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Ireland's political and cultural magazine
48June 2015
D
ANIEL O’Donnell best showed
RTÉ’s literalist interpretation of
broadcasting balance in its full
absurdity. In an afternoon interview
with Ray D’Arcy the Donegal crooner
was asked about the referendum, and
spoke on the topic for three minutes. As
he finished, D’Arcy asked “have we got a
stopwatch on that?”, and made a lame
joke about the man from Del Monte,
before moving on to the next topic.
Half an hour later, D’Arcy welcomed
David Quinn on air, and read out to him
a summary of what Wee Daniel had said,
asking for his responses. A clearly
unprepared Quinn (“I’m sort of reacting
on the hop here”, he began) gave his
initial thoughts on air, until he was
interrupted by D’Arcy, saying “I have to
finish up there, I know it’s rude David
but you know the way things are done
– three minutes”.
And so, in the name of balance, both
sides of the debate were given three
minutes, but arguments were inter-
rupted in mid sentence.
The hashtag #BAIBalance was popu-
lar on twitter during the referendum
debates: protesting at the artificial bal-
ance imposed by RTÉ’s simplistic
stopwatch solution. A lot of the cyni-
cism was unfair to the Broadcasting
Authority of Ireland, and the referen-
dum guidelines they apply which derive
from section of the Broadcasting
Act.
The Act requires news and current
affairs to be presented “in an objective
and impartial manner and without any
expression of the broadcaster’s own
views”. It does not require that balance
be achieved over a single stilted pro-
gramme, instead allowing that “two or
more related broadcasts may be consid-
ered as a whole, if the broadcasts are
transmitted within a reasonable period
of each other”.
And if that’s not clear enough, the
BAI’s guidelines state clearly that there
is “no obligation to automatically ‘bal-
ance’ each contribution on an individual
programme with an opposing view” and
“no requirement to allocate an absolute
equality of airtime to referenda inter-
ests during coverage of the referenda”.
D’Arcy’s view of ‘the way things are
done’ was a distortion.
RTÉ is a professional organisation, so
doubtless it digested the BAI guidelines.
Yet instead of the rounded approach the
BAI encourages, advocating a multiplic-
ity of voices reflecting differing strands
of opinion, much of the referendum cov-
erage was reduced to simplistic
stopwatch speeches.
Somewhere, RTÉ lost the plot. So how
did we get here?
The Referendum Commission
(RefCom) exists because of the
McKenna judgment, where Patricia
McKenna took the government to court,
and established that the State could not
fund one side in a referendum debate.
Five years later, in Coughlan v Broad-
casting Complaints Commission, the
courts found that broadcasters had to
remain impartial. Anthony Coughlan
had no complaint about RTÉ’s conduct
in referendum debates, which he moni-
tored, and he accepted that both sides
got roughly equal access to the air-
waves. However, RTÉ also transmitted
party political broadcasts, and since
almost all parties were advocating a Yes
vote, the result was minutes for Yes
and only minutes for No. Add to that
legal history the jitters in RTÉ caused by
everything from the Fr Reynolds libel
case to Brendan O’Connor’s interview
with Pantibliss in , and you end up
with risk-averse production staff taking
the path of least resistance.
Meanwhile, coverage of the second
referendum on the age of voters for the
Presidency was close to non-existent,
possibly because RTÉ was unable to find
Broadcast media fetishised false balance in marriage-equality referendum, while print media
leaned to Yes. By Gerard Cunningham
Balance is a
foreign land
MEDIA Marriage Referendum
I know it’s rude
David but you
know the way
things are done -
three minutes
“
June 2015 49
pairs to argue both sides of the ques-
tion. And for many local stations around
the country, even coverage of the con-
tested marriage referendum was
difficult, as producers struggled to find
speakers for the No side.
“I’m not sure what the fix is, I think
that the fix is that media organisations
simply need to honour the spirit rather
than the letter”, says NUJ Irish secre-
tary Seamus Dooley. “It was never
intended to be a mechanical exercise”.
“Normal rules of balance should have
been enough, but I think the Panti thing
had them all terrified”.
During the campaign, the filter
bubble was a constant distortion on
Twitter.
The bubble, caused by the social
media phenomenon of listening only to
like-minded friends, amplifies agree-
ment in an echo chamber and
downplays dissenting voices, leading
observers to overestimate support.
