Surely We Can Do Better Than This? Part1
By Media Matters President, JOHN TERRIS
Tuesday, 15 September 2015
The electronic and print media today do not have any high minded objectives such as "To Inform, Educate and Entertain." With the exception of the BBC and those national broadcasters which have modelled themselves on the BBC, like the CBC in Canada and the ABC in Australia, the only interest of the NZ television broadcaster today is to sell you shows which are supposed to make your life complete. The programmes therefore become a vehicle for sales, having no other story or production value. I worked in television myself for 12 years, so I can differentiate good programmes fron rubbish. I also proposed at a Labour Party conference when I was their Broadcasting spokesperson, that here should be private competition for state-run television, which led to my sacking and the permanent ire of the party's left wing, because there was nothing in the Communist Manifesto about privately owned television.
However, I did not envisage a subsequent series of timid and compliant governments, eager to pander to the media, both private and state-owned, on the proviso that they didn't criticize the government of the day. This dirty little deal has led to NZ having the worst television system in the world, with hardly any programmes devoted to our way of life and values and the things that make us distinct, and which is replaced by a dumb procession of shock jocks giving us the benefit of their doubtful wisdom on a range of completely frivolous topics, and endless so-called reality TV, which as anyone with any life-experience knows, is about as real as a clock-work orange.
What is the really serious casualty of all this, is fair, balanced, accurate television news and current affairs.
In most countries around the world, the main news bulletin of the evening is only half an hour and contains genuine news, rather than what we are subjected to, a full hour, which is often padded with inconsequential items from overseas, and local pieces about heroic firemen rescuing cats stuck in trees. To heighten the impression that this main bulletin of the day is somehow essential viewing, the 6 pm bulletin on both main channels begins with pompous and portentous music suggestive of imminent calamity - brass and drums, cymbals and general racket which is presumably designed to persuade the casual viewer that they had better sit down and listen, because the end of the world is nigh.
Haydn Jones
It's a bit like Chicken Little yelling into every home in the country at 6 every evening, "The Sky is Falling, the Sky is falling", even if the first item is completely anticlimactic - consisting on the night before I wrote this, for instance, of Haydn Jones ("The only reporter on the scene!" trumpeted the newsreader, probably because TVNZ has an sponsorship arrangement with the rescue helicopter), after two people who were flying in a light plane from Waikato to Stratford, crashed and survived, but had to spend a night in the open, and were obviously feeling pretty bloody by the time the intrepid Haydn hove into view and shoved a microphone under their noses and asked them the obligatory, gauche, "How do you feel?" All this because of the necessity to pad out the story with fabricated drama and excitement, way beyond the story's actual worth, given that no one was actually, (thankfully) seriously injured in any way.
At which point (perfectly understandably), the no-doubt shocked and bruised survivors, basically, told him to eff off, as wouldn't you?
John Terris is National President for Media Matters in NZ, and is a former Deputy Speaker, NZ House of Representatives.
