Mark: Can RTÉ claim a public mandate for reform, when it has muted its audience?

The public, as has been noted in many accounts of national public service broadcasting services in Ireland and well beyond, has long been effectively a “silent partner” in these enterprises: firmly cast in the passive roles of disempowered consumers – rather than active stakeholders or co-creators – by a combination of BBC-style institutional paternalism and the economic pressures of fiercely competitive media markets.

In 2019, as yet another Irish Minister for Communications kicked the fraught question of the future funding of the main public service broadcaster, RTÉ, into the long grass for reasons of political expediency, even as the existing television licence fee funding regime was showing alarming signs of exhaustion, I wrote in these pages that the broadcaster’s continuing failure to enlist the public into meaningful and inclusive conversations on the future of public service media in this country counted among the most serious threats of all to its institutional future.

Five years have passed. We have seen a long-delayed commission on the future of the media, a global pandemic, a land war in Europe and now a new institutional omni-crisis in RTÉ whose details hardly need rehashing here. And political and institutional decisions on Irish public service media’s funding model and the very shape and character of the service for many years to come are at last beginning to be made.

However, in what has been perhaps already the most consequential crisis in RTÉ’s history – one whose implications continue to play out in sometimes unpredictable ways – one thing at least has remained constant: the public absent and adrift from the conversations that concern them, cast in that familiar role as the much spoken about but lesser heard silent partner.

Sensitivities and signals

This is all the more striking because in recent times, the Irish public have loomed larger than ever over the broadcaster’s future.

For a decade, necessary action on what is widely acknowledged to be an inefficient and anachronistic funding mechanism in the television licence fee was forestalled by little more than abject political terror about the prospect of a water charges-style revolt against any putative replacement.

Then, RTÉ feared it would become an incidental casualty of the unpopularity of post-financial crisis economic austerity measures. Now, that dreaded scenario of the awakening of the sleeping giant of public disaffection has come to pass, albeit in circumstances strikingly different than envisaged.

Political reluctance to plug the gaps in the increasingly leaky funding model weakened RTÉ’s financial position for more than a decade, but it was the broadcaster’s own hand that dealt the fatal blow to the licence fee.

In the weeks and months following last summer’s revelations of abject corporate governance – from the disclosures around hidden payments to presenters to the ill-fated Toy Show musical – public opinion was made manifest, though not through the co-ordinated and highly visible protest movement previously imagined.

Rather, it was rendered through an aggregation of many thousands of individual decisions simply to refuse compliance with the licence fee mandate, leading to an unprecedented drop-off in licence fee collection that sealed the fate of the fee in its current form as well as opening up a black hole in the broadcaster’s balance sheet.

We don’t know and are unlikely to ever know what lay behind each decision to refuse or delay their television licence renewal. Undoubtedly for some it was a way to register anger at low standards in high places in Montrose; presumably there were others who, seeing safety in numbers, opportunistically took the chance to now ignore a charge they never liked.

But whatever the underlying reality, it is difficult to dispute the proposition that leveraging one’s own control over whether and when to pay the licence fee is about the most effective, if crude and unpredictable, means by which public opinion can be visibly brought to bear on RTÉ.

Indeed, even in its hour of greatest need, the organisation has set about the ostensibly central task of rebuilding trust with the public with little reference to and even less involvement of that public.

Take, for example, the question of “trust” itself, that watchword of the RTÉ crisis never far from the public pronouncements of director generals and ministers alike.

Setting aside the ambiguities of measurement and the dubious uses to which such data can be put (though we will get to some of that), it is instructive to note that despite RTÉ’s own characterisation of last summer’s events as precipitating a “widescale breakdown in trust”, any understanding of its scale and depth remains elusive a full year later.

That is, elusive outside of RTÉ itself, which holds quarterly survey data which would shed light, but which it will not share with the public on grounds that include – preposterously – the commercial sensitivity of such data.

Having long made trust expressed through a pollster’s metrics the almost sacred basis of the relationship between public and broadcaster, its instinctive reluctance now to share that information with that same public surely tells us something of the superficiality of the concept and the relationship it underpins.

But the matter of public access to a few data points is far from the only way in which that superficiality has been exposed by the RTÉ crisis.

Managing the messengers

Consider the role, or lack thereof, played by the broadcaster’s Audience Council body – a statutory committee of 15 members of the public, described by RTÉ itself as a means of enhancing communication and even accountability between the broadcaster and its public.

As a former member of the body I can attest to the ways in which its potential to act as an authentic and healthy conduit of public opinion within the governance structures of the broadcaster was suppressed by the RTÉ Board’s fear of the potential ramifications of facilitating even a modestly empowered and autonomous public voice from within.

