“That’s all very well in practice. But will it work in theory?” The quote, attributed (perhaps apocryphally) to Garret FitzGerald, supposedly illustrates the late taoiseach’s preference for airy abstraction over concrete action. But it might come in useful when considering the current predicament of RTÉ.
Obviously, things are not going very well in practice at Ireland’s national broadcaster. So the strategic plan outlined by its director general, Kevin Bakhurst, this week is understandably heavier on practicalities: getting rid of 400 jobs over five years; cutting spending by €10 million in 2024; imposing a salary cap on presenters; shifting more production to the independent sector; and so on. Most of this seems necessary, given the precarious financial situation, as do plans to improve governance and transparency in the wake of this year’s scandals.
But is it enough? RTÉ is almost 100 years old. As organisations age they accrete layers of cultural tics and peculiarities. They acquire physical assets – land, buildings, machinery – that may turn into a burden, and they can become fixed in rigid habits that are no longer relevant. At the best of times these would be symptoms of gradual decline. At a moment of existential crisis they can be terminal.
The broadcaster spends far too much time telling itself and us how valuable and beloved it is, despite considerable evidence to the contrary
Numbers matter, of course, but they’re not everything. In the unlikely event that all the targets set out this week are met, that finances are stabilised and that a new universal public-media charge is introduced, the question remains: what is the theory of the case, not just for RTÉ and public-service broadcasting but for all parts of what some dismissively call legacy media? Leo Varadkar was only half-right when he said this week that RTÉ would have to “cut its cloth to suit its measure”. That’s all very well in practice, but how does it work in theory?
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A hazard of raising this question is falling into a bottomless put of sanctimonious pieties, something RTÉ is particularly guilty of. The broadcaster spends far too much time telling itself and us how valuable and beloved it is, despite considerable evidence to the contrary. One way to avoid that is to cast a cold eye on the physical reality of where RTÉ does most of its business. Still stuck on that 1960s-style suburban campus with its anachronistic expanses of surface car parking and its listed but shabby modernist buildings, the place looks and feels a place apart, trapped in aspic. Bakhurst is probably right that it doesn’t make commercial sense to move off the site, but that doesn’t mean it’s not a weight around RTÉ’s neck and a symbol of its fraying relevance.
A public broadcaster without a mass audience has lost its reason to exist
The story of public-service media is a paradoxical one. Over the decades, companies such as RTÉ and the BBC grew their services on the back of rising prosperity and improving technology. At the same they time lost their monopolies, ceding audiences to new commercial competitors. The shift from monopoly to mere dominance was gentle enough to maintain the proposition (or illusion) of a universal service, the nation’s electronic hearth. The principle just about withstood successive challenges from multichannel broadcasting, home video, cable and satellite (although each of these chipped a little bit away). The idea of a universal service is why it’s a fallacy to split RTÉ’s output into distinct “public service” and “commercial” categories. If Dancing with the Stars is purely commercial, why does the ad-free BBC broadcast Strictly Come Dancing? A public broadcaster without a mass audience has lost its reason to exist.
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What happens when the audience becomes so fragmented the illusion doesn’t hold any more? One suggestion is to move to a pure publisher model, with RTÉ commissioning all its content from independent producers. Another is to separate content from platform and direct State funding to specific types of programme regardless of where they appear. Another is a retreat from anything that doesn’t meet a purist definition of public service – news, current affairs, cultural content, education – and leave the rest to the commercial sector. And there is a vocal minority view that the State should get out of media funding altogether.
While it’s hard to discern Bakhurst’s vision of what RTÉ output looks like in five years’ time, it certainly isn’t any of these. Before controversy engulfed his predecessor, Dee Forbes, her most contentious initiatives had been the closure of children’s programming and the attempt to shut Lyric FM’s Limerick base. These were terrible ideas that flew in the face of what a public-service broadcaster is supposed to be about. But the underlying principle – the theory – was correct. In an era of information overabundance, companies, including RTÉ, need to define their purpose clearly and ruthlessly. Unfortunately, it’s not clear that this week’s plan does that.
