Editorials

The Irish Times view on Kevin Bakhurst’s RTÉ plan: still facing an existential challenge

This year’s crises have laid bare deep shortcomings in the corporate culture of Montrose

RTE Director General Kevin Bakhurst leaves his office at RTE Headquarters at Donnybrook in Dublin to a town hall meeting with staff at the RTE campus about plans to make cost-saving measures at the organisation, including redundancies. Picture date: Tuesday November 14, 2023. PA Photo: Liam McBurney/PA Wire

Wed Nov 15 2023 - 07:00

The much-anticipated document from RTÉ director general Kevin Bakhurst, setting out his vision for a reformed and revitalised national broadcast service, will be received very differently in different quarters. The document, A New Direction for RTÉ, described as a framework for the future, will now go out for consultation. That process will then inform RTÉ's next five-year strategic plan, due for publication in early 2024.

For staff, the document presents a challenging vista of one in every five posts being made redundant by 2028 in the drive for a more “streamlined” and “simplified” organisation that relies more on the independent production sector. For audiences, it offers a rather vague picture of how the broadcaster’s output will change over the next five years, with a focus on improved apps and other digital services. For the Government, it promises to address demands for improved transparency, fiscal accountability and governance reform following this year’s scandals over concealed payments.

The Government moved swiftly in the wake of the plan’s publication to confirm additional funding will be made available to RTÉ up to the end of next year. This addresses significant shortfalls which have arisen in part due to a steep decline in licence fee payments since the Ryan Tubridy controversy. That, though, is the easy part. The larger political question remains, as it has been for more than a decade, how to reform the State’s funding model for public service media.

The antiquated licence fee certainly requires urgent reform. But it is not the gravest existential problem faced by RTÉ itself. That remains the question of what public service media’s role actually is in an era of globally distributed, algorithmically-personalised digital content. The original principles of public service broadcasting were defined at a time when the State commanded a virtual monopoly. As a former senior manager at the BBC, Bakhurst will be well aware of the mission articulated by that organisation’s first director general , John Reith, to “inform, educate and entertain”. He will also understand the need to reinterpret that mission, sometimes radically, from one generation to the next in the face of social and technological change. It is perhaps not surprising that this document does not attempt such a radical reimagining, but it will still be required in the not too distant future.

READ MORE

This year’s crises have laid bare deep shortcomings in the corporate culture of Montrose which Bakhurst is clearly determined to confront. Under his leadership, he says, RTÉ will become a smaller organisation but its role in Irish life will not be diminished. To achieve that feat at such a difficult time, the broadcaster will need to demonstrate levels of agility, creativity and originality it has not always shown in the past .

LATEST STORIES