THE DECISION by the Broadcasting Authority of Ireland's compliance committee to uphold presidential candidate Seán Gallagher's main complaints against the Frontline Presidential Debateand Today with Pat Kennyis a welcome affirmation of basic journalistic values and an important landmark point for the national broadcaster. It will provide some comfort to Mr Gallagher, although he will inevitably be left with the big, unanswerable "what if" question on a campaign that went into meltdown in the programmes' aftermath.
RTÉ’s apology to Mr Gallagher from director general Noel Curran, its acknowledgment of some serious errors, and its commitment to introducing new protocols for validating social media are important and welcome. Mr Curran’s statement makes much of the committee’s finding that it was legitimate to raise Mr Gallagher’s links with Fianna Fáil, about which no one will disagree, and that “no evidence would lead it to question the bona fides of the programme presenter or the production team in its approach in the programmes that were the subject of the complaints.” All this is true.
Live broadcasts test the capacity of journalists and editors to verify information quickly. But this does not detract from the reality that both presenter and production team demonstrated lapses in professional standards.
At issue principally is the failure to validate the tweet that allegedly came from Martin McGuinness's campaign team. When a denial came from his team, this was not relayed to the audience before the programme ended – although there was time to do so – or the next day on the radio programme Today with Pat Kenny.
Pressure on journalists, including those working in print and in the digital realm, to respond immediately to the incessant, ever-increasing discourse on social media outlets has increased sharply in recent years. But it will be disastrous for journalism if, in doing so, it accepts in the interests of speed or a "scoop" a lowering of its standards of verification. This in some ways is an existential issue for professional journalism. What distinguishes it from the blogosphere, what is its raison d'être,is precisely its commitment to reliability.
Journalists don’t always get it right, but readers’ expectations that we will try are crucial to their loyalty in the sea of information that is available to them.That RTÉ now recognises the need to reinforce controls is welcome. That the broadcaster should argue before the committee that the mass retweeting of the message gave it some added validity suggests the organisation has further work to do in changing internal attitudes.
The committee’s conclusion that no further investigation or inquiry is warranted because the complaint “was not of such a serious nature as to warrant an investigation or public hearings” is illogical. The programmes’ failures were sufficiently serious to affect the course of the election. They could hardly be more serious. But whether a public inquiry would shed any further light on the matter – the facts appear to be clear, their interpretation only, perhaps, a matter of dispute – is doubtful.