RTE’s problems are multiple: a E50 million record deficit and a devastating failure in its editorial standards and processes.
The cash crisis is hitting programming. But the editorial crisis cuts far deeper.
The Broadcasting Authority of Ireland’s report into RTE’s Primetime Investigates shows an incredible breakdown in editorial controls. The Minister used the words ‘shoddy, unprofessional and cavalier’.
As a former Head of RTE Radio it is hard to understand how this happened given the experience of the people involved. Long established guidelines were ignored and the lack of documentary evidence and paper notes is contrary to all serious journalistic practice, whether in print or broadcasting. Anna Carragher, the report’s author, talks of ‘groupthink’, a lack of challenge and review, which allowed the team to accept assumptions as facts. But, disturbing as the thirty-four page report is, it prompts many questions.
Central to those questions is the role of RTE Legal Affairs. What was its involvement in the case, what was its advice and risk assessment?
The BAI in its findings, which imposed the E200, 000 fine on RTE for a breach of its legal responsibilities under the 2009 Act, states ‘it is a source of regret’ that RTE did not waive its solicitor/client privilege with its in house legal staff. Why did RTE not do this? Given the scale of the libel and its consequences it is important the public know. The Carragher report expresses concern that the reporter was the sole conduit for contact with Fr Reynolds solicitors. Yet what is disturbing is that the report states that the May 18th RTE response to Fr Reynolds was sent by the reporter but written with the assistance and agreement of RTE Legal Affairs and the Executive Producer and Head of Current Affairs. By May 18th a letter from Mill Hill Fathers offered, for the first time a paternity test. A second letter from Fr Reynolds solicitors on May 19th was copied to Legal Affairs by the team but no reply was sent by RTE.
By May 23rd, the day of the programme’s transmission, a further letter is sent directly to the reporter by Fr Reynolds solicitors. This again offered a paternity test and stated Fr Reynolds would sue for defamation if the programme went out. This letter, while shared with the programme team, and verbally discussed with the Head of News & Current Affairs, Ed Mulhall, never went to Legal Affairs. While Mr Mulhall took full responsibility for the decision to broadcast, it remains bizarre that no one seriously considered the offer of the paternity test. There was such an assumption of guilt they never saw the offer as genuine.
It is not clear if Mr. Mulhall or Legal Affairs briefed the Director General on the paternity test offer. The report states there ‘appears to be no mechanism for alerting the Director General who is Editor in Chief’. In my RTE experience such alerts were standard requirements by Heads of Output.
When did this change and why? RTE is heavy on meetings and has several key editorial meetings across the week. Traditionally the Director General had regular contact with the Outputs Heads in Radio, Television and News & Current Affairs. When did a process develop where a major editorial and legal risk was not flagged to the Director General? The new editorial guidelines and editorial standards board create checks but the key dynamic is the relationship between the Director General and the content divisions heads.
A further, and significant, question for RTE is why they accepted an early retirement package with Mr. Mulhall without waiting for the report’s findings and without therefore providing any opportunity to explore what happened and why. The report does not include the transcripts of those involved but the real absence is an account from the senior manager himself; someone who has such a record for outstanding judgment.
The emphasis on the reporter, who has now taken voluntary redundancy, and the media’s portrayal of her as ‘shamed’ and ‘disgraced’ obscures the fact that layers of management lay between her and the programme’s transmission. She had an Executive Producer, a Head of Department and a Head of Division above her and they had RTE Legal Affairs advice. One might have expected the Head of News to brief the Director General or for RTE Legal Affairs to have flagged an alert given the scale of risk.
Was that risk assessed?
RTE, and independent, stable public broadcasting, is central to our democracy. We need trusted news and critical, courageous investigative journalism. Those who worry that that is in danger must worry about why this happened. The Chairman and RTE Board, who were appointed by the previous Minister, bridge the last Director General and the current one who started the job not long before this programme aired.
Did the board ask questions about editorial risk and structural process? Did they evaluate corporate governance? Did they provide challenge?.
A further question remains over the speed with which RTE reacted to the crisis post the libel settlement last November (indeed RTE knew once the paternity test was done in September what the outcome would be). It was this lack of public action that seemed to prompt the Minister to request the BAI investigation.
RTE needs to move on. It needs to get its finances and operations in order and restore public trust. But the failings identified in the BAI report are not just in journalism but also in management and in managerial structures and operations at the highest levels.
Good management would have saved RTE from bad journalism.
It is not clear that the changes will address the managerial gap. That requires open, engaged and collective leadership from the boardroom down rather than targeting frontline reporters who need support, training and robust editors. We all need RTE to get this right because as Carragher says in her foreword: ‘broadcasting’s powerful place in our society also brings heavy responsibilities and it is right and proper that those who hold others to account are themselves held accountable’.
The stakes are high but if RTE embraces that level of transparency, accountability and openness this dark episode may be the roots of a stronger, more public focused broadcaster. Now that would secure the public’s willingness to pay.

