Bias and the National Broadcaster

At first glance, the front page story in Saturday’s Irish Independent was a delicious revelation that, for all their bien-pensant rhetoric, the Irish Labour Party are just as venal as the next party when it comes to the dirty of game of politics.

The Indo reported that there had been a spat between Fine Gael and Labour over who would represent the Government advocating a Yes vote on the Prime Time debate tomorrow night. RTÉ wanted Leo Varadkar, the first Minister in the history of the state to come out as a gay man, but there was an agreement already in place between Fine Gael and Labour that it would be two Fine Gael, one Labour over the course of three RTÉ debates. Fine Gael had already used up their quota with Frances Fitzgerald and Simon Coveney, so Alex White was going on Prime Time and that was bloody that.

Great story. Not front page news, of course, but front page news hasn’t been what it was in the Indo since Vinnie Doyle retired. And then suddenly you might stop and wonder: what is it to RTÉ who represents any particular side anyway?

The story quotes an RTÉ source as saying "Our job was to get the best people for both sides, and one would have thought that Leo was the best person on the Government side for the last debate.”

But is it really RTÉ’s job to get the best people for both sides?

A referendum debate isn’t like a run-of-the-mill news or current affairs program. The national broadcaster’s job during a referendum or election campaign is to provide a public forum for debate. It is not the national broadcaster’s job to vet the debaters as regards their suitability to speak or represent a point of view. The national broadcaster’s only job is to measure speaking times for fairness and ask as unbalanced a set of questions as can be reasonably expected.

There is no national broadcaster in the USA, but the prospect of a commercial broadcaster stepping in to advise a political party on whom it should or shouldn’t use in a particular TV debate is ludicrous.

If, during the 2008 US Presidential Election, the Republicans wanted Sarah Palin to debate against former President Bill Clinton, can you imagine someone at one of the networks saying “our job was to get the best people for both sides, and one would have thought former Governor of California Arnold Schwartzenegger the best candidate to represent the Republican side?”

It’s hard to imagine, isn’t it? That’s not really the way it works.

To bring the story back home, suppose the No side decided on a second-time lucky strategy and put Gaelic footballer Ger Brennan forward as their representative for the Prime Time debate.

Would RTÉ turn to the No side and say, “look, Ger was a very underestimated center-half back in his prime but for a debate like this, you really need to send a heavy hitter like Breda O’Brien, David Quinn or Rónán Mullen to the plate”? Or would RTÉ just say “You’re sending Ger Brennan? Well, alrighty then,” and then text their friends to stock up on popcorn?

It’s not like RTÉ’s record in these debates is particularly strong. That the RTÉ Frontline debate cost Seán Gallagher the Presidency is as sure as little green apples. The only question is if that was due to incompetency or something more sinister.

In a sighting of that rare bird, investigative journalism, Jody Corcoran joined some dots about who’s pals with whom among the players on the night of that Frontline debate three years ago, and drew up a very interesting pattern. That piece was published three years ago, in March of 2012. Nothing changed as result of his investigation, of course. Nothing ever does.

There is No Free Press Without Regulation

Greybeards and seanfhondóirí who remember the ‘nineties can’t help but to have been a little bemused by the alliance formed by Eamon Dunphy and Pat Kelly on Pat Kenny’s radio show the other day. The Broadcasting Authority of Ireland (BAI) has issued a code of conduct for broadcasters in Ireland. In response, Pat and Eamon teamed up to pretty much pour scorn on the whole idea before Michael O’Keeffe, chairman of the BAI, who didn’t really land a glove in his own proposals’ defence over twenty minutes.

What made the mouths of those greybeards grin beneath their grizzled whiskers was the memory of an article Eamon Dunphy wrote about Pat Kenny on the back page of the Sunday Independent in the early-to-mid ‘nineties, when Dunphy was the Designated Boot Boy of that particular organ. Unfortunately, the article can’t be quoted here as research shows this blog is sometimes read by children but take An Spailpín’s word for it – by the time Dunphy was finished kicking the stuffing out of Plank (sic) Kenny, there wasn’t enough of poor Pat left to put in a teaspoon and send back to his people.

Dunphy’s profile of Pat Kenny was utterly vicious. A stomping the like of which you rarely see. Appropriate to Pol Pot, maybe, or Stalin or Hitler. But not to TV show host who wore a jumper on his chat show.

And now here they were, kicked and kicker as bosom buddies, defending the right of the broadcasters to make their own decisions without interference from the dastardly BAI. Proof that principles come and go, but show business goes on forever.

It was a pity that Michael O’Keeffe wasn’t a bit more ready for them. He came across like a substitute teacher from whom naughty children have detected the smell of fear, and are determined to reduce to tears in the time allotted to them.

