“Professionals over weekend brunch… formulaic and incestuous” was the unsparing verdict of Village in 2014 when contributor Rónán Lynch cast an analytical eye over the RTÉ flagship weekend radio Marian Finucane show, focusing on the Sunday programme’s newspaper review slot.
Lynch’s review of guest contributors on that mainstay of Sunday radio was a straightforward but apt piece of media analysis, not just because of its findings but because of the clarifying power of the slot itself as the basis for critical analysis of the underlying logics that inform the selection of on-air contributors for public service broadcast radio.
The top 25 most frequently used contributors themselves make up almost a full third of appearances
The hour-long and typically four-to-five-person panel, after all, is a format not comparable to other journalist-led ‘hard’ news or current affairs programming where strong professional and genre conventions limit the pool of potential voices heard and faces seen to those endowed with formal authority, suitably accredited expertise or an individual proximity to developments covered in the news. The buttoned-down atmosphere of the newspaper review panel, less beholden to the dictates of balance, is an unusual one in broadcasting terms in being in theory at least open to anyone capable of perusing a newspaper and selecting a story or two as a jumping-off point for discussion on contemporary developments.
Lynch’s analysis of the composition of programme panels over the course of a full year revealed how this broad discretion enjoyed by the programme producers was, in practice, wielded strikingly narrowly. He highlighted in particular the overwhelming preponderance in its 250-odd guest appearances of contributors drawn from the ranks of the upper professional classes in general and in particular the favouring of other journalists and “professionally articulate agents of monied interests” of various hues, including public relations. The on-air results, he concluded, were conversations about the news that, shorn of due representation from wider strata of society, often exuded an insider-ish, cosy and unchallenging feel.
With a generational changing of the guard at the show since host Marian Finucane’s death in early 2020, Village thought it opportune to once again measure this barometer of RTÉ’s appetite for representational range.
By conventional metrics of success, the programme itself has gone from strength to strength since the appointment of new host, Sunday Independent columnist Brendan O’Connor, who has maintained the outsized audience share built up by Finucane and kept both weekend editions of the programme close to the very top of national radio programme popularity rankings. And though opinions will vary on the personal appeal of O’Connor as a commentator in his own right, the organisation will no doubt feel that his proven ability to attract large audiences, combined with his assured broadcasting style and savvy navigation of the vagaries of broadcasting speech regulations make him a safe pair of hands well worth the hefty quarter of a million a year investment.
The show has maintained its pre-eminence in a radio market that has proved surprisingly resilient amid a welter of disruption and audience fragmentation in the media industries, yet the changed cultural environment in which broadcast journalism also now operates has posed increasing challenges of its own which are every bit as tricky to weather as changing media-consumption habits. As a more sceptical and media-savvy population increasingly concerns itself with a host of vexed questions of mediated representation, like to whom is the national megaphone passed, on what criteria of inclusion and in the service of what conception of balance, media incumbents generally (and in particular national public service broadcasters with universalist obligations) have been forced to take diversity more seriously.
Over the last five years, such pressures have seen at RTÉ the elevation of diversity and inclusion to the formal status of major organisational objective. Its first dedicated action plan on the topic in 2018 articulates, in the worthy if grandiose style of such things, a series of commitments and associated cross-organisational actions to transform RTÉ into no less than a ‘leader in diversity and inclusion, both on and off air”, with a view to “ensuring our audiences recognise themselves in us, and us in them”.
Five years into RTÉ’s diversity drive – a plan whose implementation would be aided in part by more systematic internal monitoring of programme output – it was perhaps surprising to learn that Village would once again have to spin up its own spreadsheet software for this fresh analysis of programme panellists; the production team citing a lack of time and resources to share a list of contributors used.
Our own list, then, covers a period encompassing the entire three-and-a-half-year Brendan O’Connor era of the programme, and comprises a total of 819 separate appearances by newspaper-review contributors across all 183 Sunday editions of the programme. It, and accompanying methodological notes are available on request to all readers who may wish to browse, scrutinise or remix the data in ways that we haven’t the space to explore here.
