What with complicated referendums coming up on the double, the State broadcaster's duty to inform and explain will be put to the test. Based on its pathetic performance with the relatively simple - albeit scarily scientific - stuff that dominated last week's headlines, the prospects are not good.
RTE, it could be argued, can only be as scientifically literate as the people who are on the air, and most people are intimidated by science. That argument falls down a bit when one notes that Radio 1's main man in the morning, Pat Kenny, was educated as an engineer; anyone who heard him last Tuesday teasing out the statistics in a debate about vaccination knows that he's still got it.
No, the initial failure to explain the new Michelle de Bruin situation adequately was born of wilful ignorance as well as the can't-help-it kind. A nation's tabloid-thin support for the swimmer was bolstered by talk radio's simpleminded idea of patriotism aligned with the media's native caution. The trouble started after Wednesday's press conference, when Five Seven Live (RTE Radio 1, Monday to Friday) basically ignored the guts of de Bruin's statement - effectively, arguments about procedure and the meaning of lab readings - to assure us that de Bruin had declared her innocence in the strongest possible terms. That must have been the bit where she said: "I am innocent." Reporter Barbara Jordan even started to tell us that De Bruin had "repeatedly" claimed innocence, but corrected herself.
When the science was dragged out on Tonight with Vincent Browne (RTE Radio 1, Monday to Thursday), things got worse. Michelle's dad, Brian Smith, and Mark Saggars of Sky News stepped out with the bewildering and seductive Dance of the Decimal Points. This concerned the "specific gravity" of the urine sample and the small discrepancy between the Kilkenny dipstick reading and that taken in the Barcelona lab. First, no one was able or willing to offer a lay person's definition of specific gravity, until Yvonne Judge, bless her, weighed in with the adequate and simple "density" - a contribution which was subsequently ignored.
Then, employing what I'm sure was can't-help-it ignorance rather than the wilful stuff, Smith slipped the decimal point in the Barcelona reading one point to the right (9.8 instead of .98) and Saggars moved it to the left (.098) - both had the effect of hugely exaggerating the difference between the two readings.
In Smith's version, you might say, between loo and lab the sample was largely transformed into a jar of lead; in Saggars's account, it was virtually vapourised.
Amazingly, both men went on to repeat their errors to Kenny the engineer: Saggars on radio next morning and Smith on television on Saturday - and neither time did Kenny think it was worthwhile correcting this crucial point in the defence of de Bruin. You could say Pat was following the lead of listeners who were phoning in to defend Michelle, to offer money for her defence, etc. Presumably, these are many of the same listeners who on Tuesday hammered Emily O'Reilly for raising questions about the Sunday Independent and Veronica Guerin. But in the national pandering to its heroes, at least O'Reilly got her say. In the de Bruin case, it seems, the reputations of journalists as good as O'Reilly and the integrity of the people conducting the scientific tests can be chucked against the studio walls; and the easily explicable facts of a straightforward lab test can be ignored, so long as the Golden Girl is protected.
Ah, better days. On the Gay Byrne Show (RTE Radio 1) to mark his kind-of retirement, Donncha O Dulaing reminisced with Gaybo. At one stage they were joined on the telephone by Brendan Balfe - and if you could bottle the radio smarts in that conversation, it would be worth more than a dozen Australian consultants. Balfe recalled Donncha's, ahem, ill-prepared interview with Mick Jagger in 1965 (a tape, incidentally, Balfe has been "looking for for years" - any help out there?). "Are you a rock 'n' roll group?" the great man asked. "Have you had many hit records?"
Finally, Jagger moaned, "You don't know much about us, do you?"
"No, should I?"
Now that's an ice-breaker.
