Kenny’s hidden baggage is dangerous in public service broadcasting

We're all on the same page here. There are people who are OK and people who are not OK.

Fine Gael people are OK. They are the people we chum up with on air. They are our sort.

Pat Kenny’s broadcasting has had this tone for as long as I’ve been listening carefully. Before the last election, he seemed to swallow hook, line and sinker the belief put forward by Fine Gael’s Peter Matthews and others that we could default in some strategic way. Now that Fine Gael are in government and doing nothing of the sort he’s moved to their right, or their left, if you prefer. But even if Fine Gael are, in his view, doing the wrong thing, you get the impression he feels they’re the right people doing the wrong thing. He has become the voice of Fine Gael elder lemons who thought they had everything sewn up until the property and banking crash eviscerated their pensions.

I became keenly aware of what I regard as his bias during an item on the last Dáil in October 2011. He summed up the last government which established NAMA, transformed banking legislation, appointed Matthew Elderfield as Financial Regulator and Patrick Honohan as Governor of the Central Bank and presided over the largest fiscal consolidation in a developed country since the Second World War in budgets still considered “progressive” by the ERSI with the words “free cheese and nasal congestion.”

I don’t mention the environmental agenda of the last government because there was no chance Kenny would. The “right people” do not include those who point out that the way we live our life in the First World will incinerate the planet. RTÉ’s Today with Pat Kenny has hosted climate change deniers with whom Kenny has seemed to openly side.

This is dangerous territory for a public service broadcaster because there are such financial interests vested in the fossil fuel industry that denial is a multi-million dollar industry in itself. A leaked 2002 memo to the Bush administration from political consultant Frank Luntz explained “The scientific debate is closing.... should the public come to believe that the scientific issues are settled, their views about global warming will change accordingly. Therefore, you need to continue to make the lack of scientific certainly a primary issue in the debate.”

Today with Pat Kenny did just that, repeatedly. In autumn 2009 he introduced an item on climate change like this: “The climate change debate has been raging for decades, and there are still so many fundamental questions left unanswered.”

When one guest, Dr Wolfgang Knorr mentioned the work of natural “carbon sinks” in the earth and the ocean, Kenny jumped in with the comment, “So, to this point, the earth is managing to cope very well, the CO2 balance in the atmosphere is pretty well maintained...”

The environmental blogger and journalist John Gibbons got so fed up with all this that he sent Kenny a list of questions on climate change. A furious Kenny was on the phone to Gibbons early the next morning and the ding-dong lasted nearly an hour.

Gibbons then went on the attack in an article in The Irish Times lampooning Kenny’s broadcasting on climate change. Shortly afterwards he was invited onto Today with Pat Kenny with a climate change denier John Plimer and there ensued one of the worst radio dog fights in RTÉ’s recent history. Sunday Tribune radio critic John Foley gave the item half a page and summed up: “It certainly was great radio. Did it enlighten the listener on the climate change debate? Not a whit. Just as Plimer hoped, you suspect.”

This is very far short of the standard of journalism we should expect from a high-profile slot on public service radio. “Tweetgate” on RTÉ television’s Frontline was an accident waiting to happen. You can argue that it was the fault of the production team that Kenny challenged presidential hopeful Seán Gallagher with a fabricated accusation from a false tweet. You can even argue it was not Kenny’s fault the mistake went uncorrected while the programme was on air.

You can argue — just about — he was not in a position to raise the issue of the false tweet the next morning when he was ploughing into Seán Gallagher on his radio programme.

But what you cannot argue is that he has any excuse for not expressing contrition about a mistake made on his watch which queered the outcome of a presidential election. Even now, with Gallagher taking legal proceedings against RTÉ, Kenny remains unrepentant.

He is a very skilled broadcaster and he works very hard. He has faced great challenges in his life. But a need to be proven right and an inability to learn from mistakes are Kenny’s least appealing traits as a broadcaster. Between 2010 and 2012 there were more complaints made about his programmes to the Broadcasting Authority of Ireland than about those fronted by any other broadcaster on RTÉ.

His first outing in his new mid-morning slot on Newstalk was a Fine Gael Fest. First there was Bono, associated with Fine Gael since U2’s early days. Bono was probably responsible through his friend Time Europe editor, Catherine Mayer, for getting Enda Kenny’s mug on the front page. He even managed to skewer a plaudit to Richard Bruton into his interview from Africa.

Then came Ivan Yates, the refreshingly outspoken former Fine Gael minister turned Newstalk broadcaster. When Kenny asked him if he thought listeners would take him seriously as a bankrupt in certain contexts, he rightly responded that if he had “baggage” the listeners understood that and added: “The great thing about Newstalk is that the listeners get to make up their own minds.”

But the problem with Kenny’s baggage is that it is hidden. And that is dangerous in public service broadcasting in a small country in which everyone does not know everyone but our sort knows each other.

Denis O’Brien’s Newstalk does serious broadcasting – their political editor Shane Coleman has a strong Sunday Tribune pedigree — but its anchormen tend to be personalities with their own “baggage”. Kenny will fit this model if he puts his baggage in the hall.

It’s not public service broadcasting. Public service broadcasting is funded by the public to do public service. RTÉ frequently falls short of this standard, but when it comes to balance Kenny’s replacement in the mid-morning slot, Seán O’Rourke, is out on his own. After all these years of listening to him interview politicians, I still couldn’t guess how he votes.

If you’re out there shouting “You are pretty biased yourself, Ms White”, I suggest you look to the top of this page. It is headlined “Opinion”. That was never what Kenny was paid for out of the public purse and it is right and fitting that he no longer is.