Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees

Wednesday, 11 November 2020

Joint Committee on Media, Tourism, Arts, Culture, Sport and the Gaeltacht

Future of Public Service Broadcasting and Impact of Covid-19 on the Media Sector: Discussion

Photo of Malcolm ByrneMalcolm Byrne (Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I thank the three contributors. I echo many of the comments made. At a local level, the contributions of South East Radio, the People group of newspapers and the Gorey Guardian, in my area, have been excellent. At this time in particular, it shows the value of trusted news sources, to which I will come back.

I also compliment RTÉ. Deputy Cannon mentioned the lovely montage by Jackie Fox, which got plenty of deserved coverage, and the piece with Joe Biden reading the Heaney poem. I would welcome RTÉ's continued support of the arts. Mr. Lynch mentioned the Wexford Opera Festival but I refer to the All-Ireland Drama Festival. There is a clear commitment to communities in that regard.

The point Mr. Purcell made about regulation and so on was interesting. If I wanted to take out a political advertisement, and we have been talking here about regulation of online political advertising, I cannot do it on RTÉ or on local radio. It is regulated to the nth degree yet there is no problem with me or anybody else taking out many advertisements on Facebook or actors from outside the State pumping in with regard to that.

The outdated electoral commission legislation, which I am aware we will be dealing with, needs to be addressed. I might not be able to afford to take out advertisements on RTÉ but I would certainly look at doing that on South East Radio.

I ask the three witnesses to respond to this point. We are operating in a very different media environment. Mr. Dooley will accept that it is no longer a battle between two local newspapers and, similarly, for RTÉ. We need to look to what is happening internationally. We might give out at times about our media here but they are trusted news sources and are balanced. We do not get the type of polarisation we have seen in the United States. I am looking at what is happening in media and some of the challenges in this regard. In terms of trusted media sources here, particularly in the print industry but in other areas also, increasingly the content is behind paywalls; we have to pay for it. If one wants to get The New York Timesin the US it is behind a paywall, yet Breitbart and many others are all freely available. It is about how we ensure that we can continue to get people to pay for trusted content. I am conscious of Mr. Dooley's point on the windfall tax and so on. He would be aware of what happened in France, Spain and Australia when efforts were made to deal with that. I believe the social media giants needs to be tackled at a global level.

My second point is on digital literacy and the role the media have to play in helping people to interpret what are trusted news sources. It should not just be about Twitter saying that something is not good. There is a role for the media in that. There is also a role for it in terms of explaining what we do as politicians but also about the value of trusted news and how it is checked. The problem, and Senator Cassells referred to it earlier, is that when we download content on our phones there is no checking or examination of that.

My next point, and the three witnesses might respond to it, is how we can ensure that we have trusted media sources. We need to tell those Irish stories like "Normal People" and local news stories but the environment we are operating in now is very different.

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