RTE under Fianna Fail

TOM O'DEA LOOKS AT THE CHANGES IN TELEVISION COVERAGE OF CURRENT AFFAIRS SINCE THE NEW GOVERNMENT CAME TO POWER

IN THE MIDDLE and late Sixties, when Irish television was trying to establish ittself as an independent inquirer, there were several clashes with individual Fianna Fail ministers and with the Government as a whole. In October, 1971, Gerry Collins invoked Section 31 of the Broadcasting Act, when RTE did not interpret it to his satisfaction, he fired the whole Authority over a year later.

With the arrival of the Coalition, RTE hoped for more liberal broadcastting policies. There was the spectre of Liam Cosgrave, of course, to be conntemplated - he was not seen as a liberal, far from it - but in the foreemost ranks of the Coalition grouping there were those whose liberalism was implicitly and naively taken on faith. Foremost among them was Conor Cruise O'Brien, 'a distinguished broaddcaster'.

As a result of all this, current affairs broadcasting in general became responnsive to the device known as the instant wipe - identify the story of the day, tell it with verve arid resonance; then wipe it from your mind and move on to the next day's story. Spotting trends and identifying accountability went out of fashion. Collaborative broadcasting was only a white feather away, if that. Last year, the Coalition Government talked a Bill through the Dail for the creation of a state of Emergency and the suppression of information.

The cumulative effect of all this was to cause the RTE Authority øwhich in the early days had been a purely fiscal body - to become blaatantly political and to throw in its lot with the Coalition. The Fine Gael strand in the Authority became publicly detectable, as did the Labour and big-farmer influence

Within a couple of months of assumming the office of Minister for Posts and Telegraphs, Dr. O'Brien was speaking in the Dail of the necessity for 'restrictions on RTE's activities'. Instead of revoking Section 31 of the Act, he re-invoked it.

About May, last year, when the General Election was only weeks away, many media persons felt that the Coaliition would win both that and the folllowing election. In RTE, some adopted a dialectical stance. They had been locked inside their heads since the termination of '7 Days' and the purge of the previous autumn; now, they thought, it was time to re-emerge.

RTE management had been intellectually overawed by Conor Cruise O'Brien. Managers think in terms of quantitative manageability and are thrown off balance by metaphysical subtleties. But the days of subtleties and metaphysics are now over:

Fianna Fail, the slightly constitutional Party, is back. Fianna Fail knows what it wants done and it lets it be known by way of very broad hints.

The Coalition promised open governnment: Fianna Fail has been trying to create the semblance of it. Gerry Collins has been speaking in tongues about the prison system with a fervour that recalls some of the set passages in Dickens.

The willingness of Fianna Fail to take part in broadcasts is such that the most recent glittering prize was won by an RTE afternoon musical programme in Irish, on which Jim Tunney appeared.

But the senior current affairs producction, 'The Politics Programme', is not being any mare adventurous than it had been before the return of Fianna Fail. At the end of September it ran an invesstigation into alleged police brutality. This edition had a clearer edge than did the edition which covered the same topic in February. But when one recalls that in September, the Minister for

Justice was almost putting out tenders for media coverage of the allegations against the police, it did not take a lot of courage for 'The Politics Programme' to pick up the theme.

There are many public issues that RTE has not analysed, or adequately examined, since the return of Fianna Fail. As I write, the Government's prooposed wage agreement and the response of the unions to it have not been fineecombed in the way that an alert public

broadcasting organisation should have done. In its hey-day. '7 Days' would have been on to a theme such as that in a flash. But then, '7 Days' was taken off the air because it was deemed to have been too nosey and 'The Politics Programme', since it first appeared a year ago, has always tended to be reacctive rather than to initiate its own innvestigations.

When '7 Days' was broken up, three programmes emerged from the fall-out. 'The Politics Programme' was the prinncipal one. 'Report', a documentary programme, was another. From the beeginning it was soft-centred; even when it has taken up serious themes, it has managed not to tread upon the toes of the Establishment. The third, 'Survey', examined our attitudes to drink, marrriage and so on; it did not make a deep impression on the public and it has been dropped from the current schedule.

A little magazine programme called 'Next Stop' emerged also last year. In summer, it became 'Summer Journal' and now it has re-crystallised as 'P.M.' In the past year or so, it has shown more initiative and more courage than any of its big brothers. It is not withhout significance, I believe, that 'P.M.' now employs several persons who once worked on '7 Days'.

'P.M.' is transmitted at 7 o'clock outside peak viewing time. It has not actually been taking serious risks with the new Government, but it is the only production that goes after the news while it is hot and tries to get beneath its surface.

The real test of how RTE is handling current affairs will be its response to issues that go close to the Fianna Fail bone. At the very marrow of that bone there is a quiver of hostility towards broadcasting. Fianna Fail, the populist party, will not brook criticism from a nest of intellectuals in an organisation, as Sean Lamass put it, 'set up by legisslation as an instrument of public policy and as such responsible to the Governnment.'