Dáil Éireann Debate, Thursday - 29 November 2012
28. Deputy Sean Fleming asked the Minister for Communications, Energy and Natural Resources his views on the recently published Report of the Editorial Review of The Frontline Presidential Debate; and if he will make a statement on the matter. [53255/12]
View answerRTÉ is an independent national public service broadcaster whose remit and obligations are set out in the Broadcasting Act 2009, and, as such, I, as Minister, have no role in its day-to-day operations.
As the Deputy will be aware, RTÉ established an editorial review of The Frontline 2012 Presidential Election Debate on 12th March 2012, following the decision of the Broadcasting Authority of Ireland (BAI) to uphold a number of complaints against the programme.
On foot of both the Section 53 Review on the Prime Time Investigates – A Mission to Prey programme and the BAI investigation into the use of the tweet on the Frontline Debate on 24th October 2011, RTÉ has introduced a series of structural and procedural reforms. This includes a complete restructuring of RTÉ Television and Current affairs, including recruiting an external candidate to fill the post of Managing Director of RTÉ News and Current affairs and the revision of RTÉ Journalism Guidelines, including guidelines around the use of social media. An Editorial Standards Board has also been founded, and a renewed emphasis placed on staff development.
The report on The Frontline Presidential Debate also makes a series of recommendations around how such debates are structured in the future, including issues like audience selection, format, questions, editorial supervision and training.
RTÉ has accepted these recommendations in full and have implemented many of them on recent debates on the Children’s Referendum and the Referendum on the Fiscal Treaty.
I regret last Friday’s untrue assertions by Deputy Moynihan alleging that I intervened to instruct RTÉ not to publish the working paper drawn up in the course of its editorial review. To the contrary, I acknowledged that RTÉ had committed to publishing the working paper, subject to addressing confidentiality commitments given by the broadcaster to participants in the programme.
