There used to be a vigorous, challenging, intellectual vibe about RTE in the late 1960s and into the 1970s. But now it is home to a culture of complacency. By Vincent Browne.

Cathal Goan, the outgoing director-general of RTE, is a fine man: personable, intelligent, well-read, good company.

Had he the decisiveness and general managerial ability to be head of RTE at a difficult time? Certainly in some cases.

In other cases, maybe not.

A prominent media expert warned yesterday of the dangers for media organisations in using social networking sites which have the potential to be "corrosive" to media authority. By Joe Galvin.

Richard Delevan, a journalist and managing director of McConnells Integrated, said there was a "cultural conflict between old and new media". He stated there was a lack of understanding among traditional media as to how to fully exploit social networking sites.

"The average person...spends more and more of their lives online," said Delevan. "That's great, but it does have a huge effect [for organisations]." Delevan said it was now easy for an organisation's authority to be challenged, and there were dangers of online discussion degenerating into an uninformed "free for all", thus subverting the original message.

As George Lee’s detachment from party politics is questioned, Fine Gael’s former poster boy will have moved from the backbench to RTE’s backroom when he returns to the national broadcaster next month. By Joe Galvin.

Next month, George Lee will return to RTÉ after his brief and unsuccessful dalliance with politics. Already, before he has even begun, he has been criticised for partisanship.

Last week, Lee said that he was “not sure about the Taoiseach” and that “on the basis of what we’ve heard there certainly appears to be a lot of unrest”. These comments can hardly be described as incendiary, yet the backlash was swift.

On Monday night The Frontline, RTE’s flagship current affairs show, broadcast a special programme on the state and direction of our health service. 

Advertised for a week in advance, the programme promised to tell us if our health system is on the right track or going backwards?

A larger than usual studio audience was given an hour and a half to discuss their experiences and assessments of a number of aspects of health provision, including the HSE, the beds crisis in hospitals, the uneven nature of GP cover and the slow rollout of the  government’s primary care service.

Today, the five finalists in RTE’s ‘Storyland 2’ competition showcase the first episode in their series of     film shorts. The webisodes are screened exclusively on the RTE Storyland website. Each of the finalists has a dedicated page on the site, including blogs, details of the cast, crew and characters, image galleries and links to social media.

If Haiti was visited by an “apocalypse” or “Dantean” horror in the aftermath of the earthquake of January 12, then there was one news story that perfectly captured it.

The streets of Port-au-Prince, the devastated capital, were littered with roadblocks made of corpses. Earthquake survivors, out of either anger or trauma, or perhaps Caribbean voodoo superstition, had piled bodies high across the streets, in protest at their neglect.

Pat Kenny's heckler on The Frontline last Monday night, Alan O’Brien of Bluebell in Dublin 12, was focusing on the wrong target. Kenny is not primarily to blame for his arrangement with RTE, under which he was paid close to €1 million per annum during the boom and is now paid more than €600,000.

It is Cathal Goan, director general of RTE, who is primarily culpable. Goan’s explanation for this questionable use of public funds raises further questions, not just about him, but about the point of the poll tax inflicted on every household in the country (aka the licence fee).In case of argument on the matter, the funds involved are public funds, as RTE is owned by the state.