RTE under fire

It has been a torrid few months for the station, and worse may be to come. The libel of Father Kevin Reynolds, wrongly accused in the Prime Time documentary A Mission to Prey of fathering a child in Kenya, led to an independent inquiry that is due to report in a few weeks’ time.

Separately, the Broadcasting Authority of Ireland (BAI) has censured the station for using a “fake” tweet during the last live presidential debate, arguably destroying the campaign of Seán Gallagher, an independent candidate. Last weekend Pat McGuirk, an audience member at that debate, claimed an RTE researcher tried to doctor his question to damage Gallagher.

In addition to the Reynolds inquiry, three other investigations into RTE’s news and current affairs coverage are under way, and station executives face a public grilling at an Oireachtas committee. With both cabinet ministers and opposition parties also claiming RTE has an “ agenda”, can the station restore its credibility?

“IT’S easy to beat up on the press, and it’s even easier to beat up on the national broadcaster,” said Steven Knowlton, professor of journalism at Dublin City University. “There is a sense that it’s ‘my station’, run by ‘my money’, so I can claim proprietor’s rights to be angry at them. All that RTE can do is slow down, go back to basics, and start getting things right again.”

This analysis prompted a wry grin from one RTE presenter last week. “Obviously, that’s the plan,” she said. “But the criticism has just been relentless. Everyone is walking around looking at the ground, waiting for it to be over.”

The prevailing mood was also captured by the presenter Miriam O’Callaghan, who said the scandals had crushed morale. “It is an incredibly difficult time.”

While questions have been raised about RTE in the past, there is a sense that this time is different. Following the settlement of the Reynolds libel case, for the first time the state broadcaster attracted the attention of imediaethics.org, an international media watchdog. Since then, there have been four articles about RTE on the site.

This type of international attention is deeply unwelcome, but Séan McDonagh, of the Association of Catholic Priests (Ireland), says RTE has only itself to blame. “It’s not just the wrong they committed against Father Reynolds, it’s the way they reacted afterwards,” he said.

“They’ve spent years criticising bishops for hiding behind lawyers, and taking ages to draft responses to allegations, and for not admitting their mistakes. Yet, that’s exactly what they did when they got it wrong in A Mission to Prey. ] “Then, when they lost the libel case, they read out the apology at such a rate of knots that viewers complained, and they had to do it again. They are guilty of the same things for which they were rightly criticising the church: not facing up to their mistakes. It’s not very self-reflective behaviour.”

There is a tacit acknowledgement in RTE that its sulky response to the settlement of the Reynolds libel case did further damage to its reputation. The way Noel Curran, the director-general, dealt with the negative BAI ruling on the Gallagher tweet suggested that RTE was determined not to repeat that mistake. Curran spent 24 hours after the BAI judgment doing the rounds of current affairs programmes apologising to Gallagher.

This wasn’t enough to convince Fianna Fail that RTE had learnt its lesson. “RTE fought tooth and nail against the complaint Seán Gallagher made to the BAI,” said Seán Fleming, a Fianna Fail TD from Laois-Offaly. “For months, they vigorously defended their use of Twitter on the night of the debate, and said it was legitimate. It was only when the BAI ruled that they put their hands up and said they were sorry.”

Fleming said, in light of this, Fianna Fail did not feel it was appropriate for RTE to be carrying out an internal investigation. “There should be an independent person in charge, who is not a pal of someone in there,” he said.

Rob Morrison, the former head of news at UTV, who worked for RTE between 1987 and 1991, has been appointed to review “programme-making practices and risks, giving particular attention to the production of live audience-based programmes”, but his remit does not include investigating the circumstances surrounding the “fake” tweet.

There are suggestions in Leinster House that some of the politicians speaking out most vigorously against RTE are settling old grudges. Last February, Fianna Fail made a written complaint to Curran claiming its news and current-affairs programmes were “clearly biased” in favour of Labour and Sinn Fein.