It is in the area of gender balance that the most significant and obvious improvement in contributor diversity since Village last ran the rule over the numbers is apparent, with a considerably more even 54% (male) to 46% (female) split across the period as a whole when compared to the 65% (male) to 35% (female) result found in 2014. Much of the headway appears to have been recent: discount the first year’s worth of contributors in 2020 and the result from subsequent years is very close to the sought-for goal of parity of gender representation.
Welcome signs of progress then, but gender balance is the area where Irish media have made the most progress generally – if still typically on a voluntary basis. Other “diversity characteristics” earmarked for substantive remedial responses by RTÉ and elsewhere in the media industries, such as race and ethnicity, disability and sexual orientation, remain for various reasons much further down the pecking order. Though not the focus of this analysis, a cursory look at the hundreds of names in the contributor spreadsheet shows that anything approaching the promised “fair and authentic representation” of such demographics remains a distant prospect, if this programme is any indication of wider practices.
That the dimensions of class background and socio-economic status, surely among the most crucial and urgent considerations for media diversity, are euphemised in RTÉ’s diversity strategy as the more nebulous criterion of “social experience’” suggests that these particular nettles have yet to be seriously grasped either.
And indeed it is in this area that old habits (as well as old formats) seem to die hard on the programme: with participants on the newspaper review panel again found to be overwhelmingly drawn from the upper echelons of the Irish professional classes, albeit with some changes in the relative prominence of their various fractions.
A tweaked categorisation methodology makes direct comparisons with the earlier analysis less straightforward; for example, some contributors who were introduced by the programme with more than one occupational or organisational affiliation were counted accordingly.
Yet of the 931 total roles ascribed to the 819 contributor appearances, there is no mistaking the continued pre-eminence of other journalists and broadcasters as the slot’s anchor tenants, who with a total of one in three of all appearances, remain every bit as prolific as a decade ago. Journalists from over 35 identified media organisations were given a look in, though appearances with stated affiliations were comfortably concentrated among a smaller cohort of outlets, led by the Irish Times (38), Irish Examiner (36), Irish Independent/Mediahuis (33) and in a firm nod to the Irish digital news ecosystem, TheJournal.ie (27). Other journalists drawn from elsewhere at RTÉ itself (9) were, it must be said, infrequently sourced by comparison.
Academia and education provided the next largest source of regular panellists, contributing as many as 17% (156) of the appearances. This is a category dominated by the (often professorial) ranks of a rather concentrated range of disciplines – notably medical and health sciences (partly prompted by the Covid-19 pandemic), legal studies, and economics, though in truth this understates the wider emphasis in particular on medical and economic experts, whose numbers are significantly bolstered both by their representation in other categories. In particular, medical professionals outside education and training settings (often practising consultants) comprised nearly 9% (82) of all appearances just by themselves. Non-academic economic and financial experts contribute another 5% (49).
Economists, often sourced from research bodies or think-tanks outside of academia like the ESRI or IIEA, are also further amply represented in the populous NGO category (9% or 88 appearances), a heterogeneous grouping of charitable organisations, social service providers, and the occasional campaigning group.
As before, only a small smattering of voices from organised labour are heard, but private business interests are far better represented. Contributors from businesses (with those from hospitality industries notably prominent) and professional services (often management and strategy consultants) together comprise a significant chunk of appearances (8% with 78 appearances). The related category of public-relations professionals, so prolific in the 2014 analysis, is less prominent here as a distinct group and adds another 2% to the total (21 appearances). Legal professionals (2% with 17 appearances) and political figures (6% with 59 appearances) are two other notably diminished categories this time. A breakdown of the latter category reveals that it is former Fine Gael politicians (18 appearances) who are by far the most frequently sourced political contributor.
This is largely due to the particular prominence of one such former TD, pharmacist Kate O’Connell (14 appearances) who enjoys a nearly unmatched degree of individual regularity that is illustrative of another aspect of the newspaper review slot: that its total of 831 guest appearances belies a considerable reliance in practice on a much smaller circle of tried-and-trusted participants. Of the 326 total individual contributors who make up that total, around half are one-off guests; while the top 25 most frequently used contributors themselves make up almost a full third of appearances.
