Rte and the Globalisation of Irish Television

258 Pages·2004·1.73 MB·English

by  Farrel John Corcoran

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RTE AND THE
As the national publicly owned and funded C
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performance stage, town crier and concert hall in r
a GLOBALISATION
Ireland. It sets the agenda for the national n
conversation that drives modern Ireland. For about
40 years, RTÉ’s radio and television channels have
played an enormous role in shaping Irish social OF IRISH
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and cultural life. T
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This work is a study of the structural N
TELEVISION
transformations now taking place in Irish D

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broadcasting. The book focuses on the television
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sector generally, but primarily on RTÉ, as it adjusts E
to a number of radical changes in the global field FFaarrrreell CCoorrccoorraann G
is Professor of L
of forces whose impact began to accelerate in the O
Communication at Dublin B
mid-1990s. FARREL CORCORAN
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City University, and has
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RTÉ's work is frequently shrouded in secrecy and
guiding the fortunes of the A
mystique, which means that conspiracy theories Irish national broadcaster TI
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abound about how it is governed and how it relates RTÉ, as its Chairman since N
to various power centres in Irish life. This book is the middle of the last O
firmly aimed at increasing the transparency that decade. F

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should characterise public broadcasting, and R
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demystifying this national institution that plays S
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such an enormous role in the cultural and political
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life of Ireland. E
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RTÉ Unsettled • Regulating Irish Broadcasting • Broadcasting and
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Government • The Economics of Broadcasting • Digital Television O
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• Children and Television • The Difficult Birth of Irish Language
Television • Globalisation
“...This fascinating and
i intellectually engaging book
ISBN 1-84150-090-9 n
intellect t makes a major contribution
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PO Box 862 l CULTURAL to the controvertial debates
l
Bristol BS99 1DE e STUDIES surrounding the globalisation
United Kingdom c
www.intellectbooks.com t intellect of media in the 21st century.”
9 781841 500904
'Farrel Corcoran has enjoyed the unique situation of
simultaneously being a university Dean and the Chair of
Governors of a national public service broadcaster. Such a
privileged position allows the author, for the first time, to offer
unique insider insights into the daily operations and pressures of
such an institution infused with the dispassionate analytic abilities
of a senior media academic. As a result, this fascinating and
intellectually engaging book makes a major contribution to the
controversial debates surrounding the globalisation of the media in
the 21st Century.’
Manuel Alvarado, The Surrey Institute of Art & Design
First published in UK in 2004 by
Intellect Books, PO Box 862, Bristol BS99 1DE, UK
First published in USAin 2004 by
Intellect Books, ISBS, 920 NE 58th Ave. Suite 300, Portland, Oregon 97213-3786, USA
Copyright © 2004 Intellect Ltd.
All rights whatsoever in this work are strictly reserved. No part of this publication may
be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any
means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written
permission.
Copy Editor: Holly Spradling
Cover Design: Gabriel Solomons
Acatalogue record of this book is available from the British Library.
Electronic ISBN 1-84150-895-0 / ISBN 1-84150-090-9
Printed in Great Britain by Antony Rowe Ltd.
RTÉ AND THE GLOBALISATION
OF IRISH TELEVISION
By Farrel Corcoran
For Mary
CONTENTS
Introduction 1
Acknowledgements 7
1. RTÉ Unsettled 11
2. Regulating Irish Broadcasting 45
3. Broadcasting and Government 57
4. The Economics of Television 93
5. Digital Television: Local Forces in a Global Context 113
6. Children and Television 149
7. The Difficult Birth of Irish Language Television 177
8. Globalisation 197
9. Conclusion 219
Notes 229
Bibliography 235
List of Abbreviations 241
Index 243
Progress is a Snail.
Gunther Grass
INTRODUCTION
For three quarters of the last century, RTÉ has dominated the media landscape in
Ireland, first as Radio Eireann, the only radio station in the country, operating under
the ever-watchful eye of the Government, and since 1961, as a public corporation with
responsibility presently for three television and four radio channels. With a wider reach
than all newspapers combined, RTÉ provides the dominant pictures of the world by
which we make sense of life around us. It has played a major role in dominating the
symbolic environment in which Irish people construct their sense of identity and
weave the “common sense” that underpins the everyday life of the community. RTÉ’s
social role has been to find ways of “narrating the social” that make sense of their
society for viewers and listeners, by drawing from the available stock of frameworks
and narratives and marking the boundaries of what is permissible.
The question now is whether television and radio in the Western world have all but
ceased to function as a shared public space. Some would argue that except for
occasional media events – major sporting contests, public funerals, catastrophes or
celebrations, major conquests in war or the rites of passage of the great, major acts of
social excommunication – the nation no longer gathers together in a common symbolic
space which commands attention from everyone and offers a gamut of views to feed
the great national conversation that takes place in both public and private spaces every
day of the year. Is national cohesion and political participation in jeopardy in Ireland?
If democracy is practised primarily in the nation state and depends upon national
identification to sustain collective solidarity and popular involvement in the
democratic process, should we be concerned when changes in the media system
brought about by globalisation no longer bring the nation together in one central space
constituted by mass media? Is there a growing separation between the increasingly
globalised television system and the nation state? Is media globalisation weakening
national cultural identities?
The historical relationship between the media, the nation and globalisation is more
complex than this. Economic globalisation is a complex, uneven and discontinuous
th
process and the world economy was in some respects more integrated in the early 20
century, before the energy of the world’s major empires was sapped away in World
War I. The media were highly globalised in that period too, if we take into account the
th
integrated power of the 19 -century news agencies – the French Havas, British
Reuters and German Wolff – that divided the entire world market for news production
and distribution among themselves. This cartel had the awesome power, without any
competition, of defining the world in words and pictures for the European ruling class,
