Kevin Bakhurst profile: Second time proves the charm for new RTÉ boss

Guess who’s Bak? Seven years after he left RTÉ after a four-year stint as its news and current affairs boss, Kevin Bakhurst will shortly return to Montrose as director general.

“Welcome to the jungle,” was one of the tweets he received from an RTÉ staffer when he first joined in 2012. “I like jungles,” he replied then.

Well, he evidently likes this one.

As holder of the combined chief executive and editor-in-chief role, the Londoner will be charged with taking RTÉ forward at a time marked by constant upheaval but beset by the whiff of stagnation, too.

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In his absence, spent in the upper echelons of UK communications watchdog Ofcom, what has changed at RTÉ?

For sure, almost nine acres of underutilised jungle have been lopped off its campus north of RTÉ Radio Centre through a €107.5 million land sale, prompting a location shift for Carrigstown, aka Fair City’s exterior set, and a modest relandscaping near the Stillorgan Road entrance visible from his new office window.

[ Kevin Bakhurst appointed as new RTÉ director general ]

That corner office, set to be vacated by outgoing DG Dee Forbes, has been refreshed since the days of her predecessor Noel Curran – with whom Bakhurst worked – while closer to his old news stomping ground, the TV building houses an upgraded radio studio that still smells of newness.

Elsewhere, outsourcing has shrunk the young people’s programming department, once separate commercial units have been amalgamated as part of a project dubbed “One RTÉ” and at the executive top table – not to be confused with the leaky RTÉ board chaired by Siún Ní Raghallaigh – familiar faces bear new titles.

Most alarmingly, the canteen menu is shorter post-Covid.

Born in Barnet in North London, he attended the private Haberdashers’ Aske’s school in Elstree and studied French and German at St John’s College, Cambridge, in the mid-1980s.

But the conversations, the dilemmas and the tensions essentially remain the same as they were in 2016, when he returned to Britain after an unsuccessful bid to succeed Curran.

The second time has proven the charm for Bakhurst who must now, if he fulfils the terms of the job ad, “ensure RTÉ's place in Irish public life, be culturally engaged, digitally knowledgeable and have strong editorial judgment”. That’s the easy bit.

The harder mission involves keeping RTÉ “on a sound financial footing in a challenging commercial environment” – oh yes, and persuading Government ministers that RTÉ has a value beyond their own personal appearances on it.

Leadership skills, a prerequisite here, are all over his CV. During his previous RTÉ existence, Bakhurst also served as deputy director general from 2014 to 2016 and was acting director general for six months. He is a good communicator, unafraid then to use social media for everything from apologies for technical faults to robust defences of RTÉ journalism – such as when Ryanair boss Michael O’Leary lashed out, branding RTÉ a “rat-infested North Korean union shop”.

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His initial assignment as managing director of news and current affairs was to restore faith in a division that had been rocked by two scandals in 2011 – the edition of Prime Time Investigates that libelled Fr Kevin Reynolds and the “Tweetgate” incident on Frontline during that year’s presidential campaign.

Bakhurst helped RTÉ put those damaging programmes behind it, eventually overseeing the development of a new unit that produced investigations into the charity sector, mistreatment in crèches and abuse in care homes, while also expanding RTÉ's digital news output at a time when smartphone ownership rates were exploding.

Bakhurst steered RTÉ's news and current affairs output through a phase when relations between RTÉ and the Fine Gael-Labour coalition of the day could veer into tetchy territory, not least in 2015 when then minister for finance Michael Noonan had a heated exchange on Radio 1 with Sean O’Rourke.

Not everything stuck: Morning Edition, a valiant attempt at a midmorning news and magazine television show, was unable to build a sufficiently large audience in an awkward 9am-11am slot.

Budgets tightened – in 2013, Bakhurst’s first full year at RTÉ, its total revenues sank to a post-recession trough of €327.6 million. This constrained innovation and threatened the viability of what had once been seen as fundamental elements of its news coverage. Still, he stepped back from a plan to close regional news bases by forming partnerships with institutes of technology.

Bakhurst steered RTÉ's news and current affairs output through a phase when relations between RTÉ and the Fine Gael-Labour coalition of the day could veer into tetchy territory, not least in 2015 when then minister for finance Michael Noonan had a heated exchange on Radio 1 with Sean O’Rourke.

[ RTÉ chair to be quizzed on boardroom leaks in first public outing ]

Deflecting a valid question from O’Rourke about the Siteserv controversy, Noonan queried RTÉ's disclosure record, claiming it was “sitting on reports for 12 months”. The two reports in question, about the future of the public service broadcaster, were actually for the Department of Communications to publish and had, in fact, been published the week before.

