RTE FIRST shone its innocent rays into Irish living rooms in the early 1960s, with a brief to provide public-service broadcasting - in other words, good quality home-produced programmes which would reflect social values, inform and even educate. Almost 40 years later, programming has changed dramatically, but the ethos is supposed to be much the same. RTE is heavily subsidised by the State through the licence fee, but it is also very dependent on the advertising revenue it generates.
With the arrival of the first Irish commercial station, competition for that revenue will get stiffer. Whoever gets the viewers will get the ads - at the higher prices that high ratings command. TV3 doesn't have the same aspirations as RTE. Its brief is entirely commercial; its function is to deliver the audience to the advertisers. It will do whatever it needs to get that audience - a sort of give-them-what-they-want ethos. If RTE begins to lose revenue to TV3, it may have to consider re-examining its own ethos. But do Irish audiences want "dumbed-down" stuff? Obviously a lot of people would prefer to chill out with a meaningless soap opera than grapple with Prime Time's coverage of world recession, but do we really want a diet of dross all day long?
The BBC recently announced plans to revamp its main news and current affairs programmes. Following extensive research into news consumption, it decided to increase the "emphasis on high minded serious journalism". Competition over there is much fiercer than it is here, so what does this say about British viewers' tastes? Possibly nothing. Perhaps the BBC has simply decided to target the needs of an elitist market - but one which is big enough, in a country of more than 50 million people, to take seriously. On the other hand, maybe a substantial number of people don't want mind-numbing entertainment all day long. A quick flick through RTE programming schedules on any given day - radio as well as TV - shows an emphasis on current affairs; it gives the impression that this is certainly the case here - for the moment.
And after all, TV3 is only looking for a very small percentage of the audience out there. However, the emphasis on entertainment in the media has grown over the decades, to the extent that unless there is some entertainment value, irrespective of the nature of the programme, we don't always pay much attention. The important issue is that viewers understand what they are watching - that they can distinguish, if you like, informative entertainment from entertaining information.
In some contexts this can look quite sinister. Presenting an important political issue as entertainment so as to please an audience may have the effect of detracting from the serious nature of the content. A human race of disaffected, apathetic couch-blobs looms.
Still if we know what the intention of each station is, we can make informed choices about what we want to watch. You can argue about the questionable values a commercial television station represents in a world where consumerism means misery and exploitation to millions. But at least with TV3, you know what you're getting - it's nothing if not honest about its intentions.
