How to get on ‘The Pat Kenny Show’

42 November 2014

F you’re one of the lucky top ten per cent

of earners in Ireland, you probably feel

well represented on talk radio. For the

other ninety percent, an exasperated tweet

or text message, or a few minutes giving out

on Liveline is the most you can expect. Libel

laws constrain radio researchers and pro-

ducers and make them nervous about giving

airtime to random contributors. Don’t feel

totally put out though: You have options and

this article will arm you with the necessary

information and tips for getting through and

becoming part of the public dialogue.

Broadcasters are obliged to represent a

diversity of voices from diﬀerent geograph-

ical regions and backgrounds,

so there are avenues for Irish cit-

izens to have their views directly

represented on national radio. All

too often, radio hosts reﬂexively

turn to authoritative-sound-

ing experts and commentators

drawn from Ireland’s elite, eﬀec-

tively narrowing public discourse

and closing down debate.

A 2014 research paper on Irish

radio news showed that a stun-

ning 95% of sources appearing

on morning radio during late

2008 to talk about the banking

crisis were elite oﬃcial sources.

Suspecting that mid-morning

radio might suﬀer the same lop-

sided overrepresentation, Village turned its

attention to the Marian Finucane show and

found that more than 80% of the sources on

the Sunday news review hour ﬁtted into the

category of elite oﬃcial sources. If you listen

to public or private radio and have a sense

that programmes don’t reﬂect a wide array of

opinions, you won’t be surprised to ﬁnd that

radio news and talk shows overwhelmingly

reﬂect the opinions of the elite. Anyone lucky

enough to spend a bit of time in radio studios

will know that outside of venting opportuni-

ties such as ‘Liveline’, the ‘ordinary citizen’ is

regarded with fear, liable to provoke a libel

case or ﬁre oﬀ an opinion that cuts sharply

across the radio consensus. Elite sources, on

the other hand, will rarely go oﬀ-message.

Earlier this year, Kevin Rafter of DCU

published research titled ‘Voices in the cri-

sis: The role of media elites in interpreting

the banking collapse’, investigating what he

called ‘oﬃcial sources’ on Irish radio. The

preponderance of elite voices on news radio

is already established by studies includ-

ing a number from American sociologist

William Hoynes, though it’s worth noting

that Hoynes and Rafter acknowledge that the

dominance of elite voices doesn’t necessar-

ily mean a convergence of elite

opinion, for some journalists,

politicians and academics may

take positions highly critical of

the status quo or strive to repre-

sent minority voices or broaden

political discourse.

Public media in Ireland has a

charter to represent regional,

cultural and political diversity

and Rafter set about investi-

gating elite voices in the Irish

context, focusing on the cov-

erage of the ﬁnancial crisis on

the morning news shows on

Newstalk and RTé during the

period from 30 September 2008

to 24 December 2008, the three

months following the announcement of the

banking guarantee. Rafter’s work conﬁrmed

the dominance of oﬃcial sources, which is

interesting given the dominant view in Irish

media that ‘nobody saw the crash com-

ing”’ and also in light of Julian Mercille’s

study showing that the media have largely

taken pro-austerity positions. It’s also clear

that deference to oﬃcial sources limited

the debate on alternative responses to the

crisis.

The research concluded that the cover-

age was “overwhelmingly reﬂected through

the views of oﬃcial sources” and was over-

whelmingly male. About 95% of the coverage

came from oﬃcial sources such as journal-

ists (36%), business and city sources (24%),

politicians (23%) and academics (12%).

Consumer groups (1%) and union represent-

atives (3%) made up most of the remainder.

Rafter refers to the voices of journalists in

this context as “interpretive journalism”, as

the journalists were invited not only to pro-

vide up-to-date coverage but also to provide

‘interpretation and context’. There’s a second

circle of limitation at work here, as journal-

ists tend to draw on oﬃcial sources for most

of their news, and then are interviewed by

other journalists who rely on a mix of jour-

nalists and other oﬃcial sources.

