One of the biggest problems with politicians, unfortunately, is that they succumb to human weaknesses just like the rest of us. That is, ultimately, the root of all political scandals: Human greed, human envy, human ambition, and human lust are usually to blame for the untimely downfall of political careers, when they occur.
But aside from the most base weaknesses, politicians suffer from a much less serious character flaw, but one which drives many of their actions: Opportunism.
To speak plainly, the Irish Government now has a golden opportunity to either put the boot into RTE, or, more worryingly, to put RTE into its debt.
Yesterday’s revelation that the licence fee payments in early July have fallen off a cliff may, or may not, portend a longer-term public rebellion against the licence fee. It is eminently possible that come September, the anger over TubridyGate will have dissipated, and licence fee compliance will have returned to normal. It may simply be that those whose annual fee fell due in July were acting out of an anger that was white hot, while those whose fees fall due later in the year will have simmered down.
On the other hand, these things have a way of cascading. And the public are smart enough to know that the state simply does not have the resources to prosecute everyone who takes part in an unofficial mass campaign of non-payment. If you don’t pay in August, then the odds are probably in your favour. And if the numbers keep on tumbling, then the cascade could become an avalanche.
If and when that happens, it will be the end of the road for the licence fee model.
A government governing in the public interest at that point would probably sell off RTE, or at least break it up into its constituent parts and wish it well.
But those of us who favour such an outcome should not delude ourselves that it would be popular.
RTE has two things going for it: Patronage, and inertia.
Patronage, in that it is a cash cow for a whole lot of powerful people and organisations. Would the GAA, for example, succeed in selling its television rights for the same price to Virgin Media? Probably not. Add in every other sporting organisation, and you have your first outraged lobby group. Then there is the political patronage. RTE might officially be neutral, but every left-leaning political party and lobby group knows full well on which side their bread has been buttered. Those groups will lead a fight to portray the demise of RTE as an act of historic cultural barbarism.
And inertia will be on their side. By inertia, I mean that segment of the population – still far too large to be healthy – to whom it rarely seems to occur that channels other than RTE exist. The houses where RTE goes on for the Six One news, and remains on until Prime Time is over, with a break for the light entertainment of Fair City in between. Those viewers are older, and they also tend to be the people who genuinely consider the likes of Miriam and Claire Byrne to be “stars”.
They also vote.
If the RTE funding situation reaches a crisis, as seems reasonably likely, then the Government will have two options: the tough one, and the easy and attractive one. Which one do you think they’ll take?
Bailing out RTE might be bad for the country, but it makes solid political sense. For one thing, it puts RTE and all who work for it in the Government’s debt. That makes it easier to exert the kind of passive editorial control that the Government loves asserting: Tying funding, for example, to specific programmes about Climate Change, or making encouraging noises about investigations of the “far right”.
For another, changing the funding model allows the state to extend its control over the entirety of the media even further – it is likely that any such funding model would also make vassal entities out of the independent broadcasters, by spreading the cash around to them as well. And you can do all this – use state funding to make everyone sound roughly the same – all in the name of diversity in media.
This is, I think, likely inevitable.
The problem will arise if, and only if, they try to pay for it with some specific new broadcasting charge, along the lines of the one proposed a few years ago, which would have taxed ipads and laptops because technically you can watch Netflix on them. If they try that, then there’ll likely be public resistance.
But what if they don’t? The state has enough money, at present, that it could probably abolish the TV licence and allocate €500m to broadcasting from general funds. If that happens, then nobody, aside from we nerds, will give a damn.