Opinion polls were scoured for clues,
and when they too agreed with the dom-
inant Yes narrative on Twitter, they
were followed by warnings about “Shy
No” voters, and reminders of how the
gap narrowed in the final days of the
divorce referendum, which was carried
by less than one vote per ballot box. The
fear of an echo chamber effect may even
have been a factor in the #HomeToVote
campaign, where recent emigrants still
registered flew and sailed home to cast
their ballots.
In the end, it became clear that the
echo-chamber effect didn’t really exist,
and the bubble reflected reality. Yet the
iron adherence to stopwatch debates
created a different kind of mirage. Iona
Institute director David Quinn acknowl-
edged in an interview with the US
Family Research Council sponsored
Washington Watch that Iona (“a small
organisation, we had a budget of about
€, a year”) and the No side gen-
erally punched above its weight, with
only contributors between Iona and
Mothers and Fathers Matter (MAFM)
across many debates. The lack of new
faces on the No bench became apparent
as the debates went on, and may even
have played a part in the No campaign’s
claims that unseen supporters were
being silenced.
As an aside, the accounts presented to
SIPO, the Standards in Public Office
Commission, should make interesting
reading. Of a budget of €,, it has
been estimated, based on published
Youtube rates, that Iona spent €,
on Youtube pre-roll advertisements,
with MAFM spending multiples of that.
Iona also sought to make an issue of
foreign funding from Atlantic Philan-
thropies for several groups advocating a
Yes vote, but only raised the talking
point late in the day, perhaps reluctant
to answer questions in return about its
own funding. Atlantic gave the Gay and
Lesbian Equality Network (GLEN) alone
$,, between and .
Moreover, GLEN explained to the Irish
Times in that it gets only half its
funding from Atlantic.
The most obvious effect of stopwatch
speechifying is that journalists are
tempted to stop doing their jobs as
interrogators. Interrupting a speaker,
or stopping them to clarify a point,
make for complicated timekeeping, so
it’s simpler just to let someone talk. This
often led to a claim on day one, dis-
missed as untrue by RefCom on day two,
and then repeated again unchallenged
on day three. While RefCom’s opinion
on an issue is not necessarily the final
word, there must be some duty on
broadcasters to challenge repeated
claims which have been addressed by
RefCom. Instead, it was left to opposing
sides to go around in circles playing
whack-a-mole.
Fact checking as a part of political
debates is taken for granted in the US,
to the extent that some checkers will
even call debaters over a missing deci-
mal point or a rounding error, but Irish
broadcasters are shy of placing them-
selves in the role of referees. Instead,
RefCom was used as a sort of fact-
checker, but one whose rulings were
then ignored (or at least, not referred to)
when the issue re-surfaced.
Print journalism, unlike broadcast-
ing, is not bound by the BAI’s balance
requirements. The Press Council and
Ombudsman, unlike the BAI, are not
regulators, and there are no special
legal requirements during referendums.
A survey by NewsAccess for MKC
Communications claimed “newspapers
carried three times more Yes and No
articles” across a total of articles in
the days up to the referendum. Of the
articles reviewed, were graded Yes,
No, and Neutral. However, it’s
difficult to determine what exactly this
says about media coverage, as it
includes not just news reports of cam-
paign launches, events and debates, but
also opinion and editorial pieces, which
by definition take a position on the vote.
One thing is clear though: balance is a
foreign land.
Newsaccess was unable to provide a
breakdown of how particular newspa-
pers had covered the issue, as the
commission they received from MKC
had not demanded it; and was also
unable to provide links to specific arti-
cles coded Yes, No or Neutral, strangely
citing commercial confidentiality.
“It wasn’t about ‘Is this a positive, a
negative or a neutral article?’, it was “Is
it leaving you with a sense of the Yes
campaign, the No campaign or some-
thing more neutral’”, said Paul
Moriarty, head of insight at
Newsaccess.
“For it to be tagged or coded as being
a Yes article it needs to be strongly in
favour of Yes, and if it’s No it needs to be
strongly in favour of No. Which is why
again you’ll see quite a number of what
would be called neutral articles within
the analysis”.
But perhaps the most interesting
thing the research shows, based on the
published results, is the disparity in
coverage between different titles. The
Irish Times and Irish Independent both
account for over % of the total
number of articles, while at the other
end the Herald and Star account for
only % and % respectively. To put
that in perspective, the Mail on Sunday,
published three times during the survey
period, contained more articles on the
referendum that either of the Star or
Herald, each of which appeared
times. Given the eventual turnout, tab-
loid editors seem to have seriously
underestimated their audience’s
engagement with the issue. •
Of the articles
reviewed, 424
were graded
Yes, 135 No, and
214 Neutral
“
many media
understandably
covered this
