There used to be a time when the privilege of being called a national broadcaster carried with it some kind of weight and responsibilities. The concept of a state-funded news source was not picked up everywhere, but where it was (in these islands in particular), there was a certain level of dignity and respect that was attached to it. The BBC and RT\u00c9 were both highly reputable news platforms, and \u2013 at least for a while \u2013 they took their duty of providing impartial and fair news seriously. Not so anymore.\u00a0<\/p>\n
The past month alone has seen an international scandal over blatant manipulation of footage at the BBC, while RT\u00c9 has been chugging along, happily displaying its unashamed support for several major politicians, seemingly unaware of the implications.\u00a0<\/p>\n
At the beginning of the month, there came a shocking piece from the Telegraph which revealed that, in a documentary about US President Donald Trump produced by the allegedly impartial BBC, a clip of the President had been doctored in order to manipulate his words, seemingly with the intention of making it appear that President Trump had verbally encouraged violence at the storming of the US Capitol on 6th January 2021. The clip depicted Trump saying to a massive crowd: \u201cWe\u2019re going to walk down to the Capitol\u2026and I\u2019ll be there with you. And we fight. We fight like hell\u201d. The Telegraph revealed that the clip had been spliced (at the ellipsis), and that the second half of the quote was taken completely out of context, and had been taken from a moment some 50 minutes later in the President\u2019s speech. In reality, President Trump had said: \u201cWe\u2019re going to walk down to the Capitol, and we\u2019re going to cheer on our brave senators and congressmen and women\u201d. The blatant and partisan manipulation of footage caused a worldwide controversy, causing many senior BBC officials to step down from their positions, while President Trump himself threatens a billion-dollar lawsuit against the broadcaster.\u00a0<\/p>\n
While no uproar anywhere near such a scale has occurred in criticism of our own national news source, RT\u00c9, the corporation has nevertheless shown its unabashed impartiality several times in the past month. On 7th November, the Late Late Show made an X post reading \u201cHolly Cairns is in the building\u201d, followed by a celebratory raised-hands emoji, complemented by a photo of the Social Democrats leader sitting with the show\u2019s host, Patrick Kielty. RT\u00c9 One later tweeted a message reading, \u201cWe\u2019re not crying, you are\u201d, with a clip of former President Higgins at the inauguration of President Catherine Connolly. This was later followed by yet another post that let itself down with emojis, reading: \u201cCatherine Connolly\u201d, our new president\u201d, followed by a heart emoji and the Irish flag.\u00a0<\/p>\n
The first example \u2013 that of the BBC \u2013 does not require much brain power to assess. It was a blatantly biased attempt to misrepresent the US President\u2019s words. Media companies have been publicly disgraced for much lesser offences. The other examples may not immediately evoke a sense of outrage in most, but they are simply subtler symptoms of the same kind of impartiality that has clearly taken a hold of the BBC.\u00a0<\/p>\n
As for the Late Late Show, they had every right to invite Holly Cairns for an interview; this is not the issue. If the producers had merely tweeted an image of Cairns and Kielty with some banal caption about the fact that she was being interviewed that evening, then there would be no issue either. The issue was that the post was very obviously made in a state of enthusiasm that Cairns was even within the vicinity. The (barely concealed) subtext, for those of us who cared to read it, was \u201cHolly Cairns is an awesome celebrity and we\u2019re all buzzing over the fact that she would grace us with her presence\u201d. Similarly, RT\u00c9 One\u2019s posts concerning the presidential inauguration did not show some kind of respectful acknowledgment of the politicians, but made it fairly clear that whoever wrote them quite probably has fanatic views of the people concerned. If the subjects of the posts had been other people \u2013 actors or influencers, for example \u2013 there would not be nearly as much an issue, since they are not the people actually running the country. However, it is (to say the least) unwise for a purportedly unbiased national broadcaster to openly express excitement over the arrival or sadness over the retirement, of any politician. News platforms should treat politicians with the respect due their office, of course, but they must also maintain their responsibilities by holding politicians accountable for their actions, which requires, at the least, professional distance.\u00a0<\/p>\n
One cannot help but wonder: how have our national broadcasters come to this, and how can we fix it? Should we even try?\u00a0<\/p>\n
My belief is that the abandonment of any sense of fairness and balance in our public broadcaster was all but inevitable. There is no realistic situation in which a news source funded by the state will provide balanced and impartial commentary on the dealings of the state; anyone who believes otherwise is deluding themselves, and investing false hope in the fallen nature of humanity. The truly unfortunate part of the problem is that a very large chunk of our population still obtains most of its \u201cnews\u201d from RT\u00c9 in some form or another. As a result, the station will not simply vanish \u2013 its influence will continue for a long time yet.\u00a0<\/p>\n
However, there is a solution (and one I have advocated for before): stop listening. Turn off RT\u00c9 on the radio, stop listening to any podcasts from the company (if you are the kind of person who would suffer through that in the first place), and get rid of the television altogether \u2013 there is nothing on it that you cannot find on the internet, without the need to pay an annual licence fee (at least for now). If enough people cooperate in this \u2013 if enough finally shun our failing broadcaster \u2013 then we might eventually see the complete defunding of the network. A long shot, perhaps, but I believe in miracles.<\/p>\n
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Patrick Vincent writes from Dublin<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"There used to be a time when the privilege of being called a national broadcaster carried with it…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":143743,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[1578,42,1634,82370,43,82371,6085,40,38,41,39],"class_list":{"0":"post-143742","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-headlines","8":"tag-bbc","9":"tag-headlines","10":"tag-media","11":"tag-media-bias","12":"tag-news","13":"tag-patrick-vincent","14":"tag-rte","15":"tag-top-news","16":"tag-top-stories","17":"tag-topnews","18":"tag-topstories"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/143742","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=143742"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/143742\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/143743"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=143742"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=143742"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=143742"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}