The Flood Tribunal's findings on former minister Ray Burke highlight theneed to create a fire wall between politics and public broadcasting, arguesHelen Shaw
So Ray Burke was not motivated by greed in favouring Century Radio, but by political revenge. According to Dr Martin Mansergh, it seems Mr Burke may have been willing to sell the public interest for nothing in his desire to punish the public broadcaster, RTÉ.
In the recent Seanad debate on the Flood report, Dr Mansergh says the tribunal missed the "political context", which was that RTÉ was blamed by Fianna Fáil for the "very unsatisfactory" 1989 election results because of the "constant hammering of the crisis in the health services".
We owe Dr Mansergh a debt for publicly stating what is at the core of the Flood report in relation to broadcasting. If it was simply about money and greed, we could see it as human weakness. But the financial payment Mr Burke took from Mr Oliver Barry of Century is not his main offence against the public interest. What he did, more fundamentally, was to corrupt our democratic process by using political power and legislation to try to alter the flow of information in our society.
The decision of the Broadcasting Act 1988 to introduce commercial radio broadcasting services was fully in the public interest. RTÉ needed competition, and the public needed choice. But for the minister of the day to ensure, following a corrupt payment, not just how the competition would succeed, but how tightly RTÉ was handcuffed, was an assault on our democratic institutions. After all, the public broadcasting company is the only slice of media the public owns.
Mr Burke ensured a bargain-basement fee for transmission for Century, a potential saving of £2.5 million over the run of the contract. Given that the transmission network had been built with licence-fee funds, this was giving public money away.
But this was not enough. Century still had financial troubles. The minister then changed the law to try to ensure Century's survival by limiting RTÉ's advertisement revenue. His own department, according to the Flood report, warned of a £12-14 million loss per annum to RTÉ, and subsequent loss of quality, programmes and jobs.
Mr Burke's 1990 amendment to the Broadcasting Act controlled RTÉ's advertisements to less than five minutes an hour on radio, reducing RTÉ's revenues at a time when the advertisement industry was beginning to take off in Ireland.
The 1988 legislation also ensured that RTÉ was barred from providing any public offering in the local market, unlike the BBC or, indeed, most European public broadcasters, where public broadcasting has a role in national, local and regional service.
But Mr Burke would not be the first politician to want to undermine a public broadcaster because it was not judged pro-government.
Mrs Thatcher was frustrated from cutting BBC funding because the previous Labour administration had extended the BBC charter just before she took office. Presidents Nixon and Reagan attacked federal funding to US public broadcasting, in Nixon's case over coverage of Vietnam and in Reagan's over US involvement in Nicaragua. Indeed, federal and state funding to public broadcasting in the US has fallen to just over 30 per cent today.
In many ways, the US shows that if we in Ireland did not have a tradition of public broadcasting, we may have to invent it. Public broadcasting only began in the US in 1967 because of what was seen as a "market failure". It was directly seen as a support to the democratic process to "help us see America whole, in all its diversity", as the Carnegie report says, with the ideal of being "a forum for debate, controversy and a voice for the people". Things the commercial TV and radio world did not do.
In the US at present, public broadcasting is failing because of a lack of clarity in its mission, its vulnerability to political backlashes and insufficient funding.
The Irish Forum on Broadcasting, which reported two months ago, rightly recommended that the Irish public broadcaster should have clarity of purpose, i.e. a charter, security of funding through index-linking the licence fee, and independence from political interference or influence through a regulator.
But in the US the frailty of a knowledge-based democracy is evident today, with six huge corporations owning the bulk of the media landscape: General Motors, Disney, AOL Time-Warner, News Corporation (Rupert Murdoch), Viacom and the German media giant Bertelsmann.
The US media market has been deregulated since 1996, with further constraints lifted last year, and a flurry of mergers has led to mass consolidation across the market. The latest is the merger of ABC (one of the three network news channels and part of the Disney stable) with CNN (the cable news channel owned by AOL Time-Warner), which is expected to be completed by January.
For the US public, more media has come to mean less diverse and less independent choice in a weak and marginalised public broadcasting system.
Ireland can learn from some of the warnings of the US experience. The push to deregulate will grow in both Britain and Ireland, with increased pressure from the market to remove cross-ownership barriers so that one company can own newspapers, radio and television.
The need for sophisticated regulation in the marketplace will be different to the need to monitor the public broadcasting charter and the licence fee. The forum's recommendation that a new single authority can do both is difficult to see in reality.
The proposed Broadcasting Authority, if left to mind both public and private interests, would end up with the commercial side dominating its mindset.
The corporate world dislikes popular public broadcasters and will always seek to limit their remit to fulfil their social purpose. A public broadcaster must be reaching a broad range of the public daily. Much as RTÉ Radio 1 does today.
Some time ago, a consultant suggested that RTÉ should drop the word public from public broadcasting. "It's old-fashioned and has a negative ring." It's the Ray Burkes of the world who have devalued the word, not the concept of public service. We need to start debating what kind of society we want and what information we need to maintain it. There are some things which the public, rather than the market, should decide.
Helen Shaw is a Weatherhead Fellow at Harvard University; she was previously director of radio at RTÉ