Helen Shaw runs Athena Media who produce The Media Show on RTE Radio 1. She served as MD RTE Radio (1997-2002) and previously worked with BBC NI as Editor news & current affairs, radio.

A tweet from Bryan Dobson said the Minister would be on the RTE Six One News if the report was out in time. Clearly it seemed the report was at least with the Minister.
Just after 5.30pm the BAI released the 34 page report, to its site along with its finding. The RTE newsroom led with it at Six One but it was obvious they had not had time to go through it. Throughout the day we were told the RTE DG Noel Curran would make a statement if the report was published and both Six One and Drivetime on RTE Radio 1 had similar responses from the DG and RTE issued a carefully prepared press statement accepting all the finding and showing their compliance with them.

At this stage I was trying to read all 34 pages of the Carragher report, the additional BAI findings document, the lengthy RTE response, the additional John Horgan report which was simultaneously published by RTE, and trying to make sense of it to do a short insert into the top of the Media Show so we could drop a couple of items and replace with a piece on the report and at least reflect it.
By 7pm post the Six One News we had clips of Noel Curran’s response and I had gutted the documents but the most compelling element in the responses was not RTE’s but that of the Minister Pat Rabbitte who broke through some of the PR soundbites with a damningly frank assessment of the report’s findings and called the PrimeTime Investigates programme and the journalistic work behind it ’shoddy, unprofessional and cavalier’. His sense of shock at the detail in the report reverberated. Several times he was asked by the interviewer Bryan Dobson whether he now had confidence in the DG and the RTE Board. He declined to say yes or no simply stating his confidence was shaken and he would be meeting the board and the DG at 8am on Tuesday morning.

Up until that point I had a sense that the release of the report, just before 6pm Friday, on a bank holiday weekend, could mean that its findings and implications were buried. It seemed somewhat contrived that the report issued so late on Friday although we are assured that the BAI was working frantically to get it issued in time and not hold it over the bank holiday weekend. But with all good intentions it did seem to us that if we were struggling to get it into a weekend show (which is operating like a lot of weekend newspapers and magazines) because of our production deadlines then a late delivery of the report would also make it difficult for Sunday newspapers to fully assess the report and with the May bank holiday many people’s attention is off news and current affairs from mid day Friday until Tuesday morning and Morning Ireland (which may now have to revise its 8am start time!)
Pat Rabbitte’s statement that he is calling a meeting with the DG and RTE Board at 8am Tuesday signaled to everyone that this will not get lost in bank holiday traffic and that it will run as a very big media story throughout next week and beyond.

In our own case all we could do was reflect that in the show and flag that we intend to go into the implications and consequences of the report in much greater detail next week and will follow what happens at the Tuesday meeting. We’ve already several key interviews lined up next week from people who have not been heard on this story and can take us much deeper into what happened and why. But our ability to re-make the show at 7pm was non existent and even with the short insert and change we did not hand over the programme until after 9.15pm to be reviewed by the commissioning producer. It takes time to edit, cut to duration and re format for delivery.

So what are the issues? Anna Carragher has done an excellent job in the 34 page report in trying to pull together the threads but there are some real questions that RTE needs to address and I really encourage people to read the actual report and not just the press and broadcast coverage.

The BAI in its findings expresses regret that RTE did not lift its client privilege with its legal advisors and legal team so that that information could have come into the report and its understanding of what happened and why. Given that the chairman of the BAI Bob Collins is a former Director General of RTE it suggests that the BAI believes RTE had the ability to do this legally but did not. We do not have an input from RTE legal affairs in the report but a core part of the report hangs on legal letters from Fr Reynolds to RTE particularly one to the reporter at the centre of the programme on the day of transmission itself when Fr Reynolds once again offered a paternity test and flagged his intent to sue RTE. Its clear from the report that the reporter passed this email letter to the production team, and the head of current affairs. The head of news and current affairs was told by telephone as he was at the Obama event. What remains bizarre is the unanimous decision to go ahead and broadcast the show without any discussion, it seems, about the potential issues involved or the liability to RTE in terms of a court case. It seems from the Carragher report that this letter did not go to RTE legal affairs. It is not clear if that failure would have in fact stopped the transmission because no view is given in the report from RTE legal affairs. It may well have been that the editorial decision to broadcast would have remained but its the events around those legal letters and the day of transmission which are quite revealing about the gaps in RTE News & Current Affairs procedures.
RTE, in its reponse, is keen to show everything that has been done since April in its pre-emptive move before the report’s publication. All that is well and good but some of it raises questions for RTE which may be part of that Tuesday meeting.

