THERE WERE red faces at RTÉ yesterday after it emerged that the station had airbrushed a logo off a TV3 microphone in an image RTÉ television used to illustrate a news story about Jedward’s Eurovision homecoming.
RTÉ is ultimately responsible for managing the various elements of Ireland’s involvement in the Eurovision Song Contest. As a result, it fell to the national broadcaster to host a press conference welcoming home the exuberant twins.
They had finished a disappointing 19th in the contest, which took place on Saturday night.
About a dozen members of the media assembled at the fairly low-key event for the Grimes brothers in the VIP section of Dublin Airport on Sunday evening. For 10 minutes the irrepressible twins entertained the small gathering with talk of their “awesome and crazy” adventures in the Azerbaijani capital of Baku, where the contest took place.
As is customary at such press conferences, the media were invited to put questions to the twins. Towards the end of proceedings the crew from TV3 asked the twins a number of questions, which were answered with typical incomprehensibility.
When a short item about this strange sort of homecoming appeared on the Nine O’Clock News two hours later, newsreader Aengus Mac Grianna read out an introduction with a still of the twins on the board behind him illustrating the story.
In the still image, there are two microphones, one with the RTÉ logo emblazoned on a green foam covering and a second blue microphone with no logo.
Last night an RTÉ news spokeswoman confirmed that the TV3 logo had been airbrushed out of the picture.
However, she claimed that the station had no intention of obscuring the fact that its rival broadcaster was in attendance. She stressed that the intervention went against company policy.
She said that the rogue airbrushing was done by a non-editorial member of staff “who was not instructed to do so”.
She did not go into any more details about how the TV3 logo had disappeared off the screen other than to insist that it was not editorial policy at RTÉ News to remove logos.
