Balance is a foreign land - Village Magazine

48June 2015

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

“