Sir, – Bob Collins's smartly-articulated article on the Broadcasting Authority of Ireland's Code of Fairness for News and Current Affairs (Opinion, April 9th) has fine principles, but lacks real delivery.
The only guarantee of objectivity and fairness in media is multiple points of view. Most EU countries have reduced their once all-powerful state media bureaucracies with a singular version of the truth into nimble, smaller, public service broadcasters competing with commercially-funded and diverse independent broadcasters. Across the EU, state-funded broadcasters have either been removed entirely from the ad market or had their share reduced to below 25 per cent.
RTÉ, alone among state-funded broadcasters in the EU, retains a dominant share (approximately 50 per cent in 2011) of the TV ad market, and last year the Competition Authority noted its concerns that RTÉ could be abusing its dominance, possibly denying TV3 and others a fair share of the market. Amazingly the BAI has yet to comment on the Competition Authority report, and has done nothing to address RTÉ’s out-dated dominance.
The Competition Authority noted "financing from licence fee money. . . provides RTÉ with an economic advantage compared to other broadcasters". The BAI's own Athena Media Report says "RTÉ is the dominant player in television . . . [In Europe] only Austria has a weaker commercial TV sector". Oliver & Ohlbaum, the leading UK media analysts, in a recent report commissioned by TV3, agree,"It is the scale and scope of [RTÉ] that is crowding others out of the market".
Despite recent efforts when TV3 has been more public service than the public service broadcaster itself (when TV3 broke into its schedule to bring a live special on the Government's promissory note decision; and most recently the broadcasting of the Sunday Independent 's Lowry tape), it is challenged to resource investigative journalism because RTÉ continues to be allowed the lion's share of the ad market and virtually all the licence fee. And if that wasn't enough, last year RTÉ also ran up a deficit of approximately €60m (RTÉ has not yet published the figure), more than TV3's total revenue. Oliver & Ohlbaum calculate that in 2011 RTÉ spent a competition-busting eight times more on programming than its Irish commercial competition could afford.
RTÉ will argue its expenditure is required to compete against the 200-plus channels which overspill from the UK. We can sympathise with RTÉ because TV3 also has to compete against these channels, but RTÉ should not be accorded some sort of Irish monopoly on the basis of a foreign infidels argument.
The BAI is currently considering the long-term funding of the indigenous broadcast sector under a review mandated by the Broadcasting Act 2009. This is the time for the BAI to deliver on the principles enunciated by its chairman Bob Collins. Will it continue to buttress a dominant State-funded broadcaster (RTÉ) to keep citizens “fully informed”, or choose the more-enlightened democratic approach adopted in almost every other EU country of facilitating media choice by liberating the commercial market for independent operators? – Yours, etc,
DAVID McREDMOND,
CEO, TV3 Group,
Westgate Business Park,
Ballymount,
Dublin 24.