Budget squeeze to add to jungle fever for new man in RTÉ

Overwork (and over-ambition) is usually a factor in editorial mistakes, and after Tweetgate and ‘A Mission to Prey’, RTÉ can afford to make few

‘WELCOME TO the jungle,” an RTÉ staffer tweeted Kevin Bakhurst, the broadcaster’s new managing director of news and current affairs. “Thank you,” replied @kevinbakhurst. “I like jungles.”

Following in the path of Richard Waghorn, another BBC veteran, who became RTÉ’s chief technology officer in February, and former Today FM boss turned RTÉ group commercial director Willie O’Reilly, Bakhurst is the third RTÉ “outsider” to make his way on to its executive board in recent months.

Notwithstanding director general Noel Curran’s confidence that it was the reputation of RTÉ news and current affairs that attracted such an “exceptionally strong field of national and international candidates”, it still seems a little surprising that a man who is the controller of BBC News Channel (originally called BBC News 24) as well as deputy head of the BBC’s newsroom, would be tempted by the RTÉ role.

Perhaps there is some facet of office politics that makes an exit attractive at a point when BBC News is moving offices and the organisation has a new man at the top (incoming BBC director general George Entwistle); or perhaps Bakhurst (46), a Cambridge graduate, really does fancy the challenge of a sojourn in the Montrose jungle.

But if there’s one thing everyone knows about fresh management challenges, it’s that the bigger the budget and the smaller the legacy issues the better – otherwise the challenge can all become a bit too, well, challenging.

On the budget front, Curran has stressed that news and current affairs, as a key division in RTÉ’s public service remit, will be protected from the brunt of the cuts the broadcaster is implementing as it seeks to reduce its €50 million deficit.

Its current redundancy scheme, an updated version of the 2011 programme, is still open to news and current affairs staff, however, and it will be an interesting reflection of morale in the department if disappointed internal candidates for the top job in news decide to cut their losses and retire rather than work under Bakhurst.

In any case, Bakhurst, who now has a say in the appointment of the new editors of Prime Time, The Frontline and the planned multimedia investigations unit, will be well used to dealing with budget squeezes, given the restraints on the BBC licence fee in recent times.

In late 2010, it was reported that the British broadcaster was forced to cut back its editorial deployments to a climate conference and a G20 summit because it had gone all- cameras-blazing into expensive coverage of the Chilean miner rescue. Earlier this year, meanwhile, executives indicated that BBC News Channel would scale back on the number of on-screen presenters.

Indeed, some of the artifice of television news, such as the placing of flagship bulletin presenters on location and the racking up of multiple live satellite link-ups to cover various angles of the same story, may be a less common feature of RTÉ News in future, used only for stories that clearly demand that newsroom authority figures (Bryan Dobson, essentially) are released from the confines of the studio.

RTÉ has been quietly developing its online, commercial-free RTÉ News Now service, adding bespoke mid-morning bulletins among other items. It will be interesting to see if the advent of Saorview, on which it has a channel presence, is enough to justify a thicker schedule. A fully fledged rolling news offering seems like a distant prospect given the financial crisis, but there are still plenty of ways that its new 24-hour expert can ask staff to provide content for the channel, particularly around major news events.

This may oblige journalists who shun the redundancy scheme to submit to the often self-defeating “doing more for less” mantra of the modern-day newsroom. Overwork (and over-ambition) is usually a factor in editorial mistakes, and after Tweetgate and A Mission to Prey, RTÉ can afford to make few.

No one is scandal-proof, of course, but it is worth noting in this context that Bakhurst’s primary responsibility, BBC News Channel, was not the originator of any of the broadcaster’s most awkward recent “gates” (Crowngate, Sachsgate or Andrew Gilligan’s reporting of the “sexed up” Iraq dossier).

A rude gesture by a weatherman is pretty much the closest the channel has come to generating controversy in its own right.

Making sure to thank almost everyone who tweeted him congratulations on his new job, Bakhurst has obvious social media credentials, suggesting he will engage with the public whenever there are serious concerns about an element of RTÉ’s coverage.

He has sporadically blogged about news ethics on the BBC website, defending the organisation on topics such as its reporting of the execution of Saddam Hussein, accusations that it gave too much screen time to the disappearance of Madeleine McCann and complaints that presenter Ben Brown was overly aggressive when interviewing a student protester who had been captured on video being pulled from his wheelchair by police.

His blog posts reveal a man who won’t be overly troubled by the more vexatious whines of media rivals. “BBC accused of neglecting Christianity as it devotes time to pagan festival,” ran one BBC-bashing Daily Mail headline. “It was Halloween,” Bakhurst observed. “A good chance, we thought, to explore the background to paganism.”