Noel Curran, the RTE pay-cuts and some brilliant propaganda

It’s all in the tone. While the majority of news organizations have reported the Noel Curran comments from Dublin City University last night as a bad day for the station’s highest earners, RTE itself chose a somewhat different tack in the belated appearance of a news story online this afternoon.

If you’re searching for the story on the RTE website, you might have a bit of difficulty finding it.

We managed to locate it by rooting around in Google News for a while, but while the news piece is live on the RTE website, a link to it doesn’t appear to be present in any of their news sections.

Indeed, the only way we managed to find it on the RTE website was by searching for “Noel Curran” in the news search function, and filtering results to the past couple of days.

When you do manage to locate it, it’s an interesting experiment to compare the understated tone of the RTE report with that of other news outlets today.

Whereas Curran’s admission that the station was willing to plough on without high earners such as Pat Kenny, Ryan Tubridy, Joe Duffy and Marian Finucane if they fancied getting a job elsewhere formed the basis of most coverage, RTE’s nicely-penned piece included the cleverly drama-free heading "Noel Curran outlines RTÉ's future plans" as well as kicking off with: “RTÉ has a vital role to play in retaining Ireland's independence in information and culture, its Director General has said.”

Someone in Montrose has clearly been reading up on things like this: