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Uki Goñi is a historian, journalist and author who has lived in the United States, Ireland, and Argentina.
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Sometimes it helps to draw a parallel between two events in the news, but two big recent stories – in Ireland, the scandal of RTÉ lying about Ryan Tubridy’s salary, and internationally the over-before-it-began apparent coup attempt by Yevgeny Prigozhin, those two might seem like they exist on two totally different planes, never to intersect.
But I think that there might be a parallel. To deal with RTÉ, I think that far too little attention was paid to an anonymous article written in the Sunday Independent by someone that Sindo editors assure us they know the identity of, and who is a senior Irish media ad agency figure. It tells some very important details about how the advertising world works.
I’m not going to go through the article, but in short, it relates to the Tubridy affair because Tubridy was being paid out of a barter account that RTÉ maintained. The reason that account exists is because of, at the very best, a lack of transparency in the three-way deals whereby advertising agencies book advertising for a big clients on RTÉ, and possibly other broadcasters.
The agency, theoretically, gets a 15 per cent commission. So some big company has a million euro to spend on advertising, they pay that to the agency, the agency adds value by using their expertise to book the most effective ads for the client’s target market; they pay RTÉ €850,000 euro for the ads, and they get to keep the difference. I’m not sure about the maths there, but I’ll let that go.
But then, maybe at the end of the month or the end of the year, RTÉ gives the agency a retrospective discount. Based on the volume of ads they bought from RTÉ, RTÉ give them back a percentage of the cash.
Obviously, unless the agency pays that back to the advertisers, whose money they were spending, that fattens up their commission very considerably. It seems that, in at least some cases, that’s what happened. The anonymous writer says that this practice has been made illegal in places like the US, but not in Ireland. Depending on how the contracts were written, that could constitute breach of contract, or even criminal fraud, but since we don’t have sight of the contracts, we don’t know.
Why was it made illegal in the US? Think of the incentives that this sets up. Firstly, if the agency is getting undeclared retrospective discounts from the broadcaster, that they can just pocket as pure profit, then the advice of the advertising agency, their expertise that they are selling, should you buy ad space on RTÉ or on satellite channels, on Radio 1 or on TodayFM, that advice could be hugely coloured by which broadcaster gives the agency the biggest retrospective discounts, rather than just being motivated by the best interests of their clients.
And what about the incentives for RTÉ? This system would create a huge temptation for them to set a very high headline price for their advertising, in order to price in deep retrospective discounts that they could then refund to the advertising agencies. If those discounts are pure profit, that would motivate the agency to direct their clients to advertise with RTÉ.
Advertising agencies are of course all private companies, usually the management are the owners who will benefit from those increased profits, but RTÉ is a state owned, and in the general run of things, RTÉ making more profits doesn’t normally make RTÉ management richer, so you’d hope that they were immune to such capitalist corruption. That’s where the junkets came in, we’ve seen stories of various outlandish hospitality. Ostensibly this is being paid for by advertising agencies, but obviously it is money coming from their clients, whether the clients know that or not.
You don’t have to be a genius to work out that the junkets for RTÉ top staff are designed to keep this cosy arrangement going, it’s their cut of the money that is being fleeced from commercial advertisers, or the from public service programme-making budgets, depending on which way you look at it. I look at as a bit of both.
Paying Tubridy cold hard cash out of the barter account might have been the most nakedly egregious example of this high living on someone else’s dime, it what brought attention to the whole gravy train, but it’s a drop in the bucket; that anonymous writer estimated that €50m or more flowed through that account – that’s 150 times more than the cash that Tubridy got.
But the day of reckoning for RTÉ fat cats is coming. This is not the sort of toothpaste that they can squeeze back into the tube.
As for Yevgeny Prigozhin, he has gone into exile, supposedly, in Belarus, but there have been reports of him being sighted in Russia. He was given an amnesty, supposedly, by Putin, but reports are that he is still under investigation.
Unbelievably, it actually seems that Prigozhin was telling the truth when he said that he wasn’t trying to topple Putin, he was just trying to hold the wildly incompetent defence minister, Sergei Shoigu, and chief of staff Valery Gerasimov to account.
Even without translation you can’t mistake the rage in Prigozhin’s voice when he was screaming foul-mouthed abuse at Shoigu and Gerasimov for denying him the ammunition he wants. In that video, he is literally surrounded by the corpses of his mercenaries.
He’s blaming Shoigu and Gerasimov for their deaths. It obviously doesn’t strike him that he was the one who rounded them up from the prisons, gave them a couple of days training and the odd rusty old rifle, and used them as cannon fodder to attack well-armed, well-trained Ukrainian defenders.
But it’s not Prigozhin that I’m interested in here, it’s not Shoigu or Gerasimov, it’s not even Putin. It’s the reaction in those few hours when it seemed like the march on Moscow could actually dislodge Putin. Firstly, when the mercenaries walked into Rostov on Don, the Russian city where the war against Ukraine is being run from, this was the reaction.
People came out on the streets and cheered them. The crowds weren’t huge, but they were totally spontaneous.
Secondly, the mercenaries walked into Rostov on Don, the Russian city where the war against Ukraine is being run from. They didn’t have to fire a shot to take over what should be the most secure location in the country, and they didn’t have a shot fired at them. During the few hours when a coup looked likely, there were reports of various army groups declaring their loyalty to Wagner.
There is no evidence that a single Russian soldier took up arms against him. That suggests that there is a lot of popular support within the army and the population for Prigozhin, or at least a lot of popular support for any vessel into which they can pour their disaffection with Putin’s regime. That tells us of an incredibly unstable situation within Russia, both in the general population and, as a result, within the elite that rules the place, particularly the people high enough up to give Putin a taste of his own … tea.
The exposure of that instability makes things even more unstable; it lets everyone know that there is little point in being loyal to the current regime, because it is unlikely to be around long enough to repay that loyalty.
And before I give anyone out there the hope of a democratic Russia, remember that those cheering Prigozhin are cheering him because they think Putin is not attacking hard enough, because he is too humanitarian, because he isn’t killing enough Ukrainians for their liking. They think that Prigozhin could do a better job at genocide.
But was it a seven-day – or even seven-hour – wonder? No. We don’t know what is going to happen, nobody does, but we know something is going to happen. This can’t last. The Jenga tower might survive having another brick or two being removed from it – or it might all come tumbling down when someone upstairs slams a door. But whatever it is that is the immediate trigger, this whole thing is going to collapse very soon.
And that’s the connection with RTÉ. I spoke to a couple of people in RTÉ, mid-level staff, people who are well paid but not on crazy money, and the one thing that was noticeable was that they were the only people more furious than Yevgeny Prigozhin in the past couple of weeks.
It hasn’t passed their notice that politicians, who normally run a mile from any criticism of RTÉ, and if they ever did say anything critical, they would drown it in so much sycophancy that it was barely noticeable, those politicians are now using words like ‘disgraceful’ and ‘outrageous’ about RTÉ without any qualification.
And the reason they are doing that is that we don’t know what is coming down the line, but we know something is coming, and we know it ain’t good.
The rest of that €50m sloshing through RTÉ’s barter account – you can bet your life that it wasn’t spent on orphans and widows. RTÉ’s unaccountable mixing of the licence fee, advertising income and wads of cash thrown at it by the government has long been unjustifiable. The reality is that now any increase in the licence fee to match inflation, or any more direct exchequer funding is politically impossible.
The current situation is unsustainable. The uncertainty might mean that we don’t know what the end result will be, but we know what it won’t be.