1.Why did RTE at an executive and board level react so late? Nothing in the Carragher report will have come as a surprise to RTE since its all based on their own internal material and all this was known to them by latest November given the background to the programme would have gathered for the legal case and for the internal inquiry post the libel judgement. Key people only stood aside when the Minister asked the BAI to investigate, post the libel settlement, on November 23rd. RTE’s failure, at the Board level, to take decisive action after the court case and the fact that the key decision-makers were still in their posts appeared to have prompted ministerial action. As a former member of the executive board of RTE (I was Head of RTE Radio 1997-2002) it is always uncomfortable to see politicians in the midst of the public broadcaster’s operations we have a legacy of political interference in RTE and the direct legacy of Ray Burke’s corrupt actions in radio (see Moriarty report 1!) but public accountability for the publicly funded media is the final responsibility of the Minister. It would have been preferable if the BAI had called the investigation itself but these are new powers and the BAI would normally respond to a request to investigate rather than make that call itself.

The Minister’s decision to invoke the 2009 Act and call for an independent investigate was necessary and we would not have got to where we are now without it. The RTE John Horgan report, issued yesterday post 6pm, is fine but was limited by RTE to exploring guidelines and procedures rather than what happened and why. It is equally not clear why this report could not have been issued at the time of the April guidelines announcements and given context and a rational background to those changes which took many by surprise given the BAI report was not out.

2. Can we believe, given the experience and reputation of the people involved, that this was an isolated programme or has the collapse in journalistic good practice (note-taking for legal purposes is part of Journalism 101) been part and parcel of our programmes? Was the casual approach to ethics, guidelines and referral in this case part of a culture which had developed in that strand or in the division? Can we possibly believe it was isolated? The full transcripts of the team would help us understand that - including the one with the head of news & current affairs - as to why everyone believed this story unquestioning? Was the Director General aware of this programme and to what extent was he aware of it? What level of briefing did the division give to the DG and the executive board? In assessing this programme was there a conversation about RTE’s ability to stand this up in court? If not, why not?

3. RTE’s decision to grant early retirement to the Head of news & current affairs, Ed Mulhall, before all processes were finished has to be questioned. The clarity over who runs the news and current affairs division could have been resolved without that decision being taken. Yesterday the reporter at the centre of the programme resigned and that’s the first time the word ‘resignation’ has been used. There is as RTE tells us an independent HR inquiry going on. The challenge RTE faces is that the burden of this failure of standards, or absence of standards, appears to be falling on the reporter. In any editorial process the reporter is at the bottom of the chain. That is why there are producers/directors, middle managers and finally heads of divisions.
All the non-existent processes that the Carragher report highlights existed under a layer of management. The lack of note-taking, paper records, documentary evidence, challenge and review is all the responsibility of management across the organisation. What is shocking about the Carragher report is that many of the existing guidelines were ignored or misunderstood. People seemed unclear about their meaning. That responsibility - to ensure staff know and understand their responsibilities within an editorially led organisation - is the responsibility of senior management. The appalling failures in management are at the heart of what happened and that is why the word systemic is used in the report. ‘Groupthink’ and a lack of challenge and review can not easily be tackled by new guidelines. It requires leadership. External experts can no provide that.

3. How do we learn? The big message from RTE post the report publication last evening is that the organisation is learning from the events. A key part of that learning will be openess, transparency and an acceptance that things must change completely. It would be good to see external outstanding candidates being seriously considered for the current vacancies. It would be good to see RTE re-investing in journalistic training - not just guidelines and social media training. RTE used to be a primary trainer in its sector. It would be good to see more diversity at executive board level. It would be good to see RTE engaging with the public - in the period 1997-2002 we used to do a road show, led by Kevin Healy, where RTE - including the executive board - went to towns and cities and listened to the public. It would not be a bad idea to open the windows again. Our own humble show The Media Show is a beginning - but we’re not a public feedback show - we can’t do a digital ‘mailbag’ but it is needed. The RTE Audience Council could play a much more prominent role as an interface between the public (who are 50% funders of RTE) and RTE itself. Yet it is still true that the vast majority of licence fee payers have no idea there even is an Audience Council and who is on it let alone its remit and function.
If the Minister is looking at the big picture the independent regulation of RTE is at the heart of this. Does it currently work?If not why? and what are the solutions? Given the financial crisis which is literally threatening the future of RTE - with 2012 promising a 50 million euro deficit -that question of regulation and governance is not academic but may rapidly become one of survival. Let’s hope everyone at that meeting on Tuesday is up to the challenge. Now is not the time to blink.

