It is a truism that those organisations and individuals who have to work the least for their money will tend to be the most careless about how they spend that money. Ireland’s National Broadcaster, RTE, does not have to work for the hundreds of millions of euro it receives annually: That money is taken from the public, with the threat of sanctions, in the form of a TV licence. It is taken from those who watch RTE’s programming, and those who do not, in equal measure.
In return, RTE has no real obligation to provide a satisfactory service. Whether those who fund the station are satisfied with the programming they receive in return is of precisely zero consequence, since they are forced to stump up in either case. The same stale tired formulae, in areas from sports, to current affairs, to drama, can be recycled endlessly for a dwindling and aging audience without any fear of financial consequence for those lucky enough to have secured lifetime jobs creating the same five or six programme formats and switching around the same five or six “prestige” presenters amongst them.
The net effect is a national broadcaster that is entirely insulated from the opinions or discontent of the audience it is supposed to serve. Elsewhere in the public sector, the rivers of funding are at least tied, nominally, to political accountability. In the health service, for example, wasteful spending can in theory be countered by the voting out of office of the Minister for Health and the Government of which the Minister is part. That is true of the Gardai, Schools, and almost every other semi-state company. But here, too, RTE is different.
Because RTE is a media organisation, it is granted almost complete independence. Government Ministers cannot, generally, intervene in its affairs on the grounds that to do so would constitute an attack on the freedom of the press. As a result, RTE gets its millions insulated from both the audience, and from political accountability.
There is a deep and abiding contradiction between the idea of a public service broadcaster, and the reality of a broadcaster that gets gargantuan public funding whether it serves the public or not.
The result of that is now laid bare for all to see.
Plainly, Ryan Tubridy, for all his talents, is not worth more than twice what the Taoiseach is paid, which was his salary before last week’s revelations about the additional hidden payments he was receiving. In this sense, RTE has actually become the inverse, when it comes to salary issues, of many public sector organisations.
In healthcare, for example, the state often finds it difficult to recruit top tier consultants because those consultants can earn much more in the private sector than they can on public contracts. In the civil service, salaries for talented adminstrators are generally good, but a fraction of what a capable senior manager could earn in a private company. That is because political accountability to a Government Minister comes with a certain pressure to keep pay down.
In RTE, the opposite is the case: Because there is no accountability, the salaries for the inner sanctum of favoured staff are multiples of what people are earning in competitor organisations. Virgin Media, for example, does not have any frontline presenters earning the kind of money that Tubridy, or Joe Duffy, or Miriam O’Callaghan do.
The result is an organisation which tends to see itself as being above a petty thing like public accountability. RTE stars are not considered stars because of their ability to draw the public into compelling conversations and discussions, but because of their longevity and seniority. And yet, so tired are the public of these same faces and names that when it came time to replace Tubridy as the host of RTE’s flagship show, the organisation could not find even one person within its own ranks – despite the enormous salaries – that it trusted with the job. That speaks to an organisation that is failing to nurture, and promote, talent from within. When RTE itself had to examine whether its own stars were good enough to take on the flagship talk show of a small country, it found that despite the hundreds of thousands it pays these people annually, not one of them was up to it. The hiring of Patrick Kielty was as close to an admission as you will ever see that RTE has been over-paying bang average talent for years.
So where from here? RTE still has many friends – but those friends do not value it for the quality of its journalism, or for the programming it produces. It is valued instead as a bulwark against political radicalism of the wrong kind. This, indeed, is how it increasingly justifies itself – not as a public service broadcaster, but as a political service broadcaster whose job is to ensure that the little folk are not corrupted by “misinformation” and “fake news”. During Covid 19, it was an invaluable and loyal ally to the Government and the Public Health Authorities, acting openly more as a megaphone than a broadcaster. On matters like immigration and other controversies, it can be trusted to turn the spotlight of scrutiny on dissenting voices, while treating Government policy as inherently reasonable without question. On Climate Change, it has adopted the policies of the Green Party as unquestioned and literally unquestionable truth, with no dissenting voices permitted on air.
It is not so much broadcaster these days, as it is a state communications shop.
And increasingly, the public just isn’t buying it. Licence fee evasion (in my own case, it is not evasion, but active protest) is at an all time high. Its relative share of the TV audience is in a persistent decline. After a bounce during Covid, the same is true of its radio programming. The RTE player remains a barely usable disgrace. And management, it turns out, were begging for more cash while throwing hundreds of thousands at Tubridy in secret.
If RTE ever wishes to be a public service broadcaster, then it should be forced to earn the public’s trust in its services. Make the licence fee optional – then those who trust RTE can pay for it.
But leave the rest of us alone. Because a growing number of us want no part of this garbage.