Complaints but no coherence in government media policy

Writing about government media policy is an exercise in the language of hypotheticals. Even when we had a Government, there wasn’t much of a policy – just media ownership regulations introduced too late to be much use to anyone and an inherited Broadcasting Act that had been rendered helplessly out of date almost as soon as the ink had dried.

Various other well-intended rules that no longer make sense have piled up to perplex and annoy the industry, its consumers or both. But there are things the next government could do to not only protect but promote employment in the Irish media sector - if it was so minded.

Let’s start with the “promises” that are already out there – supposing, for a moment, that within the broad fiction of the main parties’ election manifestos there are policy kernels that might become a reality.

Fine Gael said it would scrap the broadcasting levy, by which it meant axing the levy that most – but not all – broadcasters pay to fund the Broadcasting Authority of Ireland (BAI). The move would "help put Irish broadcasters on a more level playing field with foreign competitors".

The principle of an industry contributing to the cost of its own regulation seems uncontroversial, but the levy as it is structured is unfair. TV3 has to pay it, for example, while UTV Ireland does not.

Representatives of cash-strapped local radio stations are also unlikely to let Fine Gael forget this pledge, as a scrapping of the levy would be a boon to their survival prospects.

But Fine Gael made its abolition conditional on the idea that it might be able to fund the BAI by improving the television licence fee compliance rate – a much bigger, trickier, thornier issue.

It didn't spell it out on this occasion, but the compliance rate could be increased by giving An Post, the collection agent, access to the customer data of pay- TV companies. This is especially the case if RTÉ is correct in its belief that the evasion rate is higher among pay-TV customers who feel they are paying twice for the same thing than it is among the general population.

Millions might also be recovered were a more efficient collection agent than An Post to be appointed to the job, but this has become something of an unsayable for a minister of communications, whose responsibilities also include. . . An Post.

Perhaps the simpler answer would be to devote additional resources to tackling evasion, which is now estimated to wipe some €40 million from the broadcasting industry’s coffers each year.

But as the means by which we consume “television” changes, the television licence fee is only going to look more like an anachronism anyway – one that would be better replaced by a public-service media charge now rather than waiting until the whole concept of public-service media has unravelled.

The last government talked about introducing a household charge unlinked to ownership of a TV set right up to the point when it realised that the electorate would spit on the idea. Even though it knows it has “protest march on Montrose” written all over it, RTÉ must still regard this abandoned plan with fondness.

One proposal that will split broadcasting companies is Fine Gael’s promise to make satellite and cable pay-TV platforms pay for the channels they get from Irish broadcasters, which they “enjoy free of charge” under what is known as the “must-carry and must-offer” part of the legislation, originally written to encourage the rollout of cable networks.

Expect TV3 owner Virgin Media Ireland to fight valiantly to get this one off the agenda, just as its UK parent company has done in Britain.

Such is the pace of change in the media sector, there is a sense that a legislation “lag” is inevitable, throwing up curios such as a general election moratorium that applies to television and radio but not to “online audiovisual content” – even when that online audiovisual content is produced by those same television and radio companies.

Meanwhile, in Europe, laborious work is in train to update the audiovisual media services directive – or AVMSD to its friends – while even a VAT discrepancy between print publications and e-publications (which means Irish newspapers can bear a 9 per cent VAT rate, but their digital editions are liable for 23 per cent) looks set to be eradicated some time this decade.

And yet it remains a long shot that whatever government is cobbled together from Ireland’s electoral disarray will have a coherent media policy.

We’ll be lucky if it has any media policy at all beyond complaining about “negative” coverage while simultaneously going into hiding whenever journalists look like they might have an awkward question.