This week our show takes a theme of the shift online in media from the online news successes at the Pulitzer Prize awards this week to the success of Mark Little’s Storyful operation, and the question whether the print version of newspapers is dead?. Storyful is a Dublin based global, digital news agency, which is re-writing our definitions of news and journalism while sticking to the principles of journalism 101 that everything is verified and checked. Newspapers have been hard hit by this shift online. We talk to young people who see news as something they get from social media and not newspapers. They rarely buy them and if they read its Metro. We hear from Noirin Hegarty online editor at the Irish Independent, John Burns of the Sunday Times and David Cochrane of Politics.ie. We also look at what happened when we, the audiences, readers and viewers, shift online and how the media money, which is the funding base of much of content, has followed. Gerard O’Neill, chairman of Amarach, the research agency, joins us. By the end of this year it is predicted that 20% of the 900 million euro Irish advertisement revenue will be spent online but the challenge here is that nearly half of that goes into search, into Google and social media sites like Facebook. When people advertise products on your Facebook pageyou are being sold as a produce to advertisers via Facebook. So traditional media, broadcasting and print, is losing revenue through the recession, through a drop in sales for newspapers and more significantly by the movement of media revenue out of content and into search. O’Neill talks about the absentee landlords of Google and Facebook who are stripping revenue from content creators in Ireland.
With over 2 million of us using Facebook more and more money is being spent marketing us there rather than radio, TV and newspapers but the end result is that money is not then going into media companies here producing our radio, television and print media. How traditional media fights back and finds its economic and business connection with audiences in a digital age will be a recurrent theme of our series as its one of the key issues in the national and international media landscape.

Its really interesting that so far the only company that has said a blanket NO to us in our detailed and very polite requests for interviews and access is Google, who as you know are based here in Dublin at Barrow St and are a big employer in the city. Google’s reply, when I said we were talking to media companies, was pointedly ‘but you do know we’re not a media company’. Which most of us will find a little surprising. They mean they don’t make content but in many ways they are the glue in the heart of the digital media business and media landscape. They are how media content is being found, shared and how media audiences/users are being marketed for advertisement. Their revenue comes from media advertisement money and is directly linked to the transformation of the media world. Its a shame that a company that is so central to our media life, and to the sharing of knowledge, is so private about its own work. But they are not alone. I once shared a conference platform in Hillversum, the Netherlands with Apple on podcasting and the classic moment was when a member of the audience, all radio professionals, asked ‘can you talk to us about the future, where things are going?’ to while Apple guy number 1 replied ‘we can’t talk about the future, period’. We all understand there are issues of confidentiality but a sense of openness would be helpful from some of the companies who dominate and shape our media and communications world

So our lead in this week is RTE’s decision to close the London Office, which is one of those stories which is bubbling away since it was announced and will probably get bigger as the closure happens post August. Given our much we interact with the UK we are exploring why RTE took the decision to end London rather than explore cuts and savings in other part of output or even share it across regional and foreign news output? What do you think? Do you value RTE being present in London or do you think it can be covered from Dublin and Belfast which is what the newsroom is saying? We talk to Cillian de Paor, who is acting head of news and current affairs and get the reaction of people like Pat Loughrey, former BBC Director of Nations and Regions. We also ask TV3 CEO David McRedmond for his view and in both cases you may be surprised by what they say.
One of the things we’re doing in the series is adding additional content post the transmission in the form of longer even full-length interviews. We did this twice with episode 1, with a long cut of both the Bob Collins and Hugh Linehan interviews and we plan to do the same within our very limited resources with episode 2 starting with that Cillian de Paor interview. Its all at www.rte.ie/radio1/themediashow
We’ll post links to podcasts and news soon. But keep in touch via mediashow@rte.ie. We may not be based in Montrose but that RTE email gets directly to us. If it is post do send it here to Athena Media, Adelaide Chambers, Peter St Dublin 8 rather than RTE - that’s faster!.

