Surely We Can Do Better Than This? Part2
By Media Matters President, JOHN TERRIS
Wednesday, 16 September 2015
In my last editorial, I mentioned our news hour and how it wastes our time with trivia simply so as to keep hold of the audience. Often too, there is an objectionable amount of intruding on people's personal grief in the face of tragedy, which is little better than voyeurism.
All this intrusion on people's privacy, the freighting of bulletins with news which is actually faux news and not real news at all, is something that we should start to insist that "this is something up with which we will not put". Don't you object to stories about animals which have no actual news substance? In the same TV One news bulletin which I referred to in my last editorial, there was such a story of truly shattering significance, consisting of how a baby elephant in India had fallen in a hole (I kid you not!). This epoch-making item was followed by one which was quite breathtaking in its import and which was all about how yet another All Black has had an injury and may not be able to join the World Cup selection, and other ephemera, which serves to fill out the hour, part of a continuing attempt on the part of the news management to sucker the early evening audience in. Thus it is that the TV audience, which both channels obviously judge to be pretty thick, are assumed to be ready to become captive to a riveting evening of sad sales pitches by a series of shrill hucksters, interspersed with miserly and rather crumby slices of "programme".
All this is to help set the scene for you for the observation that our media milieu, is where everything, including programme quality, is subjugated to the Culture of Consumption, and where people are not respected or seen to have any discernment, or judgement about good and bad, but seen solely as consumers. So the endless travel programmes, cookery shows, shows about buying and selling houses, and which are indistinguishable in their content from the actual advertisements, which are about booking places in rest homes, or insuring their funerals, or beefing up their health insurance, with no attempt whatsoever to credit your typical viewer as having any sort of intelligence (other than the ability to shop) and not willing to be engaged at any other level.
This is just a waste of time and money. Most people want to be engaged. They have strong views and are well able to express them. Yet if you turn on television, older people for instance, and people of minority cultures, appear to be invisible. There are no hosts, presenters, interviewers or reporters over the age of 35 and they are nearly all pakeha, bright eyed and blonde. The majority appear to be just out of secondary school and engaged in using regular daily applications of the same bimbo hair dye. I shouldn't really say that, because it's not the fault of the young people themselves. The people in charge have made a decision that young singles are the ones with the dosh, and so the world of television has been created exclusively for their needs, tastes and desires. Aren't we lucky?
Meantime, we all miss out on the great ability that television has to hold up a mirror to ourselves. We need this to grow as a society, but the TV screen has become the captive of car salesmen and the shysters trying to scam people out of their life's earnings.
How about an advertising code which demands that the claimants of the quick buck to tell a semblance of the truth about their tacky wares - like that, when they're manufactured, then they're set for planned obsolescence, or if food-based, made to overload you to death with added sugar - before yet more people are led to ruin?
John Terris is National President for Media Matters in NZ, and is a former Deputy Speaker, NZ House of Representatives.