O’Keeffe should have pointed out that neither Kenny nor Dunphy are against regulation, per se. It’s just that they themselves are the ones who wanted to do the regulating, rather than someone else. Scholars will remember the ancient world had the same attitude to slavery; people had no objection in principle, as long as it was not they themselves who were the actual slaves.

Kenny and Dunphy found the proposed BAI regulations too constrictive. The found the forbidding of TV or radio show host to express his or her own opinion terrible, one of them remarking that such a regulation would put George Hook out of a job.

Like this would somehow be a bad thing.

And O’Keeffe took all this on the chin. What he could have said, of course, is that there are two words that prove that the broadcasters do indeed need a regulatory authority over them – The Frontline, and see what Pat Kenny made of them apples.

Not much, probably, but the facts are clear. Sean Gallagher had one foot in the Áras at half-nine on that Monday night, by midnight his head was cut clean off. No head has rolled. Not one.

The Chairman of the RTÉ Board is married to the most powerful spindoctor in the country. They say it doesn’t matter, because they never talk about work at home.

[And may An Spailpín take a moment to repeat again that the house does not belong to me. It belongs to my wife. A complete different person. Sure I barely know the woman, I don’t know why you people in the Revenue keep busting my nuts over it].

And so on, and on, and on. Of course it’s necessary for journalists to hold politicians to account, but journalists are also part of that same dance in the public square. Journalists have to be held to account too.

The BAI proposals aren’t perfect. They may not even be good. But that they are necessary in as clubby a society as Ireland’s is beyond all shadow of a doubt.

No Minister - There Must be an Enquiry into the Frontline

Atticus Finch, that wisest of men, tells Scout at one stage that sometimes, to understand a man, you have to walk around in his skin a little, to try to see the world as he sees it.

As the RTÉ-twitter row bubbles along – it is a mistake to call it Gallaghergate because Seán Gallagher is only a bit player in this; the totality of the story is greater – it is interesting to flush bias from the system by changing the names of the characters.

So let’s imagine that the Presidential Election had gone differently. Let’s presume that Gallagher had never taken off, and that the original front-runner had not been derailed. We then have a Frontline where David Norris is four days from the Park, and the rest are doing their best to nobble him.

Let’s say the story that broke in the summer, about David Norris’s non-mainsteam attitude to under-age sex has broken the weekend before the Fronline, and the waters have become choppy for the front-runner. Norris must face the music on the Frontline on Monday evening with the entire show on the line.

During the Frontline, Norris is under attack from Martin McGuinness, who is unhappy with Norris’s response to an interview with Helen Lucy Burke some years ago in Magill – about the time Seán Gallagher was passing around the hat for Fianna Fáil, as it happens. McGuinness sensationally alleges that Norris has written a letter of clemency on behalf of his former partner over allegations of statutory rape.

Norris is flustered, just as he was in the summer. Although a Senator, he is not match for McGuinness the cut and thrust of big time politics and is floundering badly.

And then a tweet appears from the McGuinness4Pres account, alleging the man at the centre of the Israeli trial will be at a press conference tomorrow. Reader, do you think The Frontline would have broadcast that tweet as they did the Gallagher one? Just like that?

All this hinges around whether or not the Frontline editorial team knew that the McGuinness4Pres account was not an official Sinn Féin account. It’s rather hard to believe that, so deep into the election campaign, they didn’t know what the official Sinn Féin account was.

Think about the David Norris scenario outlined above. The only difference is the order in which facts were revealed. Last Easter, David Norris was the nation’s darling. If the story had broken later than it did, maybe he would have held on to win the Park in the end.

But if the story had broken later, and his house was caving around his ears, would RTÉ have polished him off the way they polished off Gallagher if the circumstances were the same, as outline above? There is a defence of RTÉ story saying that it wasn’t the story but Gallagher’s reaction to the story that did for him. Norris’s reaction would have been no better.

It’s important to distance Gallagher from this. It’s not about Gallagher. Gallagher is an opportunist who almost pulled off the biggest coup of his entrepreneurial career, by offering the people what they wanted even though he was running for a job that couldn’t possibly deliver on that want.

What this scandal is about is how elections are run, and whether or not Ireland is a democracy or an oligarchy, where the state broadcaster plays its vital role in ensuring that only the right kind of people are elected.

The editorial team of the Frontline decided the last election. That is a power that they are not entitled to hold, and that is why there should be an inquiry into what happened, in order to ensure that it does not happen again. Why Minister Rabbitte can’t see that is a mystery, but then the Pat Rabbitte that is driven around in his ministerial Merc is quite a different bunny from the fire and brimstone prophet of the opposition benches. God help Ireland.

Pat Kenny Attacked on the Frontline Last Night

When you want to see the nation as she is, RTÉ's Frontline is appointment TV. Astonishing tirade.







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