There was some diﬀerence in repre-

sentation on the two stations as business

voices were more prominent on Newstalk

(32%) than on RTé (12%), while RTé gave

more time to politicians (28%) as against

How to get on

‘The Pat Kenny Show’

MEDIA PAT KENNY

Slightly less elite-centred than Marian

Finucane: fewer lawyers, economists

and politicians; fewer women and more

scientists. By Rónán Lynch

It’s clear that

deference to

oﬃcial sources

limited the

debate on

alternative

responses to

the crisis

“

November 2014 43

Newstalk’s 19 per cent. Where politicians

featured in the debate, almost three out of

four were drawn from parties that supported

the introduction of the banking guarantee.

So, at a critical juncture in Irish history,

news sources leaned heavily on oﬃcial

sources to frame and interpret the debate,

but it’s worth investigating whether this was

a once-oﬀ phenomenon: How do the numbers

add up in a broader context?

Not wanting to pick on the public service,

in this issue Village looks at the Pat Kenny

Show.

Kenny, a veteran broadcaster with four

decades at RTé as a radio and television

host, moved to Newstalk last year to begin

‘The Pat Kenny Show’ in direct competi-

tion with his former morning show ‘Today’

on RTé, with a new presenter and sped-up

jingle. Newstalk’s mandate is to provide

an alternative to RTé, but the move to bag

Kenny arguably resulted in a duplication of

Kenny’s previous RTé show. He replaced Tom

Dunne’s more entertainment-focused oﬀer-

ing. The arrival of Kenny was accompanied

by a huge ‘Move the Dial’ advertising cam-

paign. RTE perceived the threat as serious

and chose to address this by replacing Kenny

with a journalist regarded as a political heav-

yweight, Seán O’Rourke.

Newstalk may have persuaded thousands

of listeners to move the dial further to the

right after poaching Kenny from RTé but if

it hopes to re-invent the morning talk show,

it is not going the right way about it.

Research by Village shows that ‘The Pat

Kenny Show’ falls into a well-established

pattern on Irish talk and news radio: the

guests are mostly well-paid professionals

from a narrow range of occupations and

although Kenny’s show employs mostly

female researchers, female guests account

for only one in four voices on the show. The

fact that a highly-paid host is interviewing

mostly highly-paid guests doesn’t mean

anything in itself but at a guess the show’s

sympathies are going to be with the upper

classes. To pursue an agenda of equality of

outcome in Irish society, we could start by

examining equality of access to

the media machinery that helps

to set the agenda.

Our examination of Marian

Finucane’s Sunday morning

talk show focused on the hour

of newspaper reviews, look-

ing at ﬁfty hours of radio and

about 255 guests. With ‘The Pat

Kenny Show’, Village looked at

one month of shows, which each

clock in at two and a half hours,

with between six to ten guests

per show. There is no reason to

think this month unrepresena-

tive, but it is important to allow

that in this survey of Finucane

and Kenny we are not compar-

ing like with like. The show’s

in-house researchers, who pro-

duce occasional reports, aren’t

counted as guests for the pur-

pose of this survey, and the

survey focused on guests who

spoke for more than a few minutes and so

excluded a number of vox pops. In October

2014, the show was on 23 days and that’s

about 57.5 hours of radio.

During the month of October, there were

roughly 200 guest slots, with some guests

appearing often such as UCD historian

Diarmaid Ferriter who gets a weekly slot and

Trinity biochemistry professor Luke O’Neill

who features seven times, principally in the

weekly science slot. O’Neill is the most fre-

quent guest on the show and Kenny – who

studied chemical engineering – sounds as if

he would happily spend an entire show chat-

ting with O’Neill. Fionnán Sheahan of the

Irish Independent and John Drennan of the

Sunday Independent both appeared twice

and the Independent group supplied almost

one third of the journalists to appear on the

show. This is revelatory since there is signif-

icant cross-ownership between the media

groups as Denis O’Brien’s Communicorp

owns Newstalk, and O’Brien owns 29% of

INM, which runs the Independent group.

