Analysis: The report of the Forum on Broadcasting published this week highlights the need for the public to pay for decent broadcasting, but RTÉ must be accountable to those who pay for it, writes Fintan O'Toole.
It seems somehow appropriate that Irish broadcasting is now regulated by a Department that deals with both communications and marine affairs. RTÉ has been in choppy waters for the last few years, and State broadcasting policy has been all at sea.
Preparations for the advent of digital television, supposedly a major priority for the last government, are almost completely stalled. RTÉ is in the doldrums, crippled by a level of licence-fee income that is well below that of any comparable European state broadcaster.
The commercial television and radio sector, with a few exceptions that are all the more notable because they are so rare, has delivered very little original high-quality programming.
And the sharks are circling. Much of the commercial sector is already owned by foreign-based corporations. The Murdoch empire is moving in, with Sky's purchase of the rights to the Irish soccer team's home games merely the most obvious manifestation of an aggressive long-term strategy.
In this context, it didn't take an outrageous level of cynicism to see the outgoing government's establishment of a Forum on Broadcasting just weeks before the election as a way of parking a potentially awkward issue on an obscure lay-by. The exclusion of the licence fee from the forum's remit added to these suspicions.
It is greatly to the credit of the forum members under the chairmanship of Maurice O'Connell, however, that they have produced a short, sharp and pointed report that is anything but a fig leaf for government inaction.
The document they have produced is certainly open to the criticism that it is short on detailed analysis. This, however, seems to be a deliberate decision. The brevity is in aid of clarity. The message is unmistakable.
On the one hand, the public needs to pay for decent broadcasting. On the other RTÉ in providing that service has to be accountable to the people who pay for it: the citizens of the State. Accountability, the forum members imply, is not just about money. It is also about setting out very clearly what the State broadcaster is supposed to do, and monitoring its achievement of those aims.
Public service broadcasting is notoriously difficult to define, but the report points to the most important element of any definition: independence. A public broadcaster has to be first and foremost a service to the public as a whole, and not to commercial or sectoral interests. This includes, as the forum underlines, its political masters.
The strong implication of the forum's analysis is that RTÉ does not at present enjoy this independence. It is not independent of commercial interests, because 65 per cent of its revenue comes from advertising. Advertisers influence programmes, not directly but indirectly. Programmes which appeal to the sectors of population that the advertisers want to reach will attract ads.
Those that don't deliver the right kind of consumers will not.
Nor is RTÉ free of political influence, especially from the government of the day which, because of its power to set the level of the licence fee, is able to punish or reward the broadcaster.
Both of these problems come down to the same question: funding. This is why the forum was right to ignore the ministerial request that it talk about anything except the licence fee. Revenue is at the heart of independence, and independence is at the heart of public service broadcasting.
The forum rightly suggests that the licence fee must make up a much larger proportion of RTÉ's income and that increases in the fee should be determined by a rational, transparent system of indexation.
In vindicating this essential principle of independence, the forum confronts the argument of the commercial TV and radio sector which has claimed that it should be entitled to a portion of the licence fee in return for making programmes that can be defined as meeting public service obligations.
It does not go so far as to point out that these companies have already received very valuable public assets - access to the airwaves, a scarce public resource - in return for commitments which few of them are actually fulfilling. But it does make the telling practical point that the only effect of agreeing to this proposition would be to fragment whatever remains of an indigenous Irish broadcasting output into a plethora of cheap programmes with little public impact.
It is heartening in particular that the forum has not fallen for the commercial sector's attempts to present itself as free-spirited arena beyond the confines of the bureaucratic State broadcaster. It notes both the local radio stations and TV3 have been let away with low standards so that they can establish themselves as profit-making machines. While it seems to accept this as a necessary evil in the short term, it warns that there is a danger of these stations becoming "a privileged cartel protected by the State".
What the report does concede to the commercial sector is that there is a fundamental anomaly in the current system of regulation. The commercial stations are, at least in principle, regulated by an independent body, the Broadcasting Commission of Ireland. RTÉ is regulated by its own authority, which is not in any real sense independent of the station itself.
This anomaly can be solved, as was proposed under Michael D. Higgins when he was minister for arts and culture, by the creation of a single regulatory body. Even if the idea itself is not new, it is significant that it has been endorsed by a new body, established by a different government.
Nor can the forum be accused of being soft on RTÉ. Its basic approach is to suggest that there needs to be a contract between the station and the public which helps to fund it. RTÉ's part of the contract is to set out clear commitments and to create structures in which the public can see what it is doing to fulfil them.
The strong implication is that failure would be punished, not just financially, but by a collapse of public confidence which would make the institution unsustainable.
This requires a massive change in the secretive and bureaucratic culture of the station. It also raises intricate questions which the forum does not really address.
Is RTÉ to answer only for its use of the licence fee, or is its advertising revenue to be seen in the same way? If the former is to be the case, how can the station separate out the different streams of income and apply them to different purposes? Do programme-makers need to know who exactly is paying for what, and to think differently about a programme funded from ad revenue and one funded by the licence payer?
These are not unanswerable questions, and the forum has done RTÉ a service in raising them.