RTE is a public broadcasting service and as such has a specific brief. When he was appointed as director general about three years ago, Bob Collins explained this brief: "It is crucial to the life of this society and the life of this democracy that there is a very solid public broadcasting service which has the capacity to accommodate in its schedules a very wide range of programming; comprehensive, independent news; vigorous current affairs; significant documentaries."
In an increasingly competitive world, where the competition has a commercial brief, surviving can be difficult.
"We are in competition with commercial stations for programme rights, audiences and advertising revenue," Collins says. "It is absolutely inconceivable that RTE would abandon its public service role because of increasing competition."
And yet the station has been severely criticised for an increasing reliance on foreign productions - programmes like Friends and ER, which reflect the ethos of commercial networks in the US. At the same time it is dropping relatively cheap programmes like Later with Finlay and Gallagher and Later with John Kelly, which would seem ideal public service material.
Looking at public service broadcasting in the United States - where it is very much a minority interest - The Nation remarked: "Forced to cope with unstable revenues and rising costs, every level of public broadcasting's Byzantine structure has devised some kind of commercial scheme, raising disturbing questions about whether commercialism has overtaken public broadcasting programmes, robbing them of their intended uniqueness."
RTE already makes most of its revenue from advertising, and uses direct sponsorship as a way of financing certain programmes. As the competition with commercial stations increases, perhaps predictions about the future of public broadcasting in America made by The Nation will soon apply here: "If public broadcasting continues to move towards full-blown commercialisation . . . it will leave unfilled the vacuum for creative, challenging programming."
