Blogs Bang the Drum While RTE Beats its Chest

Helen Shaw has an interesting insiders take(sub req) on the current Crown Affair (a title for a controversy that she seems to have taken directly from P.O’Neill’s excellent post on Irish Election because she says, rather sarcastically, ‘the blogosphere drums are beating with the so-called John Crown Affair’).

The bones of her argument are actually fair enough – on the surface. There is no conspiracy concerning government interference with regard to how RTE discusses the health service. I mean are we to believe that the Director General of RTE is in such a relatively weak position that when a Government minister demands that such and such a person is not to appear on the Late Late Show that he feels he has no choice but to oblige?

There is part of me which suggest that yea, that’s exactly what happened, but I suspect the reality is a lot more nuanced, subtle and complex. Actually maybe not. Maybe it just appears complex. In fact, it’s just a mess of incompetence, complacency, fear and self censorship.

There is one thing that stood out for me in Helen Shaw’s piece in the Irish Times today and that was about how editorial decisions are made:

“Balance, fairness and impartiality feature high in the editorial framework of those decisions, and while you may not like the results as you hear them and see them every day on RTÉ television and radio, in reality they are decisions made by editors attempting to walk the thin line between creating informed debate and being fair, balanced and impartial.
And it can be a very thin line – particularly in the midst of a controversial running current affairs story, an election or civil unrest. In the end someone has to make the call. And with the best information available that is what editors do – and naturally accept the flack.”

If we look at this in the light of what decision was made in the case of RTE, we can probably see, if we take the above at face value, that the editors worried that the Late Late Show was going to turn into a full on attack on the Health Service. Indeed, the question is, why should it not have been?

The Government chose not to appear, which is its right. Should then the debate be limited in what could be said, in the interests of balance? If people were available to provide expert opinion why not let them provide that information or is raw information itself tainted with certain political bias? I have long been of the opinion that this notion of ‘balance’, like neat little conspiracy theories, is a red-herring too.

You see there are two sides to this balance thing. There is political balance, where competing political parties – parties in government for example, and opposition parties – are competing for the publics love and attention, and there is factual balance. A national broadcaster has a responsibility to ensure that programs have both, but they shouldn’t get the two mixed up.

It seems in this case RTE considered that allowing Crown to appear (leaving aside the issue of political interference) would lack political balance because Crown is recorded as criticising the two-tier health system. All parties in the opposition have criticised this yet it is very much core to how two parties in government, the major one and one of the minor ones, want to proceed.

RTE though shouldn’t have thought about the political balance in this case. Crown, and others critical of the health service, do not affiliate themselves with any political party or ideology, as Eamon Gilmore pointed out in the Dail debate on the subject.

The thing is, from a factual point of view, Crown is correct. But does that account for anything?

When he says that its common sense that there is no point in running regional hospitals into the ground before you put in place ‘centre of excellence’ he does so because he’s a professional who works in the area. The imposition of the privatization of medicine, however, is political because the impetus for it comes exclusively from Government.

Whether RTE made the decision on their own, or at the behest of a Government minister is not the point. By making the decision RTE has allowed the government to control how the debate is being framed. By pulling Crown from the Late Late Show they have, using the balance argument, suggested that Crowns opinions are political, and therefore of equal merit to the Government parties opinions. It treats them like debating points – the old ‘there’s two sides to every story’ argument.

In trying to maintain political balance they undermined factual balance. In fact they considered factual balance and political balance to be the same.

Allowing one party to control the terms of debate is as form of censorship, as I’ve argued before and which is being discussed over at Cedar Lounge Revolution in relation to the treatment of the Coolacrease story in a recent Hidden History documentary on RTE.

In my post I mention how there is an attempt to control the debate over Israel by castigating as extremist certain commentator’s opinion that happens to agree with an international consensus about how the Israel/Palestinian situation should be resolved. They do this in order to push out this consensus opinion and so redefine the debate in a way that suits their own ends.

In the case of Coolacrease documentary you have a known agitator against Sinn Fein, a prominent columnist in a national newspaper, and a Senator to boot, if not orchestrating, certainly influencing the political message that the documentary was trying to promote, and being aided and abetted in this endevour by an Op-ed columnist in another national newspaper.

By the way, in case you’re wondering what the image is above, it from a June 2006 powerpoint presentation I found today on the Web put together by the head of factual programming in RTE, Kevin Dawson. It provides an interesting breakdown of how RTE approaches factual programming in general. The slide shown is from the one on Hidden History.

I’ve no idea what the ‘Superquinn’ factor is, but I’ve a funny feeling its nothing to do with historical accuracy.

By the way, Conor worked on the Hidden History documentary on William Martin Murphy, which is to be aired tonight on RTE at 10:15. So no slighting comments about the lack of historical accuracy of this Hidden History or they’ll have to be censored