Alongside O’Connell, the upper part of the table of most frequently used panellists comprises a tier of guests on semi-regular rotation: think columnists Alison O’Connor and Brenda Power, sociology and political science academics Niamh Hourigan and Gary Murphy respectively, economist Dan O’Brien and security analyst Declan Power, to name a few.
Perusing the names and affiliations of this privileged set of effectively tenured voices reveals not only a dominance of the upper professional classes but also the preponderance of eminently known quantities with considerable (sometimes bordering on ubiquitous) access to national media platforms and who in some cases stand in for whole disciplines and fields all by themselves.
For programme-makers who are, in the end, in the business not just of managing a national public platform for discussion and debate but of producing regularly deliverable product under deadlines, the predictability and consistency offered by a stable of reliable, experienced standbys has obvious appeal. It all but guarantees panel discussions that are decorous, amiable, and duly respectful of the mechanics and niceties of broadcast conversations. But there is a corollary to this reliance on the voices of the upper middle classes who, as Irish Studies academic Joseph Cleary noted in his 2007 volume Outrageous Fortunes, have long tended to monopolise intellectual and cultural debate in Ireland more generally. This is that, in spite of the surface-level diversity afforded by its spread of gender, occupational and sectoral representation, it means that programmes favouring such voices are apt to reproduce and naturalise the sensibilities which emerge from these frequently-shared ‘sibling commonalities’. These commonalities, Cleary suggests, include the “similar modes of education and professional training, shared forms of cultural taste and cultural capital”, and most importantly the “collective structural positioning and vantage-point within the larger social system conferred by their occupation as intellectual workers”.
The formula of platforming the already economically and culturally well-capitalised is one that whatever the individual merits of such contributors, sends not only a clear message about who can (and cannot) be trusted to ventilate about the news on the national airwaves, but institutionalises an approach that lends itself to conversation that all too often tends towards the consensual, the conformist, the complacent and the self-referential.
Radio bosses will no doubt be loth to mess with a seemingly successful formula, and those buoyant JNLR ratings offer an ample disincentive to do so. But they and others who might be reluctant to take a more penetrating look at representational diversity on the public airwaves would have to admit that it speaks to one of the core dilemmas of RTÉ’s increasingly imperilled institutional position. Super-serving its core audiences (those most receptive to a cordial amble through the weekend press) is hardly a viable route to securing its long-term future.
And it seems that a large and growing share of the wider public shares the fundamental concern. Since the broadcaster’s diversification drive was initiated in 2018, the two related audience perception measures it tracks as part of its annual performance commitments have been on a steady downward trajectory. Those who agreed with the statement that RTÉ “reflects current Irish society” have shrunk in number from 76% to 63% by 2022, while those positively affirming that RTÉ offered a “range of new voices and faces on air” dropped from 58% to 45% by 2021. This latter result represented the worst single performance of any of its formal perception-based performance metrics; it can be safely assumed that it is a drag on overall sentiment toward RTÉ that it can ill-afford, particularly as mass licence-fee delinquency has set in since the summer’s controversies.
It is perhaps not the most hopeful sign of the urgency of RTÉ’s commitment to reversing these trends that it has in public at least been content to externalise the reasons for these and other declines in public satisfaction: its recent annual reports suggesting negative media commentary about the broadcaster and the challenging production environments that attended the Covid-19 pandemic as explanations for the drops. In 2022 it even took the step of quietly dispensing entirely with the badly under-performing “range of new voices on air” perception metric as a formal target measure, justifying this to the broadcasting regulator on the basis that the question’s meaning had generated “on-going confusion” for respondents on precisely what was being asked.
Whatever the reason, it all suggests that while RTÉ according to its own stated goals might well see itself reflected in its audiences, the wider public may not be able to say the same for a long time to come. The urgent question for a broadcaster now faced with countless competing priorities – some of them of existential import – is whether it can afford to keep them waiting.
Below please find attached: individual appearances by incidence and proportion, categories by incidence and proportion and full contributor spreadsheet.
Mark Cullinane is a post-doctoral researcher in the school of applied Social Studies, University College Cork
With special thanks to Paul Frewen of the same School for his many contributions to this analysis.