supplying Governments with strategic information about far away places to guide
war-planning and sustain the imperial system. But at the same time, as Benedict
Anderson reminds us, localisation was also at work: newspapers in places like Latin
America were redefining readers’ sense of time and place so deeply that media
audiences, within a generation or two, began to evolve into members of emerging
national formations with their own distinct cultural identities, no longer mere colonies
1
– RTÉ and the Globalisation of Irish Television –
of European powers.1Globalisation intensified in the period between the two World
th
Wars in the 20 century. Two great American cultural industries were well into the
process of achieving world hegemony by then: film and recorded music. But this is
also the period when public service broadcasting, deeply indigenous in its ambitions,
was established in several countries. The balance in globalising tendencies was tipped
yet again when television successfully challenged cinema from 1950 on, restabilising
national media systems at least in those places where the state was strong enough to
provide resources for nationally originated material.
Even a brief historical overview is enough to caution against an overly deterministic
– or pessimistic – view of cultural globalisation and the huge changes that are now
taking place in broadcasting. These changes can be ambiguous in their effect and have
the potential to take media developments in different directions. This book examines
one particular broadcasting system in its present phase of transition, and the wider
context in which it operates, European and global. Implicit in the analysis is a tension
between the nation, where people find their identity, and the state, which regulates,
provides resources and is a major link to globalising processes.
There is an important sense in which television functions as a collective rite of
communion that evokes a sense of togetherness, a quickening of hope (the Celtic
Tiger!), a sharing of disappointment, a celebration of common values, a renewal of a
sense of national purpose. It can counteract, or exacerbate, tendencies towards the
privatisation of experience and rampant individualism. When television first arrived in
Ireland as a mass medium in 1961 (some people had already purchased sets as early as
1952, to participate in the cult of monarchy and its major rite of passage, the coronation
of Elizabeth II), it was often portrayed as a modernising force, dragging society away
from its traditional roots, especially what remained of Gaelic and Catholic tradition.
Reactions to Gay Byrne’s Late Late Show exemplified this. Academic critics of
television took on board Frankfurt School beliefs that among the major casualties of the
age of mechanical reproduction was a breakdown in the communal experience of a
shared past. Yet today we might be inclined to think more positively that indigenous
television content can provide a vital communal link with the nation, and to worry
more about the ability, or the interest, of the state in maintaining a secure production
base for an indigenous film and television culture. This base depends not only on RTÉ
but also on how the mandate given to the Broadcasting Commission of Ireland is used.
Asecure production base for television and film holds out the promise of these popular
media being able to maintain a creative connection with popular culture as it is lived in
Ireland today, with all the ambiguities that this implies, without enduring the
pathology of excessive dependence on a film and television culture produced in
California.
In some parts of the world, especially in North America, there is a crisis in the
relationship between the state, the nation and the media system, with all the dangers to
democracy of the disenfranchisement of the public that this threatens. We have to look
no further than CanWest, parent company of Ireland’s TV 3, and the tensions created
by editorial decisions on content that have inflamed relationships between media
professionals, media owners and Canadian politicians. The CanWest controversy,
2
– Introduction –
explored later in this book, illustrates the dangers posed to press freedom and
democratic governance by corporate centralisation of news editorial control. Quebec
Communications Minister Diane Lemieux called the crisis in the Canwest system “an
extremely concrete illustration of the dangers inherent in the heart of corporate media
concentration.” What is remarkable about the rapid accumulation of media power by
CanWest in Canada is that it has passed almost unnoticed in Ireland, where the
company’s influence over Irish television, the regulation of broadcasting and the
politics of media funding, is steadily increasing.
In other parts of the world, a combination of a weak television economy and an
unregulated commercial television system, can wreak havoc on the public’s right to
good information and entertainment that connects them with the culture they live in.
Ireland undoubtedly has a weak film and television economy, with cinema screens
dominated by Hollywood’s output and with nine television channels now dipping into
a total pot of only 200 million in advertising revenue (RTÉ One, Network Two, TG4,
TV3, UTV, Sky One, Sky News, Channel 4 and E4). Ireland also has a weak regulatory
regime, with the BCI committed, like so many other European regulators before it
influenced by the American laissez-faireregulatory model, to what is termed “light
touch” regulation, and to continually increasing the number of radio and television
channels that must operate within the same weak media economy. Both of these
tendencies within the BCI heavily favour the agenda of the advertising industry and
the business sector it serves, though the language used to justify this bias speaks of
increasing viewer and listener “choice.” It remains to be seen how Government will
frame new broadcasting due before 2004, so that it will maximise the resourcing of
indigenous programming in radio and television. Without this support from the state,
television will follow in the footsteps of the cinema, for similar reasons: the cost of
imports is a fraction of the cost of filling the same screen or time slot with an original
production, and this creates an ever stronger pressure for global market integration in
film and television.
Astrong public service broadcasting system is clearly the best hope for original
Irish production. But in much of the world, public broadcasting is now trying to
withstand a combined ideological, political and commercial assault. New hostile
lobbies have been formed in several countries, including Ireland: new deregulatory
policies have been implemented; and new private broadcasters have been licensed to
broadcast. Despite these assaults, RTÉ has just come through the worst period in its
history and survived a radical “downsizing” in fairly good shape, with a stronger
focus on new programming commitments issued as promises to its audience at the
beginning of 2003. Crucial to its future will be its ability to increase its output of
engaging indigenous programming, especially documentary and drama, and to
sharpen its critical edge through investigative journalism, so that it never gets drawn
back into a situation where it is closely identified with the state. To be relevant to the
nation, it must maintain its critical distance from the state, even though this is the hand
that feeds it.
Despite the importance of RTÉ in Irish life, very few books have been published
which take aim at the institutional forces that shape the programme output.2But RTÉ
3