Let me know.
And the first episode is just a beginning. We’re just shaping the series and have lots of things in the pipeline including a great series on inside media-houses from the Irish Times, Storyful to TV3. We’re looking for access to just about every influential media force you can think of and if we’re missing one of them let me know.
I am going to try and write a blog note regularly about the production of the show and will share your feedback too. Thanks for reading and hope you can listen.
Our twitter address is @athenamediaie and the hashtag we’re using for the series is #rtemediashow so please do use that so I can find all your comments!
Podcast online on RTE http://www.rte.ie/radio1/themediashow/
and our own site by Monday - and we’ll be posting full interviews from the series so starting with Bob Collins…lots more in that interview on Right to Reply and how it works.

www.athenamedia.ie

There’s a lot of talk about media accountability, accuracy and bias at present. Some of it is flowing from the controversy over the so called Frontline and bogus tweet account which was the subject of a BAI complaints decision against RTÉ last week. Some of it comes from the discussion over the proposed changes to the code of fairness and balance for news and current affairs which the BAI is also concluding.

Equally there is discussion over the BAI’s investigation of RTÉ’s ‘Fr. Reynolds’ Primetime and the report by investigator Anna Carragher which is due shortly. In many ways it is good to separate the apples from oranges (or apples from garlic given the week’s other news!). The Frontline ‘fake tweet’ issue is an error of judgement and even good journalists are allowed to have errors. RTÉ has already said ’sorry’ but it does have questions to answer on its processes, its editorial processes, which have been highlighted over the weekend. I don’t think it warrants a public inquiry (and the BAI has already ruled out any inquiry) but Sean Gallagher is open, or anyone else for that matter, to take another complaint against the programme based on the changed and continued allegations. We need to be careful that every single clash over an editorial error or judgement call does not result in endless inquiries which will be both costly and equally fruitless.

The Fr. Reynolds case was and is completely different and separate and the investigation governing it has been triggered by the Minister using part of the Broadcasting Act to investigate the matter. It did not result from a complaint and is not part of the normal complaint process under the BAI. The Fr. Reynolds investigation is not about a live programme and a judgement call within a live programme. It’s about a detailed constructed programme which was seen and vetted by several key editorial people in RTÉ and it’s about the broadcast given the subsequent libel case. What is puzzling about the weekend allegations about The Frontline is that is does not seem that these were made as complaints to either RTÉ or the BAI and have only surfaced post the BAI judgement and in response to news media coverage. If that’s not the case I’d love to be corrected?

For RTÉ the key now is to re-connect with the public in a new and more open, transparent manner. The new social media guidelines which will form part of the overall programming guidelines should be on the home page of the RTÉ website as a click through. The RTÉ Audience Council, which does exist although few know about it, must be given channels to connect with the public and to act, as it was intended, as an interface between the audience and RTÉ so that there is real communications. The Audience Council could really help RTÉ, but try to find it online or via the website and you will struggle. It needs to be empowered.

Emily Bell, formerly of The Guardian newspaper and now of the Tow Institute for Digital Journalism at Columbia University in New York, talks about the Internet and social media forcing journalism to be more transparent in all its processes, more open to its readers, listeners, viewers contributions and feedbacks and to recognising that what is needed today is ’see-through journalism’.

‘See-through Journalism’ is about getting rid of the cloak of secrecy around what we do in journalism and in the media. It’s about seeing ourselves as collaborators with our so-called audiences. It’s about respecting them and ensuring they know how we make the news, how we make decisions, about how we edit and construct stories. An informed and engaged public is more likely to support the valued news providers who offer trusted and accurate news and information stories which help and assist our lives. For RTÉ - and indeed any news organisation - the challenge is to see this crisis as an opportunity to re-invent, to open up rather than close down. RTÉ need to look at ways in which it does this via its website, its own programmes (there is no media programme on RTÉ radio or TV) and more importantly via public meetings. One of the things my colleague Kevin Healy did in my time on RTÉ’s executive board, when he was in charge of public affairs, was to set up an RTÉ road show where managers and programmes literally took to the roads and had open public meetings around the country on RTÉ, programming and feedback. They were lively discussions but the thing is when you open up and say you are listening to your audience, your clients, your customers, you often find that the majority of them support and value you and the conversations that follow allow you to understand and address the negative feedback.

The challenge for the Minister of Communications and the BAI itself is that the Internet does not come under their brief. The Internet and all the content that flows within, and via social media, is not governed by the regulations currently being discussed about broadcasting and equally while the print media loves to attack RTÉ it would have to think quite differently if it had to operate under the same news and current guidelines as the broadcasters. It is time for an overall Media Authority which brings together all forms of media and content creation, which is distributed to the public, and to merge and coordinate the ways in which we think about media regulation. The press is currently self-regulated and we know from other parts of public life how challenging that is as a concept. The conversation now needs to open up to the creation of an integrated media authority which connects and makes rational all the ways in which we as citizens and consumers are served by the media as a public and commercial good.

If you want to follow our work connect with us on facebook and on twitter.