Funferal

RTE bowing to government pressure?

A worrying report that RTE dropped Pat Rabbitte as an interviewee after the Minister for Justice demanded that he only be interviewed by himself and not with any other politician. While I don’t believe it’s unprecedented for RTE to bow to requests from potential interviewees – and there’s a certain practical tension in trying to secure interviews with ministers and the like – I’m surprised that they didn’t take the ‘middle road’ of interviewing the two separately, but rather just dumped the opposition politician. This definitely sounds like the sort of thing that falls under the BCC’s remit (if someone jumps through the hoops to bring a complaint to them). According to RTE:

A spokeswoman for Prime Time said the programme made its own decision on who appeared and no outsider dictated to it or exercised any veto.
It was not uncommon, the spokeswoman added, for interviewees from time to time to agree to be interviewed on their own and not to debate with someone else.

But Rabbitte had already been invited to take part in the programme, according to his statement, so surely if RTE was making its own decisions on who to interview they would have retained that interview, even if it wasn’t a head-to-head format.