Two figures struck me yesterday. The first was the viewership for the TV debate in the United Kingdom between Prime Minister Rishi Sunak and soon-to-be-Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer: Some 4.8million people tuned into that, a drop of nearly 33% over similar audiences for the TV debates in the last United Kingdom General Election.
The second was the latest figure on RTE TV licence sales: They continue to plummet, with TV licence sales down 13.5% year on year for the month of May, and 12.8% overall for the year to date.
For some years now, it has been patently obvious that the market for traditional printed newspapers is dying, with every single news title in Ireland selling almost 50% fewer newspapers than it was at the turn of the millennium, despite an enormous population increase. Up until now, there have been few signs that traditional television might follow suit. Up until now.
In the UK, because an election is ongoing, the rationalisation for the declining viewership of TV debates is that people are simply less interested in Sunak versus Starmer than they were in Corbyn versus Boris Johnson – that people tuning out is to be expected, in the same way that fewer people might watch Portsmouth versus Lincoln City compared to the numbers who would watch a Manchester derby. The problem with this analysis is that it only holds if the great tuning out is limited to politics and nothing else. But it’s not. As Stephen Bush noted in the financial times last week:
The latest Doctor Who premiere was the BBC’s most successful drama that week — with a little over 4mn viewers. For context, when the Conservatives entered office in 2010, the show managed the same thing with 10mn viewers.
The final election debate of 2010, also on the BBC, between Gordon Brown, David Cameron and Nick Clegg, got 8.4mn viewers. The final election debate in 2019, between Boris Johnson and Jeremy Corbyn, scored just 4.4mn. The audiences for both reflect a deeper truth: that televised set-piece events reach fewer people than ever before.
There was, it should be noted, a similar decline over a similar period in Ireland: RTE debate viewing figures are hard to access, but at least one news report indicates viewership of the 2011 leaders debate in the general election reached 800,000 people live, but in the 2020 election only 650,000 tuned in – despite a much larger population.
The same viewership decline on television is afflicting essentially all programmes other than live sport (which is one reason why live sports commercial rights fees are soaring). Coronation Street has reportedly lost a third of its audience in five years, Eastenders something similar. The trend is clear – fewer and fewer people are tuning into their televisions, and are choosing to stream content on the internet instead. This, doubtless, is exacerbating RTE’s problems with the television licence fee. Some of the recalcitrance when it comes to paying the annual fee will be a genuine protest, but some of it will simply be a people opting out of RTE programming and not considering the channel relevant to them.
This all has consequences for election campaigns, and is, I think, a massively underplayed reason for the growing and observable disconnect between voters and politicians. Up until relatively recently, a politician in Ireland could watch the 6 and 9 news on RTE and get a broadly reliable sense of the news the country was seeing, and how, therefore, to calibrate their message. But what of the audience that isn’t watching that news, and is getting their news elsewhere?
One measure of the decline of the importance of television news and television debates in Ireland will be the performance of Niall Boylan in the Dublin European Election campaign: Every politico I know expects him to be in the mix for a seat (mandatory disclosure, my close friend Sarah Ryan is his campaign manager) and yet Boylan was not featured in RTE’s set-piece debate for the Dublin Constituency on Tuesday night. Somebody may correct me on this, but I think, were he to win, he would be the first candidate to win a European election campaign without either him or a same party running mate being granted that kind of televised exposure in the final RTE debate. The same would be true of Ciaran Mullooly in Midlands Northwest, also widely tipped to be in the final shake up for a seat.
One other notable feature of this campaign has been the way it has been conducted by the big parties: Previously, election campaigns might have been expected to feature multiple press conferences and set-piece events in the hope of nabbing a few minutes on the evening news. In this campaign, such events have been significantly fewer, but spending by the parties on online advertising has continued to grow. Fine Gael has not put Nina Carberry, for example, on television once. But it has spent substantial resources promoting videos of the candidate on the internet.
What seems clear from all of this is that the power of RTE in Ireland is slowly, but inexorably, declining – and there are very few reasons to expect this decline to go into reverse. In fact, it will likely accelerate as the population ages and the internet generation inevitably replaces a dying off generation that still relies on television as its main source of news.
The political effects of this are clear to see, too, in the polling: The younger the age group in the opinion polls, the more fragmented the vote. The older, the more loyal to Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil. Part of that is the radicalism of youth, for certain – but part of it seems intuitively tied to media consumption habits.
There’s an old news maxim which suggests that any headline that ends in a question mark, like the one above, can be answered with a single word: No. And perhaps it’s too early, just yet, to declare these elections the first post-television campaign.
But that day is coming, and much sooner I think than a lot of people think.