Definition of news and current affairs just got looser

BACK IN the pre-YouTube wilderness years of analogue-only broadcasting, it used to seem unbearably paternalistic to me that even those Irish DJs who were allowed to break free of golden oldie-fixated playlists were forced to interrupt their flow of relative cool by breaking for the news on the hour, every hour.

The statutorily required, formulaic, padded-out bulletins, followed by what certain RTÉ presenters are in the habit of calling “news of sport”, followed in turn by the excruciating cacophony of the advertising breaks, meant it wasn’t long before I started fiddling with dials, wires and leads in an effort to pinpoint that exact position in my eastern seaboard bedroom where a humble Tesco Clubcard alarm clock radio could pick up a muffled FM signal for BBC Radio One.

Ah, BBC Radio One: Steve Lamacq, Jo Whiley, Simon “Dead or Alive” Mayo.

But amazing though it was that its schedule wrapped up in the evenings with John Peel playing the latest polemic by Half Man Half Biscuit or similar, its daytime mainstream appeal centred more on the fact that not only was this an ad-free zone, but the on-the-half-hour Newsbeat bulletin was swiftly dispensed with in about three minutes, jingles included.

The station’s music-free intervals simply weren’t long enough or annoying enough to turn off the radio and press play on a cathartic cassette mix instead. Less was more.

Fast-forward to 2012 and the Broadcasting Authority of Ireland is now accepting applications from holders of music-driven, youth and niche radio services that are interested in a full derogation from the statutory requirement for a minimum level of 20 per cent of news and current affairs content.

Derogations were legislated for in 2009, but the BAI has now outlined the circumstances in which they will become available. “The board felt it was the right time to do it, given we are entering a significant licensing process,” says Michael O’Keeffe, BAI chief executive.

The process in question is the BAI’s licensing plan for 2012-13, under which the authority intends to invite applications for 24 different radio services where existing contracts are due to expire – seven of these services are either music-driven or niche stations that would theoretically qualify for the derogation.

The rest are “broad format” services that will not be permitted a full derogation from the news and current affairs requirement, although many already avail of a partial derogation that involves discounting the hours between 1am and 7am, which effectively reduces the statutory minimum daily airtime for news and current affairs from 284 minutes to 216.

“Some of the services would have had to close down if they had not been permitted the overnight derogation,” says O’Keeffe, who acknowledges that economic sustainability is “always a factor”.

Either way, it’s a requirement that has traditionally spelled two words to radio stations trying to keep both budgets and listenership figures intact: phone shows.

Phone shows are the wayward offspring of the original regulations, and, while some have substantially less overlap with standard definitions of “news and current affairs” than the average polemic by Half Man Half Biscuit, it all counts. Indeed, the counter-intuitive success of phone shows as late night user-generated entertainment vehicles on allegedly music-driven stations means the genre is likely to outlive the regulations that spawned it.

As the BAI noted in its latest broadcasting services strategy document, regulators have to date applied “a broad definition” of news and current affairs under the 20 per cent quota, and it intends to continue to do so.

Music-driven, youth or niche stations that believe it is in their commercial interest to apply for the full derogation, must come up with “innovative” proposals for their alternative schedule in order to get it – or as O’Keeffe puts it, “it’s not simply a case of ‘I’ll drop all my news programming and put in a jock for three hours instead’.”

Consideration will also be paid to how much news is otherwise being broadcast in the franchise area, lest there be a headline drought.

The authority’s loose definition of news and current affairs over the years suggests the bar for what counts as “innovative” alternatives won’t be too high, however. In the case of a music-driven station, it might simply be a matter of broadcasting live music events or letting whoever ranks as a celebrity in its universe witter on for a bit about their particular craft.

Anything is surely better than the bizarre experience of listening to a debate about house prices on Phantom FM.

Such pragmatism on the part of both the regulator and the independent radio sector only serve to highlight the misguided nature of the original rules. Even if you don’t accept that people have the right to dwell in wilful, blissful ignorance of current events, the 20 per cent quota imagines a world of mono-media consumption where listeners are so unsophisticated, they can’t even manage to turn the dial or switch channel presets either in search of news, or to avoid it.

And in the age of Spotify and Last.fm, obliging music stations to shoehorn the headlines of the day in between tracks makes even less sense than it did in the 1990s.