The great thing about a crisis is that it enables people in power to do things that they would never ordinarily be able to do. Take Covid 19, for example: The outbreak of that pandemic saw Governments across the west assume for themselves “emergency powers” over public gatherings that would never have been accepted by the public in the absence of the crisis. Or take RTE and Climate Change: Climate Change has been designated as an “emergency”, and so on that topic, RTE makes no pretence at covering the issue even-handedly. In fact, and this bears repeating, if you are somebody – regardless of your scientific qualifications – who doubts that carbon dioxide is responsible for global warming, then you are not even allowed on RTE.
RTE is a media organisation, in theory. It is funded by the taxpayer because it is supposed to provide information to the public in a neutral, unbiased, and factual manner, allowing the Irish news consumer to ascertain all the facts and then form their own opinion about those facts. In order to do that job, it is necessary that RTE is fair and impartial. That is the reason why it receives hundreds of millions of euros from the taxpayer annually, and it is the official reason why you can be sent to prison if, like me, you flatly refuse to pay the television licence.
But how can you be an impartial state-funded media organisation and take political stances, as RTE regularly does? RTE is openly partial on the issue of climate change. It is now, also, openly campaigning for a political outcome vis a vis the Eurovision Song Contest:
A brief word about the Israeli Eurovision entry: That country is to be represented this year by 24-year old Yuval Raphael, a singer from Ra’anana, Israel. She was 22 years old when she attended the Nova Music festival on October 7th, 2023, when she and others were attacked in the Hamas assault on Israel that day. She survived by hiding, for eight hours, under the dead bodies of her murdered friends. She was one of eleven survivors from the group of 50 bodies in which she was found by rescuers.
This, then, is whom the taxpayer funded Irish national broadcaster are going to lobby to have excluded from the Eurovision Song Contest.
And, to what end? The policies of the Israeli state are assuredly not conditional on that country’s participation in the Eurovision Song Contest, any more than they are conditional on Dublin’s recognition of a Palestinian State or Michael McDowell’s apparent support for the Occupied Territories Bill. The state of Israel as a whole is entirely unlikely to be affected by participation in Eurovision. So this, in essence, is about crushing a single young woman’s hopes and dreams on account of her nationality. And it is an attack not being led by political campaigners, but waged by the very national broadcaster whose solemn duty to the Irish people is to report the news, not participate in it.
We are told that RTE’s decision to formally intervene in this manner is not one that comes from the top down, but the bottom up: The Montrose branch of the National Union of Journalists, by all accounts, has been applying relentless pressure on management to “take a stand”. But if you want to “take a stand”, then you should have picked a different career. Journalists, especially those working for a national broadcaster funded by the taxpayer to be impartial or objective, can do just about anything other than take partial and subjective stances on world affairs.
As for RTE management: We are told that the era of massive salary payments to RTE employees is at an end. Apparently it has been replaced with an era of massive political deference to RTE’s reliably left-wing workforce instead. It says little for RTE management that the station’s image as an impartial broadcaster is less important to them than keeping the radicals in the RTE canteen happy.
But of course, the old excuse to justify bad behaviour and power grabs is, and will be, rolled out: That the Gaza war is a unique and unprecedented crisis requiring unique and unprecedented action. This is nonsense on stilts.
It is also likely to be entirely fruitless: Ireland is, as this column regularly notes, an enormous outlier in Europe in terms of its attitudes to the Israeli state and the conflict in Gaza. So much so that a very mild statement from Simon Harris yesterday exhorting the Israelis not to proceed with their next planned operation in Gaza drew co-signatories from just five other countries, two of which (Norway and Iceland) are not even members of the European Union. Across the continent, the Israelis have little reason to fear that the RTE view will prevail.
But then this is as much about Eurovision and ownership of that cultural event as it is about anything else. Over the past two decades or so, Eurovision has assumed a role as being a kind of LGBT Christmas, drawing a cult following from mainly progressive, often homosexual, European liberals. The audience for Eurovision (at least that which travels to attend the event) is disproportionately left-wing and liberal, and that is doubly true for those who make Eurovision their careers and life’s work. The campaign here is not so much about excluding Israel as it is about making sure Eurovision continues to be identified as a progressive safe space, free from political views that its superfans abhor. It’s sort of a European-wide Late Late Toy Show, and RTE would never dream of having an Israeli on that annual love-in.
But the Irish public deserves better: How can RTE claim (though of course it did claim, even when making the statement) that its Israel and Gaza coverage is impartial and unbiased when it is also campaigning against Israel fruitlessly at a European level? Watch RTE’s coverage of the war, and you are now – officially – watching coverage from an anti-Israeli organisation. That is their public stance. It is now undeniable.
Media organisations are entitled to take views and editorial stances – as this publication does, for example, on immigration. But the difference is that Gript Media is not funded by the taxpayer to be neutral and ever-impartial, and you do not go to prison for refusing to donate to us.
RTE should be free to take whatever campaigning stance that it wishes. But it should be free to do so only when the television licence and taxpayer funding for its activities is ceased. This farce and debacle is yet more evidence of how urgent that de-funding is.