The FG-Labour government was disgruntled at what it saw as bias in RTÉ's coverage of the water charges issue, with former minister for communications Pat Rabbitte accusing it of acting as a “recruiting sergeant” for the far left and Sinn Féin.

Why has the appointment of RTÉ's next leader run into trouble?

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The role of RTÉ Director-General, held by Dee Forbes since 2016, is well-paid, prestigious but daunting. The task of finding funding to maintain the broadcaster's output and compete in the era of streaming is a tough one. Now, leaks to the media, seemingly from within RTÉ's governing board, have revealed internal strife over the appointment of the successor to Forbes. What is going on at RTÉ? Laura Slattery explains.

But with anti-charges protesters outside Montrose demonstrating against perceived pro-government coverage, Bakhurst could be entitled to conclude that RTÉ was upsetting everybody equally.

“It doesn’t necessarily mean you are right if you are getting criticisms from all sides, but you weigh it up and see if there are reasonable points being made,” he said, reasonably.

There were other big editorial fights in 2015, with RTÉ obliged to apply to the High Court for permission to air statements made in the Dáil by independent TD Catherine Murphy about Denis O’Brien’s business dealings with IBRC. O’Brien had previously been granted an injunction against RTÉ to stop it reporting these details.

[ Who would want to be director general of RTÉ now? ]

Bakhurst described the clarity provided by the judge as “an incredibly important message to send out to members of the Dáil and members of the press in Ireland”.

He expressed concern about the self-censorship effect of restrictive Irish defamation law, too, noting it had “an impact round the edges” of RTÉ's coverage and there was “a danger to robust public debate”.

Bakhurst (57) had already built up a substantial career as a highly respected BBC news man before he reached RTÉ.

Born in Barnet in North London, he attended the private Haberdashers’ Aske’s school in Elstree and studied French and German at St John’s College, Cambridge, in the mid-1980s. After a brief spell at accountancy firm Price Waterhouse, he joined the BBC in 1989 as an assistant producer in its business and economics unit.

The year after, he became a producer on the BBC Nine O’Clock News, moving to Brussels to serve as Europe producer in 1994-1995, then working as assistant editor on the 9pm bulletin (which became the Ten O’Clock News in 2000). From 2001-2003, he was an editor on BBC News 24, the old name for the BBC News Channel.

During a three-year reign as editor of the Ten O’Clock News, the programme amassed awards for its coverage of the Madrid train bombings, the July 7th bombings in London and the crisis in Darfur, then from 2006-2012, he was deputy head of the BBC newsroom and controller of the BBC News Channel.

Bakhurst was still a couple of rungs beneath the top BBC news job when he left it for RTÉ in what seemed like a stepping stone to a grander gig back home. But he declared he loved living in Ireland and was taking Irish lessons by the time the director general seat was vacated by Curran. Fully acclimatised to Montrose, the personable Englishman was favourite to succeed him.

He must make its output more relevant for less money, improve staff morale while seeking cuts to compensate for falling commercial revenue, pencil in a catch-up with the Taoiseach and, very probably, sign off on a new Late Late Show host.

The more commercially experienced Dee Forbes got the job instead. Soon after, he became part of a mini-exodus of top executives to leave RTÉ. A headhunter had asked him to apply for a job at Ofcom and after a process he described as “mercifully quick” compared to RTÉ's DG hunt, he took up a new role at the organisation as it was expanding to become the first ever external regulator of the BBC – making it a politically sensitive time for his former employers.

Indeed, such is the climate of hostility towards the BBC in recent years, when Bakhurst was linked with the top BBC news job in late 2021, reports in the pro-Tory Daily Mail and Daily Telegraph newspapers implied this could be interpreted as evidence of too cosy a relationship between the BBC and Ofcom.

As Ofcom group director, overseeing content and media policy, Bakhurst earns a pay package of £303,272 (€346,000), which includes a base salary of £248,000 (€283,000), according to its most recent annual report.

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If he is paid the same as Forbes, whose pay was subject to the semi-State cap, the RTÉ director general position will represent a pay cut – but on the plus side, at least he’ll no longer feel any professional obligation to watch GB News.

The “safe pair of hands” tag, bestowed upon him in London as well as in Dublin, seems accurate for a man who, outside of work, served as a magistrate for six years. It isn’t necessarily the faint praise it sounds to some ears – a flair for choosing battles wisely is a less damning way of putting it.

Still, the pressure will be on him now to both protect and revive RTÉ in a manner that inevitably demands some element of risk-taking.

He must make its output more relevant for less money, improve staff morale while seeking cuts to compensate for falling commercial revenue, pencil in a catch-up with the Taoiseach and, very probably, sign off on a new Late Late Show host.

And that’s just the first week.