More home-produced programmes, yes, but that will not be enough to save RTÉ, writes Muiris Mac Conghail
The confirmation by RTÉ yesterday that it is to increase its home-produced programming in its television schedules is a move in the right direction. It is also the only way forward if it is survive as the national broadcaster.
RTÉ television is against the ropes not because of competition, and certainly not from TV3, but because its home-produced programming has been lacking in both originality and quantity.
The imbalance in the ratio between income generated from advertising and that garnered from the licence fee has created a "satisfy the advertisers" strategy in the commissioning of programmes. Those audiences sought by RTÉ are those with disposable incomes.
True, the imbalance in the ratio between income from advertising and from the licence fee has been corrected for the future.
The future, however, depends very much on the present, and what RTÉ has being doing up to now has been largely to ignore half of the audiences presently available to it because of their disposable income levels. RTÉ is cloning the practice of commercial television services.
One thing about broadcasting audiences is that when you treat them badly they may not come back.
The reformation of drama and documentary will take about 18 months before it could even begin to show results. In the meantime the success of Murphy's Law on BBC shows the way the national broadcaster might have gone, but it chose not to take originality and creativity seriously.
You cannot undo the damage done in TV schedules in the short term with alienated audiences. The question is how much time RTÉ has before the national broadcaster becomes just one other service in a host of services to be established under the new Broadcasting Authority of Ireland (BAI) in a legislative framework to be introduced as a broadcasting Bill in the autumn.
In announcing the licence fee increase for RTÉ in December 2002, the Minister for Communications, Mr Ahern, committed himself to seeing through a major reform of public- sector broadcasting.
Yesterday he confirmed that it is his intention to proceed this autumn with that restructuring, which will basically mean that RTÉ will become a commercial State company with its own board of 12 directors.
RTÉ has already weakened itself with its self-imposed strategy of a commercially led TV service. The question is whether it will have the time under its current legislative frame to work through a transformation of its programming schedules before the commercial State company is established with a new core of directors.
I presume that the new directors will themselves be conscious of their commercial responsibilities. This would appear to mean that the exercise proposed in yesterday's announcement from RTÉ is going to be a nugatory one, a mere waste of time.
If RTÉ is supposed to revert to a position in which home-produced programming is to be at the centre of the television schedules, what then will be the function of a commercially led board of directors in the future framework in which RTÉ is to be located?
The Government, in my view, has decided to rid itself of a public-service broadcasting organisation and, for the future, to make RTÉ, or whatever organisation replaces it, a self-financing one, securing only a portion of the licence fee.
The Minister himself will decide, as he already has with his special broadcasting fund - and he can, as things now stand, decide in future - what percentage of that fund will be purloined from the receipts of the RTÉ licence fee to be spent on other broadcasting activities.
The critical decision by Mr Bob Collins to step down as director-general before the end of his term of office is to be noted.
Undoubtedly Mr Collins has been through a hard time in recent years, but the result of his premature departure may be to allow the abandonment of his post, with its far-reaching editorial powers, to be replaced in the short term by a chief executive.
The present, now complete, reorganisation within RTÉ provides for a series of stand-alone divisions each capable of being run independently of the other. In fact the whole of RTÉ is capable of being broken up into pieces.
The Minister has in his mind, I believe, the idea of a structure for broadcasting in which the Broadcasting Authority of Ireland will assume all the regulatory powers now held by RTÉ, the present RTÉ Authority will be reduced to the status and function of a semi-State commercial organisation, and a director-general will be appointed to the Broadcasting Authority of Ireland to run all of Irish broadcasting under its direction.
Mr Collins's stepping down now removes one obstacle to the changes envisaged by the Minister.
The Broadcasting Authority Acts give the Minister the power to determine who will be a successor to Mr Collins, or if there will be one, and he may indeed have been the last director-general of RTÉ. Retaining the position by appointing an acting DG may well satisfy the legislative framework of the constitution of RTÉ.
The current Broadcasting Commission of Ireland, whose role has so far been ineffective, could well be transformed into the Broadcasting Authority of Ireland, and its chief executive may become the director-general of that organisation. That gets rid of one organisation and downgrades RTÉ. One down and one to go!
The commitment by RTÉ to increase home-produced content must be seen in the context of major structural changes in the industry and of the ultimate possibility that the licence fee, and all that goes with it, including public-service broadcasting, is for the knackers' yard.
The Government is not concerned with the future of quality broadcasting. It is simply not a political question of any importance. The media industry is in a phase of acquisition and consolidation, and so what if RTÉ goes in that process?
RTÉ is not in position to guarantee the future of quality programming and thereby its own future. The arrival of new structures in the shape of the BAI will so engage its efforts to survive that regrading that its dynamic will be spent on structural infighting and not on quality programming.
Muiris Mac Conghail lectures in communication at the Dublin Institute of Technology