The survey proceeded by listening to the

October output of ‘The Pat Kenny Show’ over

several days on Newstalk’s website. After

listening to back-to-back shows, which fre-

quently covered the Ebola scare, this repor ter

was surprised to ﬁnd people still walking

the streets; the other immediate impres-

sion is that Kenny particularly loves talking

to professors and doctors, a combination of

The voices of

oﬃcial elite

sources on the

current-aﬀairs

sections of

‘The Pat Kenny

Show’ make

up about two-

thirds of the

parts of the

show outside

of culture and

entertainment

“

44 November 2014

reassuring voices that constitutes the radio equivalent of calming

a nervous patient with doctorly authority. Only one of the 22 aca-

demic guest slots was ﬁlled by a female voice, that of former Irish

Times editor and lecturer in journalism at the University of Limerick,

Geraldine Kennedy. About one quarter of the guests are women, and

the only category they dominate is that of non-professional guests.

These voices, which represent about 12% of the guests, are mostly

women; in October they included Anne Boyle, mother of disappeared

girl Mary Boyle, and Kathleen Chada, whose husband killed their

two children.

‘The Pat Kenny Show’, like RTE’s ‘Today with Sean O’Rourke’, oﬀers

a mixture of news, culture and entertainment and as such both shows

feature writers, artists and musicians, but otherwise we ﬁnd a pre-

dominance of oﬃcial sources. In order of frequency of appearance,

‘The Pat Kenny Show’ has journalists (20%), business and PR (16%),

academics (11%), politicians (8%), singers/

artists (8%), writers (7%), campaigners

(6%) and doctors (5%). About 12 per cent of

the guests are outside any professional cat-

egory, and make the news because of their

personal or family situations. The rest of the

guests are sportspeople (2%) and priests

(1%), while Brendan Ogle has his own one

half per cent category as the sole trade union

representative. (The data sheet is available

on village.ie.) Figures have been rounded up

or down to the nearest one per cent.

How does this compare with the Marian

Finucane show? The breakdown of guests

on her Sunday newspaper review hour over

one year was journalists (29%), business

and PR (18%), politicians (14%) and aca-

demics (10%). Legal professionals made up

another 10 per cent, for an overall mix of

oﬃcial elite sources of 81 per cent. ‘The Marian Finucane Show’ is

sui generis in its enthusiasm for legal sorts. By way of contrast, ‘The

Pat Kenny Show’ is relatively barren ground for both legal eagles and

economists, with Eddie Hobbs the only economist to feature, and

politicians are generally relegated to the Friday show’s weekly news

round-up. In an Irish context this constitutes progress of a sort.

Taking the same categories established by Rafter, the combined

voices of journalists, business sources, politicians and academics

(broadly classiﬁable as oﬃcial elite sources) on the current-aﬀairs

sections of ‘The Pat Kenny Show’ make up about two-thirds of the

parts of the show outside of culture and entertainment, a heavy

majority in the context of a talk show. The remaining third is made

up of campaigners and non-professional voices. The conclusion can

be drawn that even in a light current-aﬀairs context, oﬃcial voices

predominate, often ﬁltered through the interpretation of journalists

who themselves depend on oﬃcial sources for their stories.

By providing a range of statistics on representation on radio

shows, Village is providing citizens with the means to take their

positions to radio researchers. The ordinary, non-profession citi-

zen seems to be under-represented on ‘The Pat Kenny Show’, but the

show’s researchers aren’t going to start calling random citizens to

feature on the programme.

Citizens determined to engage in public discourse should take

matters into their own hands, and Joe Duﬀy’s ‘Liveline’ or complaints

to the Broadcasting Authority need not be the only outlet.

Researchers on radio shows will generally respond well to

informed callers who can back up their ideas with facts and ﬁgures

or references to laws or statutes. •

MEDIA PAT KENNY

‘The Pat Kenny Show’ Guests – October 2014

Percentage of Official Sources During

Banking Crisis – Rafter

Journalists

Business/

Politicians

Academics

Trade

Unions

Consumer

Groups

Business/

Misc.

Academics

Politicians

Culture

Writers

Campaigners

Doctors

Sports

Priests

Trade

Unions

More than 80%

of the sources

on Finucane’s

Sunday news

review hour

ﬁtted into the

category of

elite oﬃcial

sources

“