Sir, - Muiris MacConghail made some interesting comments about RTE in the course of his review of a book on the BBC (Books, September 11th). He asserts that RTE schedules are now driven by ratings, which in turn causes a fall in the quality of the station's output, a reduction in its range of offerings and the placing of important programmes at the periphery of its schedules. Two things need to be said about these criticisms.
Firstly, we must separate expressions of personal opinion from carefully researched arguments about trends in television programming. Media studies are now firmly established in Irish higher education and academics who publish large conclusions about broadcasting should be able to ground their views in quality research which carefully analyses output using methodologies widely accepted in the international academic community. I would be very keen to see the programme sampling period used, the longitudinal framework, the ethnographic organisational or content analytic methodologies applied and the analysis of findings on which Muiris bases his conclusions, before being convinced by his criticisms. I would allow without challenge a television critic to publish personal opinions about individual programmes, based on individual taste. But a serious academic comment on overall broadcasting performance trends must, in my view, be based on findings drawn from careful empirical observation; otherwise it is too impressionistic and subjective to be taken seriously.
Secondly, it is easy to be pulled into the myth of the Golden Age of RTE, in which the past is always more glorious than the corrupt present. In the absence of longitudinal research, the myth gets more powerful if we encourage it. The truth is that RTE has had to make its way through the contradictions and tensions generated by being both publicly funded and supported by advertising ever since the Lemass government of 1959 established it as a dual-funded broadcaster. (The 1969 book Sit Down and Be Counted gives an insider's view of these tensions in the infant RTE.) Of course ratings are important for RTE, and always have been, but so is the public service commitment to make programmes that go beyond the imperatives of maximising audience size.
My own belief, based on familiarity with its very robust internal editorial processes, is that RTE today has not allowed these contradictory pressures to get out of balance, even though it must now compete for viewers' loyalty with British channels that are vastly superior only in the size of their revenue streams. There is no room for complacency in RTE, but if we are going to knock its very significant achievements in what is acknowledged by most broadcasting professionals today to be one of the world's toughest same-language television markets, let's at least avoid academic dilettantism and assess its performance using credible research techniques, within the comparative framework of similar-sized dual-funded European public service broadcasters. - Yours, etc.,
Farrel Corcoran, Chairman, RTE Authority, Dublin 4.