During the course of the next month or so, we are going to hear a lot about the duty of broadcasters to be balanced, fair, objective, and impartial, in current affairs matters. In fact, TV3 have twice now sought to determine exactly what that duty means. First, earlier this month, TV3 queried whether this duty requires a moratorium on political coverage the day prior to polling and on election day. Then, last Thursday night, on Tonight with Vincent Browne, Browne suggested that if Fine Gael leader Enda Kenny did not accept TV3’s invitation to participate in an election debate with other party leaders, TV3 would go ahead with the debate with an empty chair where Kenny should have been; and Browne simply rebuffed Fine Gael’s Alan Shatter’s objection that the empty chair would breach TV3’s duty of impartiality. Given how supine Irish broadcasters have been in the past about the scope and limitations of this duty, I’m delighted to see TV3 take such a robust interpretation, and I look forward to further examples during the general election. In the meantime, in this post, I want to look at the fairness issues raised by the moratorium; in a future post I will look at those raised by the empty chair.…

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