Labour leader’s dig in Dáil ‘Goodbye Viktor Orbán, hello Patrick O’Donovan“. highlighted a serious issue that is being left largely unaddressed – the lack of trust in and less acknowledged the lack of trustworthiness in the media, especially public service media.
It is not just woke lefties – a lot of rhetoric from the right-wing builds on the same concern. Gript’s Ben Scallan’s pinned tweet focuses on RTÉ and even claims Gript is the real public service media since it is free from subsidies controlled by the politicians it cover.
Of course, Gripts own funding sources are hard to examine.
The right-wing view is that market feedback assures greater quality than any public service can. Issues such as Gript’s scary coverage of sex education or its coverage of the Novemeber 2023 Dublin riots might show otherwise.
The idea that commercial media would provide balance was known to be nonsense (Bagdikian,1983) even before the dawn of surveillance capitalism which now serves us information only in a way that is manipulated according to the dictates of the highest bidder (Zuboff, 2022)
Our political system has been busy on media issues. Report of the Future of Media Commission (2023) was published after much work and consultation. RTÉ is being reformed, albeit within the same managerialist and centrally controlled model. Comisiún na Meán (www.cnam.ie) was set-up in 2023 and the challenges of developments in social media, especially concerning children has been coming thick and fast, with politicians struggling to cope.
Yet independence of RTÉ from governments remains largely under addressed, and it is of course the issue that the Irish political system can most directly address .
There are long-term and deep-seated societal reasons that mean this needs to be addressed but more pertinently it now in the main political players medium interest to grasp this problem.
Fiannna Fáil (FF) as the dominant party is the one whose ‘brand’ is tied most closely to the main stream media in Ireland. The family connections, in the time of before social media, might have been benefitted FF with rumours about Halls Pictorial Weekly only circulating among those felt themselves to be political insiders already. With social media the fire behind any smoke can be easily kindled, spread without any chance to be in context or any chance to correct complete calumnies. For any cynical FFers who think traditional arrangements work for them as the dominant party , the risk of Sinn Féin (SF) replacing them surely is an enough on its own to force a rethink.
SF have so far benefitted from the decreasing trust in the main stream media, with their well-organized and resourced media savy. But this is changing rapidly as people talk about ‘Mary Sue’ & SF use of the law. Further SF’s political success destroys their outsider status. They know too that if try to the play the same they believe the other big parties did, they are likely to fail, both from the changed media landscape and because traditional media will remain riddled with old regime oblasts.
FG (Fine Gael) may think a professionally managed public service can made trustworthy through capable leadership that keeps a tight ship and strict oversight from a well-vetted board and a competent department. Even they must realise even if trustworthiness could be achieved by this managerialist approach, public trust is not. FG’s claim that they are the competent technocratics has no chance of being heard without trust in media. The spectre of a SF government also means that FG’s assumption, that they will have a big say in who are RTÉ’s great and good masters will be, is increasingly unsound.
Labour, Social Democrats, and the Greens try to leverage their support through working cleverly with the current media establishment. Sometimes they succeed but their work to keep access to a public service media ultimately controlled by the larger parties is always going to be limited. With the commercial media who are even more hostile to them, a trusted public service media is vital.
The more marginal left parties, like People Before Profit know that the same private interests in the media are already tipping the scales in favour of right-wing marginal voices rather than own. They desperately need some media with some sense of public service before the neoliberal domination of the mainstream media starts to seem like the good old days.
Aontú and any of those on the right that depend on democratic processes working know that while they can benefit in the short-term from attacking main-stream media their views will lack any platform at all, if the likes of Musk, Murdock or big corporates are the only media sources to survive.
It is only those committed to replacing democracy with the whims of ‘market-tested’ great genuses will benefit from the complete destruction of trustworthy media.
The diverse political interests that embrace democracy face two challenges to solving the lack of trust in public service media.
First is the challenge presented by the interests that depend less on any democratic base but more on the extreme wealthy elite, who have extraordinary and growing inequality strengthening their hand. This challenge looks like it is going to keep growing in the medium term. The best time to act on this interest is now.
The second challenge is the temptation of any political interest to think it can by controlling public service media from its centre. Imagining it will get a better deal for itself than embracing public service independence. My points above show that is a dangerous delusion.
We urgently need a radical democratization of RTÉ that decentralizes and divides the control of media from government and parliamentary powers. Such schemes need development but there are some suggestions available including O’Rourke & FitzGerald (2021).
Sources
Bagdikian, B. H. (1983). The Media Monopoly. Beacon Press.
O’Rourke, B., & FitzGerald, J. (2021). Submission to the Future of the Media Commission. https://arrow.tudublin.ie/buschmarrep/26
Report of the Future of Media Commission. (2023). Gov.Ie. Retrieved April 20, 2026, from https://www.gov.ie/en/the-future-of-media-commission/publications/report-of-the-future-of-media-commission/
Zuboff, S. (2022). Surveillance Capitalism or Democracy? The Death Match of Institutional Orders and the Politics of Knowledge in Our Information Civilization. Organization Theory, 3(3), 26317877221129290. https://doi.org/10.1177/26317877221129290
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