Irish Examiner view: Public service broadcasting must be protected

A report to Government says short of increased borrowing or seeking permission to use the proceeds from the sale of land to cover current-account deficits... RTÉ will need to be rescued.

There are few enough foundation ideas as contested today as truth. Our capacity to accept objective facts or analysis is challenged every day. Doubt and disengagement are the consequences of myriad views fighting for acceptance. Trust in impartial agencies is deliberately undermined to make room for one tin-hat fantasy or another.

The anti-vaccination voices undermining efforts to quell the pandemic may be today’s loudest example of this chorus of corrosion. That Trump’s legacy and lies have achieved such a presence, such a lasting force in a society that should know better, is another disconcerting example. Greenwashing, as climate collapse accelerates, is another. This week’s publication of the Government’s Food Vision 2030, a plan that envisages food exports rising from €14bn today to €21bn by 2030, despite climate obligations, must be seen in that context.

In a world with an ever-widening smorgasbord of news sources, each with its own motivations and each competing with digital corporations with next to no transparency or oversight, trust in media becomes more complex. This is exacerbated by the declining percentage of Irish-owned media at the table.

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For over a century, one of the bulwarks in that process has been the privileged position, and responsibilities, afforded to public service broadcasters. It is not coincidental that, all around the world, these determinedly objective counterweights are being challenged in ways that make it increasingly difficult for them to be as comprehensive, as authoritative, as they need to be to retain the trust that underpins their role. Unfortunately, it is not coincidental, either, that as the need for their contribution grows, support for the idea of public service broadcasting seems at a dangerously low ebb.

RTÉ Director-General Dee Forbes. Photo: RollingNews.ie

RTÉ is caught in that maelstrom too. The organisation has weathered financial difficulties for many years. It has shed staff and property, it has remade itself, but a report submitted to Government warns that the broadcaster faces an “existential” crisis and acute financial problems. The report warns that RTÉ will be “left, in the medium term, with very limited room for manoeuvre, if it is not allocated a significant increase in public funding” and, “short of increased borrowing or seeking permission to use the proceeds from the land sale to cover current-account deficits . . . RTÉ will need to be rescued.”

This issue has been in play since RTÉ first broadcast in colour in 1968, yet the necessary political will to resolve these obligations has not materialised. This long-fingering is not surprising in a political culture where managing the message is regarded as almost as important as the message. That this culture is happy to focus on the hubris and shortcomings of RTÉ is a reality, too, but our democracy would be all the poorer, and even more vulnerable, if the space and function entrusted to public-service broadcasting were closed down, or lost to alternatives with their own objectives. QAnon TV anyone? It is in everyone’s interests that RTÉ, in whatever guise, is strong enough to offer a credible warts-and-all view of society. The organisation should be resourced to do just that and preferably before someone has to decide whether to close Raidió na Gaeltachta or Lyric FM.