the Irish public are close to that point.