Commercial revenue or subscriptions alone won’t plug RTÉ's funding gap
Public service broadcasting is part of the public good, the TV licence funds services which the commercial market does not fund. Illustration: Paul ScottThe licence fee is, in essence, a form of taxation. It applies to everyone, even to those who don’t avail – or don’t recognise that they avail – of the services RTÉ provides.
If public service broadcasting is to be funded exclusively by either subscription or commercial revenue many of the existing programmes will not survive. There will be little or no investigative journalism, less authoritative news, little Irish language programming , and children’s programmes will be scarce.
Whatever the outcome of the various reviews of RTÉ that are taking place it is highly likely that RTÉ will continue to carry advertising. Taoiseach Leo Varadkar has already indicated that he favours a solution which includes advertising revenue. As income from the licence fee has remained largely static for years, not surprisingly, RTÉ put greater efforts into trying to increase commercial revenue. This inevitably resulted in an obscuring of the distinction between public service and commercial programming.
A role for an annual independent audit of RTÉ's activities, commercial and editorial, also needs to be considered. Finally the collection of the licence fee must be more efficient. Moving the collection of the fee from An Post to Revenue seems an obvious possibility.
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