Editorial:
Media Matters' Top Ten Awards for 2012

By Media Matters President, JOHN TERRIS

Sunday, 30 December 2012

Since this is the Silly Season, between Christmas and the New Year, when the Media have little to write about apart from the weather and our bad driving behaviour, and so indulge in compiling lists of the Ten Most This and That, here are the Media Matters' Top Ten Awards for the past Year.

THE MEDIA TOP DOG PERSONALITY AWARD – PAUL HENRY

Mr Henry deserves to be recognised for having achieved the distinction of single handedly generating enough complaints to the Broadcasting Standards Authority to keep that otherwise moribund organisation in close-to-useful employment during 2012.
After he persisted over several months in generated widespread viewer outrage for his racist and sexist jibes, his employer TVNZ, though delighted with his ratings success, was forced to sack him.
Henry then attempted to take Australian TV audiences by storm but failed spectacularly to do so and was sent home with his tail between his legs. What A Dog.
MEDIA BLONDE AIRHEAD INSENSITIVITY AWARD – TELEVISION NEWS

In the wake of the Christchurch Earthquake and the Pike River Tragedies, these various identical and interchangeable young woman TV journalists were measured against the best journalistic standards and found wanting, as they persisted in trying to intrude on people's private grief by asking the most stricken victims, gormless questions like "How Do You Feel?"; and then, before a space the length of a short commercial break had elapsed, fell to psycho-babbling on about the need for something called "closure".
Most people who have experienced trauma on anything like the scale of Pike River and the Christchurch earthquakes, know that "closure" is actually a stupid word, like the expression "moving on", in that most of those affected by these events will have to learn to somehow live with the after effects of them for the rest of their lives.
This, while the bimbo and her camera crew and her news executives will have forgotten everything about these victims and "moved on", as if real life was actually like that.
THE MOST INGRATIATING BIG-FLAT-SLOB AWARD

This must surely go to Kim Dotcom, real name Kim Schmidt, a fugitive from justice who has somehow been embraced by the Media in NZ purely because he is being sought by the United States Government, which makes him, in the eyes of the media here, automatically a candidate for Hero of the Year.
THE MOST INGRATIATING SKINNY-AS-A-WRAITH AWARD

David Bain, hands down. Here is a man about whose motives for apparently slaughtering his entire family, thousands of words have been written, but who has curiously not uttered a single word in his own defence.
Carefully coached by ex-All Black Joe Karam, Mr Bain has smiled and smiled, but preferred to say absolutely nothing at all, apart from thanking his supporters, leaving it to his glib Aussie Silk to point the finger at Robin Bain, the father of the family, who is thankfully unable to make any defence of his own good name, because the court process suggests he was shot dead by his son.
THE "WE'RE ACROSS THIS STORY" AWARD

Goes to all the political columnists in every branch of the media but especially television, who, tiring of telling the government how they should be running the country, and being ignored, have gone big with criticism of the way the Prime Minister slurs his speech.

Why can’t they get the message that John Key probably feels that speaking coherently to the media is a thorough-going waste of good breath, when they can't manage to speak coherently themselves?
Examples: the TV commentators who consistently enunciate the word HALP, when they mean HELP, and even more strangely, ELP when they mean ALP. Then there are those weather forecasters who say SHOWUZ when they mean SHOWERS, and newsreaders who say OWUZ when they mean HOURS.
In unison with John Key, we say "Enough already!"
THE DAVID WHO AWARD FOR POLITICIAN OF THE YEAR

Shearer deserves the accolade simply because the media continue with the fiction that David Shearer will be unable to run the country because he is perceived as indecisive. By whom (apart from a small coterie within his own ranks who covet his position, and who like the poor, we will always have with us as long as there is such an entity as a Labour Caucus) is not clear.

It is true that Shearer does tend to be a bit of a verbal ditherer (like John Key, in fact) which makes him pretty much a typical Kiwi actually.
THE STOP-PUSSYFOOTING-AROUND-THE-WHANAU AWARD

To the Supreme Court judge who tossed out the case brought by James Takamori's whanau against the right of his wife to have him buried where he wished, rather than having to suffer the indignity of having his mortal remains stolen by the whanau in questions and hustled off to be buried on a remote marae in another Island.
THE BOOZE-GUZZLER’S FRIEND AWARD TO ALL MEDIA COLLECTIVELY

Who this year, despite all their hand-wringing editorials expressing concern about the costs to NZ society at large of our Booze Culture, seen in mounting road deaths, family violence andincreasingly violent crime, failed to confront the real reason we are wading knee deep in the effects of the over-consumption of alcohol, which is alcohol advertising.
This advertising is an income stream that the media hypocritically support on the basis of some misbegotten distortion of the Right of Free Speech principle, because like advertising smoking used to do, Booze Ads support their bottom lines.
The Parliamentary debate on the Sale of Liquor reform (what reform?) was also apitiful sham, with the political parties buckling to the power of the Booze Lobby because they need their cash come election time.
So we have our two most powerful institutions, our Parliament and our Media, effectively bought off by the Booze lobby.
And they keep telling us this country is not corrupt?
THE NELSONIAN EYE AWARD

To all those media in this country who consistently failed to call for accountability following the issue of the reports into the Christchurch Earthquake and the Pike River disaster.
While there is no place in these events for a witch-hunt, and while the law must take its course, the failures to stop faulty building and faulty mining practice goes right to the top. Yet reading the media would have you believe that it really wasn't anyone's fault that hundreds of ordinary NZers died unnecessarily.
And the supreme LORD LEVENSON AWARD for 2012 goes to:

All of the NZ Media apart from Radio New Zealand, which have managed to ignore all the press statements and articles circulated to them in 2012 by this organisation - Media Matters in NZ - this year, even though we are the only media advocacy group in New Zealand campaigning for better standards.
This has come about for one reason, and one only, and that is the media in this country don’t want you to know that, for example, their repetitious reporting of violence in the written media and their depiction of violence as a solution to problems in the electronic media, are proven by all the research to be major contributors to the incidence of violence in real life.