I recall when in the wake of RTÉ’s last major crisis, the Prime Time Investigates defamation of Fr. Kevin Reynolds prompted the Audience Council to convene a public event in response to the issues it had generated. Initially conceptualised by members as an opportunity to bring together the public in an open and participative forum, RTÉ management reshaped the event into a substantially more élite-oriented affair centred around a public lecture headlined by an American broadcasting executive.

Even the event’s MC, the then Press Ombudsman John Horgan, was moved on the night to describe the sparsely-attended event in a UCD lecture hall as embodying an archaic and out-dated form of public inclusion in broadcasting issues that had a “touch of the 19^th century” about it.

A full decade later and with RTÉ now in the throes of a more all-encompassing calamity, I was not surprised to see that the Audience Council was still being sidelined as a vibrant and representative source of public opinion.

A direct inquiry to RTÉ about the activities of the group following the revelations of early summer last year yielded a startling response from its chairperson, who is not an ordinary member of the public but a member of the RTÉ Board itself. Their response seemed to not only confirm that the council had not met following the eruption of controversy but also that doing so would have somehow exceeded its statutory remit. Readers may wish to consult point 10 of Section 96 of the Broadcasting Act 2009 to judge how credible that is.

Then, upon the expiration of the council’s two-year term after the summer, the Board, as it has done in the past, delayed the replenishment of its membership until this spring. So, the body supposed to represent the voice of the public within RTÉ had not met at all in the nine months during which the broadcaster’s organisational future was turned upside down, and the public was having its say by other means.

In correspondence to the Joint Committee on Media, Tourism, Arts, Culture, Sport and the Gaeltacht on the subject last September, RTÉ Director General Kevin Bakhurst didn’t seem to see any issue with the Audience Council’s absence. It was, he said, after all just one of the many touch points they had with audiences, which also included extensive audience research activities.

This response tellingly confused the rather crucial distinction between public opinion born of at least nominally participatory and democratic means and that generated by the top-down, controlled and in every sense privatised machinery of audience research.

This was a conflation on display again last week when RTÉ published its long-awaited New Direction strategy, aiming to chart a course beyond its current travails and into Irish broadcasting’s second century and digital-first “third age”.

Measuring a mandate

“You spoke. We listened”, proclaimed a tweet heralding the publication of the New Direction plan, alluding to RTÉ’s recent public consultations on an earlier framework version of the document.

Those consultations, which included an open-access online public survey as well as one separately completed by a weighted representative national sample, were upon publication earlier this year lauded as providing “wide-ranging support for this new direction” with those same findings now liberally cited in last week’s more fleshed-out plan as evidence of broad public endorsement of it.

This included references to apparent clear public majorities, averaging about two-thirds, indicating support for two of the most eye-catching and drastic elements of the plan. The first is large numbers of job redundancies affecting 400 (or up to 20 percent) of current personnel, and second, a considerably greater emphasis over time on private-sector programming commissioning over in-house production, of the order of a 50 percent increase in spend.

There is more to the plan, which seeks to cut costs in some areas to spend more in others, than these specific measures. But while there seems little doubt that public revulsion at the developments of last summer was of a white-hot intensity it is much less clear that this seamlessly translates to what Bakhurst has described as a “compelling mandate” for these regressive central elements.

Scepticism about that mandate for a shrunken broadcaster with less production capacity might justifiably be piqued in the first instance that those in RTÉ whose careers will end as a consequence are likely to be those staff widely perceived as being least responsible for the problems that have now beset the station.

It is also a plan out of kilter with the wider mainstream of contemporary Irish public opinion on public provision more generally. Consider a simple thought experiment: is it likely that a broad public consensus would become apparent today for an agenda of swingeing cutbacks and partial privatisation in any other public service?

A closer look at the consultation process offers more concrete grounds for doubt about its sufficiency as the basis of the mandate RTÉ claims.

One telling statistic is the low level of engagement with the online public survey for the New Direction plan, which at under 3,000 respondents is a steeper than 70 percent decline on the almost 10,000 submissions recorded just two years prior in a consultation of similar scope.

This is more than a little curious given the stated purpose of the new strategy as the basis on which no less than new “social contracts” between public and broadcaster would be forged.

Given just how inescapable the RTÉ crisis was in 2023 as a subject of media and public discourse, does this level of apparent disinterest not give further credence to the idea of a public grimly resigned to the expectation that the future of RTÉ was a matter over which it was going to have little real role and influence in shaping?

The format and design of the consultation survey itself, too, give ample reasons to see it as something considerably less than a serious exercise in determining what people wanted from their public media. Those questions soliciting agreement or disagreement with the proposals to cut jobs and outsource production, for example, were presented to respondents with short descriptions which framed both in honeyed terms.

