As Ryan Tubridy and his agent prepare to appear before the Oireachtas today, it should be recalled that they are there solely because the television licence exists.
RTE is unique in the Irish media landscape in that it is a broadcaster that the public is compelled – on pain of prosecution and imprisonment – to subsidise. Nobody in Ireland knows, or much cares, how much the Editor of the Irish Times is paid, or what the expenses package that Virgin Media presenters avail of comprises. There are no scandals about the exorbitant pay and conditions in the many local radio stations in Ireland which provide invaluable public service broadcasting, and there are no recorded instances of Newstalk or TodayFM expending thousands on party flip flops.
The excess that the public has seen in RTE is scandalous precisely because it is facilitated by the public, and their taxes. If RTE was a private entity, performing well and generating the revenue that made such excess viable, then few would care, and fewer would know about it to begin with.
The justification for the existence of the television licence receeds and thins with every advancing year. We are told, without much evidence, that “public service broadcasting is a public good”. And yet, few can define “public service broadcasting”.
The basic idea, in so far as we can tell, is that public service broadcasting prioritises the needs of the public over the need of the media organisation to make a profit. And yet, when you think about it, this makes no sense: A media organisation that was not serving the public would make no profit to begin with, because viewers would turn elsewhere. If Virgin Media and Newstalk, to cite two examples, were not serving the public, then the public would switch off, and those two companies would fail. True public service broadcasting should, in fact, be profitable.
The other notion is that public service broadcasting should be free from bias or personal opinion: This is a statement that should make anybody who has ever heard Philip Boucher Hayes, for example, talking about bicycles or climate change, laugh.
RTE is not free from bias or opinion, but is riddled with it from top to bottom. Would an unbiased public service broadcaster sponsor political events like Pride Parades, as RTE does? Would it ban critics of climate policy from its airwaves, as RTE does? Would it be as timid and deferential to Government Ministers as RTE customarily is? Would it have parroted the Government’s line during Covid 19 with the enthusiasm that RTE did?
The truth is that RTE is a state institution like any other: As this scandal shows, it has often prioritised the needs and objectives of RTE staff over the needs of the public. And we should be honest about what RTE exists to do: It exists not to provide public service broadcasting, but to provide free to air broadcasting. Except that it costs more, every year, than a Netflix subscription. It is neither free, nor public service.
The licence fee does not serve the interests of the public in any readily identifiable way.
For one thing, it does not provide accountability – it insulates RTE from accountability. The licence fee ensures that RTE’s performance does not matter to RTE’s bottom line. Whatever the quality of the programming it produces, the bottom line remains underwritten by Irish families who have no choice in the matter. The basic fact is that the licence fee makes the public more accountable to RTE than vice versa: You can go to jail for not paying it, but no RTE executive will ever go to jail for producing “Dancing with the “Stars””.
Further, as the row over GAAGO shows, it does not provide public service: Thousands of Irish sports fans this summer found that their TV licence was of no use to them, if they wished to see their county play on the biggest Irish sporting stage. Countless stories of potential public interest are ignored by RTE not because those stories are not of interest to the public, but because they are not of interest to RTE.
Finally, the licence fee creates an unequal marketplace: One competitor in the Irish media landscape has been picked ahead of time, by the Government, as a winner. Everybody else – from we at Gript to those with a different perspective at the Journal – are left scrambling for crumbs, and starved of resources to fund genuine journalism, while RTE has money to spend on flip flops. It is subsidised mediocrity, and subsidised corruption.
No Irish person should ever be sent to prison for not paying it. And no self-respecting Irish person should pay it to begin with. A Government with sense would give RTE its Donnybrook campus, and their best wishes, and leave them to it. Let’s see what happens when their existence depends on serving the public, rather than being served by the public.