If the 2023 Joint Oireachtas Media Committee meeting is now best remembered in Montrose as RTÉ’s own Battle of the Little Bighorn then it is for a good reason.
Not alone did Dee Forbes – RTÉ’s own General Custer – not turn up but the associated airing of stories about flip flops and dysfunctional governance left the Irish public in no doubt that the RTÉ media organisation had well and truly passed its sell by date.
But in some respects, the stories of RTÉ’s wild corporate excesses miss the point. The legacy media organisation which routinely hides behind the fig leaf of ‘public service broadcaster’ needs to be judged on its programming output and, more importantly, the number of viewers and listeners it is now actually attracting.
RTÉ tends to be extremely coy about publishing these numbers. The one programme it will always be sure to tell everybody about is the Late Late Toy Show which, in November 2023, attracted a combined audience of 1.7m viewers or about 33% of the Irish public making it Ireland’s most watched programme of the year.
But the Late Late Toy Show is nothing near your typical RTÉ programme these days. Average audiences for the Late Late Show are now more in the region of 350,000 viewers or about 7% of the Irish population. In 2008, the average audience for the same programme was about 683,000 (15%) while back in 1991 it routinely hit a million plus when the country’s population was significantly less than what it now is.
In fact, things look even worse for RTÉ when you look at the ratings for some of the station’s core programmes. For example, current affairs flag ship programme Prime Time is now more likely to attract an audience of about 200,000 meaning it is watched by just 4% of the Irish public.
Things are no better over in radio land. While the latest JNLR figures show that RTÉ’s most popular programme Morning Ireland attracts a listenership of 487,000 (9% reach), radio programmes like Claire Byrne Live attract 287,000 or just 6% of the population. It hardly makes for a convincing case that the Irish public are fully engaged with RTÉ’s programming output.
Perhaps, nothing better illustrates RTÉ’s own delusions about itself than that infamous 2020 advertisement The Truth Matters. In it, RTÉ got to role-play itself as the trusted public service broadcaster bravely countering the febrile world of social media and, in particular, far right misinformation and disinformation. Given RTÉ’s subsequent performance before the Oireachtas Media Committee, that hasn’t aged particularly well.
This was the media landscape that newly appointed media minister Catherine Martin inherited when she took office in 2020. The fact that she quickly set up the Future of Media Commission hinted that we were going get a fresh look not just at RTÉ but the Irish media in general.
However, with the commission composed largely of media practitioners and academics, it quickly became clear that the people whose views weren’t going to be represented were precisely those who have stopped watching and listening to RTÉ. As the audience numbers show, far from now being some tiny minority who live their lives down some social media rabbit hole, these people now make up the majority of the population.
There were no big surprises when the same commission reported. It gave RTÉ a glowing report and basically recommended that the organisation be put entirely on the state payroll. This appears to have been Catherine Martin’s view to begin with and the fact that the commission confirmed it was hardly a surprise.
However, publication of the Future of Irish Media Commission report in the summer of 2022 came just months before the skeletons started tumbling out of the Montrose wardrobe with the Tubridy payments controversy. This was quickly followed by the RTÉ shambles that started to unravel during the subsequent Oireachtas Media Committee hearings.
One of the questions that no one asked during these hearings was how could the Future of Media Commission have got it so wrong about RTÉ? It is also noteworthy that it wasn’t RTÉ’s own RTE Investigates or PrimeTime which uncovered the story about governance issues within the state broadcaster – so much for that narrative about RTÉ holding power to account.
A feature of this coalition government is that both Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael appear to view putting up with any number of random Green demands as the price they need to pay to stay in power. This has seen them implementing extremist policies on everything from immigration to gender ideology to climate change. In this context, it would appear that saving RTÉ, rather than reforming it, was Catherine Martin’s own pet Green project.
Pouring €725m of taxpayers’ money into RTÉ isn’t going to change anything in RTÉ and in three years time the organisation will still need fundamental reform. The only thing that Catherine Martin’s tenure as minister has shown is that RTÉ will divulge as little information as it’s required to do and equally, will deliver as little reform as it is required to do.
But back to the numbers. RTÉ always fought against the publication of the salaries of its top 10 ‘talent’ on the grounds of commercial sensitivities. With Ryan Tubridy departing to Virgin Radio in the U.K. and reports suggesting that his salary there is not within an ass’s roar of what he was earning in RTÉ there exists clear evidence that, when benchmarked against an international media market, RTÉ’s top earners are massively overpaid.
It’s much the same story with RTÉ’s audience numbers. It’s no longer good enough for RTÉ to simply declare to the nation that it is Ireland’s public service broadcaster. The organisation needs to prove that assertion by publishing the audience numbers it has on a regular basis rather than simply cherry-picking viewing numbers for particular programmes which show it in a favourable light.
This is hardly an outlandish demand. After all, in an age when RTÉ enjoyed greater public trust the organisation freely published its top ten programmes and their audience numbers on a weekly basis in the RTÉ Guide. Besides, after pouring €725m into the organisation, Irish taxpayers are now more like shareholders than passive members of the mythical RTÉ audience.
What the numbers now clearly show is that the relationship between RTÉ and the Irish public has fundamentally changed. That’s something that needs to be recognised by RTÉ. More importantly, it also needs to be recognised by media minister Catherine Martin.