Given that the country is reasonably small, and that over 750,000 people saw the online version of this piece from RTÉ, along with an unknown number (but probably in the hundreds of thousands) will have seen it on television, this clip probably isn’t new to you:
Consent, recognising abusive relationships and gender inclusivity are all topics featured in a new draft Social, Personal and Health Education syllabus that will make sex education mandatory for senior cycle pupils. Here, some young people share their views on the proposals. pic.twitter.com/az0JFnUK4J
— RTÉ News (@rtenews) July 15, 2023
Note the framing: “Some young people share their views on the proposals”.
The trouble is that the people in the clip are not just “some” young people: They are a very specific group of young people. They are members of a state-funded campaigning group called “SpunOut”, which is funded by the Department of Health and the Department of Children. Though the group purports to represent all young people in Ireland, a glance at the front page of its website shows where its priorities lie:
Here’s a member of SpunOut’s board, delighted with himself, understandably. Though given the spelling, perhaps SpunOut should focus more on the literacy curriculum:
https://twitter.com/rosspjboyd/status/1680149601100111872
SpunOut is also explicitly a campaigning organisation, and one which has openly been campaigning for a change in Ireland’s sex education curriculum. Is it a surprise, then, that its members would tell the public that they feel entirely positively about the new curriculum – the very thing for which they have been campaigning?
For clarity, there is nothing particularly wrong with allowing members of a campaign group airtime to make their case to the nation for the changes that they want to see to sex education or anything else. But it’s little short of disgraceful for the state broadcaster – which clearly sought these particular voices out – to present them to the public as the random and genuine views of normal teenagers representing Ireland’s youth.
There is little chance, it should not need saying, that they’d ever have granted representatives of an evangelical christian youth group to make the opposite case, without mentioning their perspective.
In recent weeks, much has been made in defence of RTÉ of the importance of public service broadcasting. Central to the value of public service broadcasting, we are told, is trust.
The case for state funded media is that outlets like Gript cannot be trusted because of our funding and our bias – when you read news on Gript, you are reading it through the filter of our journalists, and the filter applied by me as Editor. The theory is that people like me are pushing agendas, and will keep news and facts from you, the reader, in order to change your mind. RTÉ, by contrast, just give you the facts and let you make your own mind up.
The problem with this argument is that it is bullshit, as the example above proves: Yes, you get a particular perspective with Gript, just as you do with The Journal, or the Irish Examiner, or the Farmer’s Journal. But with RTÉ you still get an agenda, just one that is unfairly and unjustly cloaked in the notion that there is no agenda at all.
What would proper public service broadcasting look like, in the case of the sex education bill? It would presumably allow the Minister to set out the case for the changes she wishes to enact. But most importantly, it would outline the changes that the Minister wants to enact, and highlight the most important changes.
How many viewers of RTÉ know, for example, that the state wishes to teach their children that they have “white privilege”? How many viewers of RTÉ know that the state wants to teach their children about “harmful attitudes towards gender”? How many viewers of RTÉ were informed that there is a public consultation process open where parents can read the new curriculum, and submit their views on it to the Department of Education?
If the purpose of public service broadcasting is to strengthen our democracy and facilitate public debate and conversation, then this is yet another example of RTÉ failing the most fundamental test.
For the amount that its reporters are being paid, the public have a right to expect better. But then I think of the old man I met this weekend, living alone in his house, with a small television that rarely, if ever, changes channel away from RTÉ 1. How can the public expect better, when RTÉ is all they know?
It’s for that latter reason, I think, that all instincts towards compassion and sympathy for RTÉ in its present crisis should be swallowed and suppressed by those who do know. RTÉ does not deserve a life buoy, in its present crisis. It deserves a lustily thrown anchor.