“That’s all very well in practice, but how does it work in theory?”
This line comes to mind when Coimisiún na Meán explains its role and how it goes about its business. On one side sits the big mission. This includes putting manners on the global platforms whose European headquarters are a short taxi ride away, protecting children from harmful content and building sturdier defences against online illegality.
On the other sits an institution that grew out of the old Broadcasting Authority of Ireland, with the habits and reflexes that history implies. Squaring those two identities was never going to be easy.
The commission was set up two years ago to build a “robust regulatory framework for online safety” and to place non-traditional and on-demand media on an equal footing with radio and television.
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On the face of it, this made sense. People now encounter journalism, entertainment and propaganda through the same rectangle in their hand. Harms and benefits don’t respect the old boundaries.
But when a regulator evolves from a broadcasting culture, it instinctively tends to see problems as broadcast problems. This is where theory collides with practice for the parts of the media that never asked to be broadcasters in the first place.
Newspapers and other non-broadcast outlets have long prized their editorial distance from the State. They subscribe to a self-regulation code overseen by the Press Council and the Office of the Press Ombudsman.
They are not licensed and they do not receive core public funding. Broadcasting has a different history. The State has always been more interventionist there, understandably so, because spectrum was finite, public-service obligations were explicit and audiences were broad.
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Where the ground has shifted is in the commission’s growing role as a direct funder of journalism. It has launched schemes to subsidise the hiring of reporters covering local government, the courts and “underreported” subjects.
There is no doubt the collapse of advertising revenues has hollowed out coverage of some of these areas and that the public interest has not been well served by this market failure. So plugging the gap might look like common sense.
Yet directly paying for journalism jobs within competing local and national media companies is a very different proposition from commissioning an independent TV production company to make a documentary under the Sound and Vision scheme.
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It raises obvious questions about the arm’s-length principle and it risks market distortion. The outlets that take the money gain capacity; the ones that decline it (The Irish Times has not participated) risk being disadvantaged. And there is inevitably a problem with perception when individual journalists are having their wages paid by the State, particularly when the funding for these schemes comes directly from the Exchequer via the Department of Media.
There is a further risk in the “underreported” scheme. There is, after all, no shortage of topics that deserve more coverage. Scarcity forces choices. But who makes them, on what criteria and with what transparency? A newsroom’s agenda ought to be set by its readers and editors. The State’s role is to defend the conditions in which such choices can be made freely, not to pre-clear the subjects that merit attention.
When it comes to regulation, the commission’s perimeter is blurry. It speaks confidently about “audiovisual media services” and “video on demand”, terms that sound precise until you try to enforce them.
A three-minute clip on a newspaper site, a page with a list of YouTube embeds or a podcast series recorded with a camera pointed at the host are functionally similar for audiences. If video is subject to one regime and audio to another, as seems to be the case, we are regulating yesterday’s consumption patterns.
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Meanwhile, podcasts are already edging into video, so the distinction grows less meaningful by the month. If the commission believes video podcasts should sit outside its remit, it should say so plainly. If it believes they fall inside, it should explain how.
This definitional anxiety is also visible in the commission’s continued attachment to platform technologies that never really took hold here. Its calls for expressions of interest in “new commercial or community sound broadcasting” take care to reference FM and DAB+.
The latter is the latest iteration of DAB, a technology that dismally failed to attract Irish listeners and was abandoned some years ago. Of course, broadcast radio should not be ignored (it remains an important public space), but the language suggests the commission’s gaze is still drawn to familiar forms while actual audience growth is happening elsewhere.
Origins matter. A regulator that used to fund and police the content of some media organisations now finds its remit extended to a set of quite different ones. Perhaps understandably, it finds it difficult to adjust. Even if it behaves impeccably, that can lead to confusion among the public as well as within the industry itself.
Part of the solution is simply to provide greater clarity. Publish better, clearer rationales for what the commission sees as its responsibilities. Say plainly what, if anything, it proposes to do about video podcasts. If the answer is “nothing beyond existing law”, say that too.
Treat salary subsidies as short-term measures with a closing date, not a permanent parallel revenue stream. And focus effort where the public interest is hardest to secure by other means: the opaque systems of the big-tech platforms that now shape what people see, share and believe.
None of this will conjure the old media market back into being. But it can avoid making the present challenges worse by muddying incentives and confusing categories. The public needs a modern regulator that understands how attention is produced and traded, while at the same time can keep its distance from independent journalism.
