The Irish Cultural Exception

As we predicted a couple of weeks ago, there was simply no way that the international media could stay away from the story of the Irish reality TV show where the contestants are on a boat...and the boat sinks. The New York Times covers it today. It's a fair story, with a good quote from Brian Trench, a media analyst and head of the school of communications at Dublin City University, who wants to know:
Is this legitimately part of what a public service broadcaster should be doing?

Indeed. Americans who find the UK system of TV licences already too communist for their tastes would be doubly horrified at the Irish system in which the national broadcaster collects a licence fee on every TV and has spent most of its existence with a monopoly on TV advertising as well. There is now some fledlging competition on the latter front but it remains to be seen whether it is viable. So that leaves RTE as the incumbent with two sources of revenue, one guaranteed. Looking down the schedules on any given day would leave you hardpressed to spot the distinctive Irish component -- even the Irish shows are mostly just local versions of generic formats. And as the NYT article points out, the sponsor for the doomed reality show is basically Rupert Murdoch.

Of course, it's not clear what the options are for a pretty small English-speaking country trying to have some distinctive local content on mass media. But (perhaps fueled by resentment at having nothing else to watch for years), we're pretty sure RTE is not the answer. Our personal preference would be to dump any public subsidy for the main broadcast channels, keep it for the lively Irish language channel (TG4), and fund good quality radio and independent TV production companies that meet some reasonable local content/culture requirement. As far as we can tell, the Brits are suckers for that autentic Irish stuff anyway so it might even be viable without much of a subsidy. And with no RTE, that would be one less bit of material for Saturday Night Live.