The Brendan O’Connor Show: revisiting analysis of RTÉ’s Newspaper Panel

PB October/November 2023 October/November 2023 53

The top 25 most frequently

used contributors

themselves make up

almost a full third of

appearances

“P

rofessionals 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

ﬂ agship 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 ﬁ ndings 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 hour-long and typically four-to-ﬁ ve-person

panel, after all, is a format not comparable to

other journalist-led ‘hard’ news or current a airs

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-o 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

The Brendan O’Connor Show:

revisiting analysis of RTÉ’s

Newspaper Panel

Professional classes over weekend brunch… safe

and a bit incestuous, with little diversity, but with

equal numbers of women unlike with Marian

By Mark Cullinane

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 ﬁ ve years, such pressures have

seen at RTÉ the elevation of diversity and

inclusion to the formal status of major

organisational objective. Its ﬁ rst dedicated

action plan on the topic in 2018 articulates, in the

worthy if grandiose style of such things, a series

of commitments and associated

MEDIA

Brend nd Brendn

54 October/November 2023 October/November 2023 55

cross-organisational actions to transform RTÉ

into no less than a ‘leader in diversity and

inclusion, both on and o 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 voluntar y 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

aliation 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-o 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 aliations of this

privileged set of eectively 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

oered 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

Kate O’Connell, Alison O’Connor, Brenda Power,

Niamh Hourigan, Gary Murphy, Dan O’Brien

and Declan Power —. the afﬁliations of these

privileged tenured voices reveals dominance

of the upper professional classes but also the

preponderance of known quantities