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The future of free-to-air publicly funded television is currently under the microscope in Ireland, Great Britain, Australia and Canada. And it seems as though each country is struggling with answers about where funding will come from, whether the public needs it, and if it should survive.
This dilemma has been brought into sharp focus in Ireland because, for the past nine months, a scandal has engulfed the Irish public broadcaster, RTÉ.
It began with allegations of secret payments by its previous management to its star presenter Ryan Tubridy to boost his salary. RTÉ accepted the findings by accountancy firm Grant Thornton regarding the payments. In June, it issued a statement claiming: “No member of the RTÉ executive board, other than the director general [Dee Forbes], had all the necessary information to understand that the publicly declared figures for Ryan Tubridy could have been wrong.” Since this time, Forbes has been too ill to answer questions in public about these payments.
RTÉ is partly funded by advertising and commercial interests and partly by the government. The scandal has pitched its present management before the Dáil’s media committee on live television and has led to 123,000 more households refusing to pay the licence fee than in the previous year, resulting in a loss of almost €22 million (£19 million).
In an annual survey by business consulting group CX Company in October 2023 RTÉ dropped to the bottom of a league table of trusted brands. The new RTÉ director general Kevin Bakhurst is working hard to right the ship, but his plans for the immediate future include 400 redundancies.
Irish public service broadcasting struggles are happening at the same time as other similar broadcasters are working out if they have a future.
In the UK the BBC has taken massive hits to its budget over the past few years – including having to use licence fee money to pay towards the World Service and to finance free licence fees for the over-75s. The government had previously paid for these licences but it then transferred the estimated £745 million cost to the BBC.
Tight budgets have meant cuts to programming, including to current affairs programme Newsnight. The licence fee system itself may not last for much longer.
In Australia, where payment for the public service broadcaster ABC comes directly from the government, there have been repeated charges of political interference in its reporting, appointments and funding. A series of blistering cuts of 15% since 2014 culminated in December 2023 in the axing of the popular current affairs programme The Drum.
Over at the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC television and Radio Canada), there have been decades of cuts to staff and resources. Like RTÉ it is a hybrid company, funded partly by the government and partly through advertising.
Its major challenge is its geography as it operates within the highly competitive North American broadcasting sphere and its mix of programming has less appeal than it had in the past. It has pledged to cut 10% of its workforce and axe some programming to answer its current funding crisis.
Main sources of news in Ireland 2021
So what is the point of public service media In Ireland, economist and journalist David McWilliams in the Irish Times claims that “we are witnessing the death throes of RTÉ” mainly because people’s media habits are evolving and “no amount of political special pleading is going to change this”.
Similar arguments are being made in Australia. According to the Reuters Digital News Report 2023, the ABC remains the most trusted media service (66%), but, according to the Australian Financial Review, less than two in three Australians interact with it each week.
While young people may increasingly pay attention to social media and influencers, they still return to trusted news online for big stories and emergencies.
In 2021, during the height of the pandemic young people even watched television news programmes, with the Reuters’ Digital News Report Ireland 2021, showing figures for 18-24-year-olds going up 13 percentage points on the previous year. However, this turned out to be a momentary blip in watching scheduled TV at the time it was broadcast and the following year this figure dropped back ten percentage points.
Is trust enough?
The true importance of public service media isn’t its popularity but its trustworthiness and its availability. All of these broadcasting services mentioned here top the Reuters Digital News Report’s ranking for the most trustworthy brands in their respective countries.
According to the European Broadcasting Union the core values of public service media are “universality, independence, excellence, diversity, accountability and innovation”. The EBU seeks ways to keep public service media sustainable and in public ownership and Ireland and Great Britain are signed up members of this group.
But another point of attack against these kinds of broadcasters is their timidity towards governments in power.
Goldsmiths, University of London, academic Des Freedman argues that the public service model, as demonstrated by the BBC isn’t necessarily “the most effective means of holding power to account” due to “structural and institutional factors that constrain the BBC’s journalism”. However, so far, nobody has come up with a concrete plan “to secure distinctly public forms of communication that are independent of both state and market”.
Reform would seem to be the only way forward – to seek public payments, but in a fairer way than the blunt licence fee. Finland provides an excellent example of a country in which you pay for public broadcasting in relation to your pay packet. In an ideal scenario, this revenue stream would be kept separate from government interference, as would appointments to management positions.
Public service media should not just chase the most attractive demographics, instead, they must serve all their nation’s communities. Innovation should be the guiding principle to keeping digital services up to speed and trustworthy at a time when AI may lead us all into confusion.
With the surfeit of disinformation and misinformation on the internet and social media, trust has to be earned every day. Transparency, independence and honest communication are the old-fashioned values that public service media – in particular RTÉ – need to demonstrate. With new Reuters’ data on trust is published in June, this will be a key test of whether RTÉ programming can still win the trust of the public.
Professor Colleen Murrell receives funding from Ireland's regulator Coimisiún na Meán to research and write the annual Reuters Digital News Report Ireland.
