Warning lights are on for expensive investigative arm of Irish journalism

MEDIA & MARKETING:RTÉ news and current affairs budgets had already been in retreat

WHEN RTÉ'S director general Noel Curran confirmed to Bryan Dobson on Tuesday's Six-One news bulletin that the broadcaster was suspending Prime Time Investigatespending the outcome of a review of its editorial processes, it must have caused an additional personal pang – above and beyond the severe humiliation of the Fr Reynolds libel aftermath itself – that this was the flagship series that he himself had been responsible for launching in 2003.

Although the regular Tuesday and Thursday editions of Prime Timecontinue as normal, the December run of the investigative strand has been pulled subject to a review of RTÉ's editorial processes.

A year is a long time in current affairs broadcasting. While Curran is now dealing with the fallout of what he admitted was "one of the greatest editorial mistakes that ever happened at RTÉ", Prime Time Investigates ended 2010 on a high. An edition called Carry On Regardlessby reporter Rita O'Reilly and producer Bill Malone on the opulent lifestyles of the Nama developers and their suddenly independently wealthy spouses, was watched by 783,000 people in December 2010 – the highest audience in the history of the programme.

But although Carry On Regardlesstuned into the dual screen-magnets of public fascination and public opprobrium with the dishonourably rich, investigative journalism doesn't always prove to be such a heavy-hitter. Nor are or should commercial considerations be the primary motive for it. That would inevitably skew the topics selected towards "sexier" items and away from "worthier" ones, and towards investigations that can fill an hour's broadcast time relatively cheaply, thus raising the question as to how "investigative" the journalism is in the first place.

RTÉ's editorial mistake and postponement of the next series of Prime Time Investigatescomes at a time when investigative journalism in media organisations across the world is seen to be at risk – indeed, former Wall Street Journalmanaging editor Paul Steiger, who heads the non-profit media site ProPublica, believes investigative stories with "moral force" are now beyond the resources of most newsrooms.

"There's no way I can think of that you can have a profitable business model for investigative reporting," Steiger mused in the documentary Page One: Inside the New York Times,as he explained his newsroom's partnership with the New York Timesand other US media outlets. ProPublica's philanthropy-funded investigative journalism has won two Pulitzer prizes – for a story on euthanasia in a New Orleans hospital and for a report on Wall Street bankers. It is the only online news organisation to have won any Pulitzers at all.

In a time of media austerity, and in the absence of any philanthropists, RTÉ has the advantage over other news outlets of being able to use licence fee income to pay for investigative journalism. And so its statement on the Fr Reynolds affair last Thursday insisted that investigative journalism would remain “one of the organisation’s core output priorities for the coming years”, and that it would maintain its commitment to it.

But at a time when RTÉ is facing both a sustained shrinkage in commercial income and what it estimates is a €20 million extra cost as a result of funding changes imposed by the Government, news and current affairs are not exempt from cost-cutting rounds.

Investigative journalism as a rule of thumb costs more than regular news reporting, a fact that has two implications for RTÉ in this debacle. First, the undesirability of "wasting" money on investigations that do not yield results may have had an influence on its decision to go ahead with the broadcast of the Mission to Preyprogramme. Second, the postponement of the forthcoming series may represent a further "waste" unless those programmes can be repurposed once the Broadcasting Authority of Ireland's investigation is done.

A glance at RTÉ’s overall news and current affairs spending reveals that news budgets are in retreat at almost as fast a pace as its overall indigenous programming budget. In 2009, this department spent €37.8 million across RTÉ One and Two. Last year, this spend fell to €35.5 million, a drop of 6 per cent.

The temporary stepping aside yesterday of current affairs managing director Ed Mulhall and current affairs editor Ken O’Shea means that RTÉ’s news and current affairs department is at risk of falling into stasis pending the outcome of the BAI’s inquiry.

With RTÉ’s public service targets at risk from both its own error and the issue of what Curran calls the “serial erosion of its public funding base”, the warning lights are on for Irish investigative journalism until any passing philanthropists with a fondness for stories with “moral force” take sympathetic notice.