Fleming rejected the suggestion that his party was trying to settle a score by calling for an independent inquiry. “I can guarantee that is not the case,” he said. “I had nothing to do with that letter, I know very little about it. Fianna Fail is not taking an anti-RTE stance here; it’s actually taking a pro-RTE stance. We believe it is in their own interests to have an independent inquiry and clear the air.”

But this has already happened, according to John Whelan, a Labour senator. “The BAI investigation was independent, and it found against RTE,” he said. “Despite RTE having to be dragged kicking and screaming to the table, it is absurd to suggest there hasn’t been an independent inquiry.”

Whelan said he didn’t believe the claims made by McGuirk gave sufficient cause for yet another probe. “I don’t think his claims are credible, quite honestly,” he said. “He made sensational accusations that were unsubstantiated and uncorroborated, but that raised a lot of questions. For example, why were these claims not made contemporaneously? ”

Whelan’s disquiet at the prominent coverage given to McGuirk’s claims mirrors the view in RTE, where many staff feel they have been unfairly singled out over the tweet. One pointed to footage of the audience an hour into the presidential debate, at a time when another candidate had just made a joke at Gallagher’s expense, with McGuirk laughing and clapping along.

Another RTE employee questioned why the BAI didn’t establish, definitively, the source of the original tweet. The Twitter account @mcGuinness4Pres was set up on the same day as the official Sinn Fein site and retweeted much of its content. There are suspicions in RTE that Sinn Fein may be behind this account, too. If so — Sinn Fein denies it — this might somewhat exonerate the broadcaster from the accusation it had used a “fake” tweet.

Even as RTE tries to direct the print-media focus to these points, however, the controversy keeps moving on. Last week, two other members of the Frontline audience expressed unhappiness at how the debate was handled.

While the credibility of RTE’s news and current affairs coverage is chipped away, others are questioning more fundamental aspects of its ethos. Leo Varadkar, the transport minister, has accused RTE of having a left-liberal bias. “It’s something that has been there for a very long time and I don’t think it has been properly addressed,” he said. “There’s a general liberal attitude [in RTE] which in some ways has to do with people not correcting for personal bias ... I think there should be an external analysis of the broadcaster, the coverage it offers, the questions being asked.”

Rónán Mullen, an independent senator, recently accused RTE of having an anti-Catholic bias, and has praised Varadkar for identifying the broadcaster’s tendency to be biased on certain issues. However, Varadkar’s comments prompted an incredulous response from Vincent Browne, a TV3 presenter, who said RTE’s coverage was “suffused with a right-wing perspective”.

Eoin Devereux, a media sociologist at the University of Limerick and author of Understanding the Media, isn’t surprised at the attacks. “RTE has long been a whipping boy for the entire spectrum of political persuasions in Ireland,” he said. “It’s interesting that those on the left, in the centre and on the right in Ireland all find fault with RTE’s output. So ideology, like beauty, must be in the eye of the beholder.”

Devereux said part of the problem is that many of those criticising RTE have vested interests themselves. “It’s important to remember that the Sunday Independent and Newstalk, for example, are in direct competition with RTE,” he said.

“Fianna Fail’s recent assertion about RTE’s supposed bias is also problematic. [It] does not acknowledge the multiplicity of voices that we hear on RTE radio and television.”

Devereux said his main criticism of the station is its failure to be biased. “RTE’s strength and weakness is the middle-ground stance it has occupied on many contentious issues in society. Public-service broadcasters, in particular, need to place more of a focus on the structural or societal causes of poverty and injustice.”

WITH the report into the Reynolds libel looming, the state broadcaster will be at the centre of the news cycle again in a few weeks’ time. Once that is over, Knowlton said it is imperative for RTE to go back to “good, old-fashioned, big-foot journalism” in an attempt to regain credibility.

“What some people don’t seem to appreciate is if RTE loses the trust people have in it, everyone in the [media] will suffer,” he said. “RTE might suffer the most damage, but it will affect the whole industry.”