These measures, the preambles suggested, were merely about streamlining, simplifying and modernising the broadcaster and allowing it to better support the independent creativity of the nation. They demonstrate no attempt to put these startling proposals into any sort of context or even a hint of the trade-offs necessarily involved in the apparent shift towards becoming a smaller publisher-broadcaster, an outcome long sought by its critics on the right of politics and in business.

After priming respondents to see these measures as benign and desirable, then denying them the information to understand their contexts and implications, it is hardly surprising – and particularly so in an environment of widespread public anger – that RTÉ was able to secure majorities of survey respondents to sign on the dotted line for what amounts to a diminished and pessimistic vision for its future as a public service.

Finally, RTÉ’s treatment of the only elements of the survey which allowed respondents to venture their own views in comment boxes on what the broadcaster needed to do next to build trust and improve the service tells its own story about the abject nature of the whole exercise.

Any possibility that these spontaneous comments might hint at a more nuanced picture of public opinion was headed off at the pass by the method of data analysis itself. Converted to quantitative tabular form, and grouped under vague and generic themes with labels like “increase transparency”, “accountability”, or “quality content”, they only hint at the underlying sentiments involved.

That, however, is as good an understanding as we will ever get. According to RTÉ’s response to a Freedom of Information request seeking the original submissions, these records simply no longer exist: having been in, its own words, “electronically shredded” at source by the polling firm to which the broadcaster outsourced the work and before anyone outside the company or even RTÉ itself read and considered them.

Such an approach was justifiable, RTÉ subsequently explained, for various reasons, citing compliance with standard practices, proper ethical considerations of participant anonymity, as well as time and cost constraints. The “essential answer” given for the discarding and obscuring of this rare source of public opinion, though, was that RTÉ simply “didn’t require” in-depth analysis of the public submissions, given that the exercise was merely one of determining whether the ‘‘direction of travel” proposed had their broad support.

These scattershot excuses would hardly pass muster in the undergraduate social science research dissertations I grade as part of my job. Follow-up questions, sadly, were soon met by the all too familiar sound of shutters being hastily lowered at Montrose – their audience research department regrettably sending word that they did not possess the “capacity for individual dialogues with members of the public”.

This, I think it is safe to assume, is more a case of “won’t engage” than “can’t engage”, but it does reflect the larger truth that RTÉ’s capacity to listen to the public, whatever its willingness, likely is at a particularly low ebb. Now deeply in hock to a government with little apparent long-term vision for public media, and facing industrial unrest for the planned cost and personnel-cutting measures that government is effectively demanding, the public are at the back of a long queue for its attention.

Breaking the silence

And that’s a problem, because the public may not wait around to be called.

While other public services may well be able to sustain themselves by keeping their service users at a safe distance, it is much less clear that something as distinct as broadcasting, whose roles span, uniquely, from the democratic to the informational to the cultural and much else besides, can any longer afford to do the same.

In a climate in which growing numbers of the public are less minded to defer to the authority of media sources of all kinds, yet one in which RTÉ urgently needs to find new audiences, being perceived as a distant and unresponsive bureaucracy with little genuine connection with those it professes to serve may well be a fast-track to irrelevancy.

It will suffice least of all for the younger demographics it needs to learn to court as a matter of institutional survival, for whom Netflix is just a swipe and tap away and the case that public service media is something other than a 20^th century relic needs to be made from scratch.

Like the licence fee whose revamp or replacement appears to be imminently announced after all these years, the idea of the public as merely silent partner, heard only through the pseudo-democratic machinery of trust metrics, audience councils and consultation surveys, is an exhausted model that has had its day.

Like the licence fee, it is no longer able to credibly serve as a stand-in for something resembling popular legitimacy for public media in a more sceptical age and a more complicated world.

It will, however, likely prove difficult to dislodge. It is, in the end, a vision of the public conjured up not just by the corporate side of RTÉ but an outcome of the wider long-term compact between government, broadcaster and programme-makers who each gain, respectively, a measure of political, institutional and professional control from the arrangement. None of these parties seem inclined to want to upset that delicate balance in favour of an untested, more democratic but less governable alternative.

With no white knight riding to the rescue, it seems inevitable that it will fall in the end to us who make up that public to ourselves find ways to insist on our inclusion in ways large and small in designing and participating in the communication infrastructure that we nominally own.

Therein lies the best hope of reshaping RTÉ as a set of democratic services that better meets the needs and aspirations of the population in a way that neither Netflix nor social media can hope to. That is, if the decades cast as silent partner have not caused us to forget how to use that voice.