Richard Boyd Barrett: Media Bill Could Hollow Out RTE

The Media Regulation Bill sets out aspirations that, on the face of it, you would consider to be very good. Protecting editorial independence, protecting journalistic sources, or sorry, the MFA that it derives from, ensuring independent functioning of public service media, enhancing transparency of media ownership, guaranteeing transparency in state advertising for media providers, all of those things, boosting transparency in audience measurement for media services and so on. They all seem like worthy aspirations to protect diversity of media, transparency around ownership, and the independence of journalism and editorial independence. All of those are things we would definitely, definitely want. But I am concerned that this also takes place in a real world context, and there are references, just reading the Bill Digest, to sort of removing obstacles and barriers to media organisations operating across boundaries within the European Union, national boundaries and so on. And competition is the importance of competition, you see. And often it's suggested that if we have more competition, then we're going to get more media diversity, that that's actually going to help all those aspirations, which you couldn't but agree with. But is that actually the case in the real world? And I just wonder about that, because while there were the aspirations, actually, I mean, what is the real world situation of media is the hollowing out of public service broadcasting, the increasing privatisation of things that were done by public service broadcasters being outsourced to private operators in a context in which the people who are coming to dominate access to news, media, information, are a billionaire class of social media owners or media magnets like Rupert Murdoch. So competition very often just leads to monopolistic control of the media on a global level by big players, the big billionaires who own media, own social media. And at the same time, we have our government effectively dismantling RTE. Now, look, I often have my disagreements with RTE over editorial decisions and so on, and I'd like to see the balance better this way, and I'd be, you know, I wouldn't be backward about coming forward when I want to, when I'm critical of certain decisions they make. But to me, we have to fight very, very hard to protect public service broadcasting because we have far more influence and say over what RTE does than we have over what Rupert Murdoch does, or over what Elon Musk does, or over what Bill Gates does, or any of these characters. We have far more influence, right? We can hold them in front, we can hold RTE in front of an Oireachtas committee. We can have an influence when people, as they were, were getting paid absolutely excessive salaries at the top of RTE, and the whole scandal around the salaries for Tuberty and so on, right? We can actually do something about that and influence the situation, but actually the sins of a small number at the top of RTE are now resulting in people who weren't getting paid big salaries, ordinary people, the technicians, the ordinary journalists, the people who, you know, man, the cameras and, you know, all the people, the backroom people who actually make the thing function, they are going to suffer, and the jobs they did, and many of them are just being done away with, and those jobs are going to be outsourced to private operators. And, you know, who has the money to engage in audiovisual production, in media production? Only big players, by and large. I mean, you even look at the film, there's been a lot of praise of the Irish film industry recently, and there's no doubt about our creative talent, Jesse Buckley, you know, Cillian Murphy, Barry Hogan, you go through the list, and also the technical people in animation, all the rest of it. But the fact of the matter is, in the largely privatised Irish film industry, nobody has a secure job, nobody. It's film to film. It's episodic work, right? No guarantee. You, by and large, don't get any of the entitlements that people who are directly employed by, for example, RTE have. You don't have any of that income security, employment security, that you might have in a public service broadcaster. So the ordinary people, and this is what's happening now in RTE, things like Fair City are going to be outsourced, probably, the Late Late Show, outsourced. We're now going to give more tax breaks to the Section 481 is going to be extended to the non-scripted sector, which means, you know, for example, American quiz shows are going to get tax breaks from the public to make quiz shows ostensibly made here. Meanwhile, people who have proper jobs in the audiovisual sector in public service broadcasting, their jobs are being done away with, and RTE is being hollowed out, right? So I just wonder, is this, you know, the market, the internal market of the European Union are removing barriers to supposedly to ensure greater diversity, whether at the actual net result, the actual net result is that we do away with public service broadcasting and everything gets outsourced and privatized and secure employment in the audiovisual sector in the media actually is slowly, slowly, but surely done away with. And that's what I actually think is happening. So the degree to which some of these things are good, don't get me wrong, I mean, transparency about media ownership, good. But if we don't have a public service broadcaster, things are going to go in a bad direction, in my opinion, because they have an influence even on how the rest of the media behave. I mean, one of the reasons our media is better than in America is because there's still some notion of having a thing called public service broadcasting, whose job is to have an orchestra to celebrate culture and heritage and things that maybe aren't profitable, that don't garner lots of advertising, but actually are making a contribution to society, to the best interest of society, to celebrating our culture, our heritage, our arts, things that are not profitable. A market, a deregulated, largely privatized, outsourced market full of diversity, but actually it's the diversity of Musk and Murdoch and Google and Facebook and you name it, that's not real diversity. That's not real diversity. And actually ordinary jobs and the people are building up a pool of talent and giving them proper jobs and building up, even funding from the EU, as a point I've made again and again and again, for the audiovisual sector in terms of Section 481, is supposed to be dependent on building up companies of scale and permanent pools of skill and creative talent and so on. That's what it's supposed to. You're supposed to get the money on that basis. But that's not actually what's happening. What's actually happening is we're doing away with the permanent pools, because that's one of the things that RTE wants. They made documentaries that nobody else would make. They made television series that were trying to reflect Irish society and its evolution and its development. They had an orchestra, or they have an orchestra. Will it still be there if we move in a certain direction of outsourcing and privatizing everything? I don't think so. And in truth, I think some people saw the scandal around high salaries, which was a scandal, an outrageous scandal about some of the salaries, but they saw it as an opportunity to have a go at public service broadcasting in this country and to dismantle it, to privatize it through the back door. So I'd like to hear from the Minister about how that's not going to happen and how this bill is going to contribute to actually protecting quality media, quality public service broadcasting and protecting decent jobs and actually nurturing a permanent pool of creative and technical talent in media and the audiovisual sector.