[Rdd]

Why doesn't the Irish government not do what they do in the US with regards to PBS funding - government funding for public broadcasting is given to an independent body, who then divide the money out to public broadcasting companies.

Corporation for Public Broadcasting is the US example, set up in 1967, where federal government money comes to them, and they are the ones, an independent body, who dishes out the money to public broadcasting entities such as PBS.

Why not an Irish version? Where Irish public money is provided to it, and then this independent body dishes out the money to RTE and other media companies for public broadcasting?

This ensures that the Irish government does not directly fund RTE, and so can not become a problem for the independence of RTE.

I’m not sure the chronically underfunded PBS is the model to follow, nobody wants to go down the route of countless pledge drives and telethons just to get publicly funded programming.

What might happen down the road is a model similar to New Zealand On Air - the Media Commission’s Sound and Vision scheme is a virtual copy of it but with only 10% of license fee funding allocated. Again though the price in NZ was a fully commercial TVNZ and I’m not sure this is what we want from RTE either.

In the short term, there’ll likely be a stopgap solution, where the current funding model remains, but the shortfall in the license fee is made up by direct funding from the Exchequer, with strings attached. After that who knows? Once the immediate crisis is in the past we’ll be back to no impetus for reform, and RTE could remain as is for many years to come.