Striving to resist detail

Connect: The dawn of a brave new era for Irish public service broadcasting is at hand, according to the Minister for Communications, Marine and Natural Resources, Dermot Ahern.

"My aim is to ensure RTÉ has the funds, the structures and the ethos to serve its owners, the people of Ireland," he wrote in this newspaper this week, discussing his draft Public Service Charter. And to a large degree, Ahern is right. He deserves praise for increasing the licence fee to a realistic level, and for seeing through reforms which finally require RTÉ to give a proper account of its expenditure and output.

Financial accountability is the red meat of Ahern's charter, the quid pro quo hammered out between RTÉ and the Government in return for the licence increase. One still wonders why it took quite so long for RTÉ to agree to do what it should have been doing for years in this area - the opacity of the company's financial reports has been legendary - but the new strictures are a serious attempt at introducing transparency. We can only wait and see whether they work.

But the rest of the draft document is disappointing, a limp side salad to the main course. The charter is intended to act as a sort of "constitution" for Irish public service broadcasting, so a certain amount of self-important waffling is to be expected. But an opportunity has been missed.

In his article, the Minister cited similar charters in the UK, New Zealand and Sweden, "which are equally demanding of their public service broadcasters".

The Swedish charter is particularly interesting, since entire passages of the Irish charter appear to have been lifted verbatim from it. But why not go further and state, as the Swedes do, that a public service broadcaster "shall ensure that standards of proper grammar and usage are observed in programming"? Is that too demanding? Also worth considering is the requirement that "SVT (the Swedish broadcaster) shall contribute to Swedish film production", a fairly common requirement of publicly funded broadcasters around the world, although RTÉ, despite occasional forays into film, would undoubtedly see it as an intolerable burden. And one wonders whether Ahern has seriously considered Sweden's most innovative broadcasting initiative, the unilateral banning of advertising which targets small children.

Most debate on the charter so far has revolved around its commitments to regional diversity and the Irish language. As the Minister has rightly pointed out, these are fairly unexceptionable and bear comparison with similar commitments in other countries. It seems bizarre, though, that there is no mention at all of TG4 in this regard - another example of the document's depressing lack of specificity.

Instead there is such guff as: "in its programming and editorial content, RTÉ will strive to resist gender stereotyping". That "strive to resist" is priceless, hinting at deep-seated impulses kept barely under control. Some will have to strive harder than others, if there's to be no more of that "lovely girls" stuff on The Late Late Show.

"It is a given to me that RTÉ, like public representatives and the civil and public services, must be fully accountable to the public it serves," the Minister has written. Why not take this opportunity, then, to lay down some clear markers on our behalf? There could, for example, be much clearer guidelines on how RTÉ cross-promotes its own activities. Is it acceptable for "news" bulletins to devote large segments to upcoming programmes such as Cabin Fever? Or for the RTÉ Guide to favour its own programming over that of its competitors? Swedish public service television is advertisement-free, but the Swedish charter has strict guidelines on sponsorship and commercial promotions on its programmes. Nothing of that sort is to be found in the Irish version. And should our charter not provide unambiguous information in relation to commercial breaks, their frequency, duration and volume, which licence payers can easily access and check against the reality on their screens? Apparently not. As it stands, apart from the yet to be fully tested financial accountability measures, the draft charter is so intent on making all the right noises that it throws the reality into even bleaker relief. That reality is that RTÉ's report card is very mixed; not absolutely disastrous but certainly very far from perfect.

In an ideal world, the charter would set out in a clear and unsentimental way the role, purpose and duties of a small national public service broadcaster, partly funded by commercial revenue, within the context of a turbulent, fissiparous, transnational media environment. It would pragmatically address challenges which are likely to arise in years to come, and would codify policy on matters of concern to the viewing and listening public. No such luck.

We're told the Minister "will keep the charter under review so as that it can reflect change in the nature of Irish society along with changes in the broadcasting environment". The implication is that this document is the pinnacle of cutting-edge thinking on the subject in 2003, and that it may require a little fine-tuning to keep up with the times. In fact, it's a fluffy blancmange of pious aspirations, couched in anodyne platitudes so vague as to be almost meaningless.

Licence-payers deserve better.

Eddie Holt returns next week