Editorial: Sleaze in the media
By Media Matters President, JOHN TERRIS
Monday, 21 October 2013
Len Brown and Bevan Chuang
Aren't you,like me, just a bit fed up with the sea of sleaze which is our constant media diet these days?
It's not just about Len Brown and Bevan Chuang.
It's not just about the evidence that is emerging that shows that their illicit liaison was used by Brown's political opponents to ruin his reputation.
It's about the whole messy media landscape of which this is but a part. It's become a sea of sleaze and "sexually inappropriate behaviour". This gets reported daily by our newspapers and television news rooms, as if it mattered. This unmitigated diet of prurience is surely drowning us, it's like swimming in a sewer. Suddenly, Miley Cyrus' bumps and grinds on stage become a big deal. The sordid lives of the Kardashians are treated as if they were at all relevant to anyone except themselves. Even the local newspapers are at it. The Dominion Post yesterday headlined a story demanding to tell us "Why we need the mayor to have an affair!". Something as wholesome as a women's netball test is reported by TVNZ news against a montage of thinly disguised women's crotches.
You want to cry "enough already", but what can you do. There is no monitoring of all this. The Broadcasting Standards Authority is operating in an environment which takes no account of any of the new media developments of the last 20 years and are hopelessly out of touch, while the Press Tribunal is simply a collection of industry stooges. Nobody is listening.
It's all very well to have a free press but what do we mean by the phrase? Free to do what? They operate in a social milieu where there is deep concern about the levels of youth crime and teenage pregnancy, child bashings and transient adult relationship and they are simply playing to those fears to try to sell another subscription to their seedy paper or another trip to Harvey Norman. These people have no values, and they have no ethics. Worse still, they have no consciousness of the need to acquire some. They simply want to keep selling their trashy substitutes for worthwhile dreams and aspirations, and to make of their fellow New Zealanders little more than a society of consumers, avid for the next prurient revelation about the wayward behaviour of their fellows.
John Terris is National President for Media Matters in NZ, and is a former Deputy Speaker, NZ House of Representatives.
