RIP Gordon Spittle

I was sorry to see the name Gordon Spittle in today’s death notices.

Gordon was a sub-editor at The Dominion when I was there in the late 1980s. He also wrote Counting the Beat, published in 1997 – one of the best books about New Zealand pop music that I’ve read.

A comprehensive, authoritative and well-written history of Kiwi popular music from early folk songs through to Dave Dobbyn, Crowded House and the heyday of the Dunedin sound, it deserved far more recognition than it got. No New Zealand pop fan's book collection is complete without it.

Gordon died in Auckland on August 12, aged 72.

Why I'm suspicious of the phrase "award-winning"

I’ve said for years – not that anyone was listening – that two of the most useless words in the English language are “award-winning”.

Award-winning wine, award-winning magazine, award-winning artist, award-winning TV commercial, award-winning restaurant, award-winning book, award-winning movie, award-winning building … Many of these accolades can be dismissed as meaningless. I wouldn’t necessarily condemn them all out of hand, but people should be very wary of accepting them at face value.

I speak from some experience, having been a judge of journalism and newspaper awards, restaurant awards and even cheese awards. Though in all those instances the judging process was as transparent and fair as it could be, my misgivings grew to the point where I declined to be involved.

The reliability of awards depends on too many variables. Who was eligible? Who were the judges? What were the criteria? How could anyone ensure judges’ decisions were not subject to potentially unfair personal bias? Of critical importance, who bothered to enter and who didn’t? (Often, the best practitioners in any field don’t bother to enter competitions because they don’t need to. Wine competitions are a case in point.)  

Awards often don’t tell you what you most need to know. Just as a glowing review of a new car doesn’t tell you how reliable it’s going to be once it’s left the showroom, which is the crucial factor for most buyers, so an award for an individual piece of work doesn’t necessarily prove anything in the longer term.

In the same way that a clever winemaker can craft a wine that will stand out in a competition where judges might have to taste several hundred samples in a day, it’s possible for a newspaper or journalist to produce an individual edition or article that attracts high praise. But the real test is the ability to do the job to a high standard consistently over weeks, months and years.

Keri Hulme’s celebrated novel the bone people comes to mind. Hulme won the Man Booker Prize in 1985 and was lionised by the literati, but she appears to have done nothing of any note since. Which raises another question: how long can someone go on being described as “award-winning” before the award recedes so far into the past that it’s no longer relevant?

The honour showered on Hulme's novel, which some critics described as incomprehensible,  raises another problem with awards. Sometimes they represent the verdict of a rarefied elite that almost takes pride in being out of touch with popular taste. Art awards are another case in point.

The intimate (some might say incestuous) nature of New Zealand society presents additional risks. There’s always the danger that people will be judging the work of friends – or just as insidiously, enemies and rivals, especially in the bitchy literary community.

Returning to journalism, which is the field I know best, I can think of reporters who won acclaim for outstanding stories and never rose to the same heights again. As an editor, I once hired a reporter on the basis of a major award he had won but whose performance was mediocre. Some people thrive in a particular environment but, for whatever reason, are unable to reproduce that same level of excellence once they move on.

I know other editors who had similar experiences. A reporter I once worked with in Australia had several major newspaper titles bidding for his services after he happened to score a prize-winning national scoop simply by being in the right place at the right time (he happened to be close to the scene of a terrible accident in a remote location), but who proved a disappointment to the paper that ended up hiring him.

Digressing slightly, what about those stickers on wine bottles which purport to assure buyers of the wine’s quality? They guarantee nothing. As Michael Cooper pointed out in a recent Listener wine column, the relationship between some wine “critics” and the wineries that supply them is sometimes ethically compromised, to put it politely. Some critics are hired guns, paid to talk up a wine (though they presumably wouldn’t risk their reputations by putting a five-star sticker on an indifferent product).

Right now, the international media are getting excited about the most celebrated awards of all – the Oscars, which take place in a couple of weeks.  But it can be instructive to go back through the lists of past Academy Award winners. Many of those that scored the coveted Best Picture gong are soon forgotten. They came and went and made no lasting impression. Birdman (2014)? Moonlight (2016)? The Shape of Water (2017)? I rest my case.

Conversely, many movies that people still watch over and over again – true classics – never got recognition from the pompously named Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. Even Citizen Kane, widely acclaimed – rightly or wrongly – as the greatest Hollywood movie ever made, failed to win either a Best Picture or Best Director award. (How Green Was My Valley won Best Picture that year – a wonderful film, but it didn’t have the staying power of Orson Welles’ magnum opus.)

And who knows, in the opaque maelstrom that is Hollywood, what political factors or studio power plays might have influenced the nominations?  

Arguably the Oscars will have even less credibility now that ideology, in the form of a continuing backwash from the Black Lives Matter and Me Too! movements,  has intruded. In future the awards are likely to be handed out not on the basis of how good a film is, but on how well it’s deemed to reflect ethnic and gender diversity. Could this be the final kiss of death to an overblown ritual that has outlived its usefulness?

Now, to get to the point (finally, I hear you say) of this rambling dissertation. My long-standing scepticism about that phrase “award-winning” has been resoundingly vindicated today by two stories on Stuff. Both concern buildings described as award-winning.

One, a house at Pekapeka, on the Kapiti Coast, was demolished in 2016 at a reported cost to the owners of $1 million. The avant-garde house, designed by Wellington firm Parsonson Architects, was a Home of the Year finalist and won an NZIA colour award. Unfortunately it didn’t keep the rain out. The owners were quoted $800,000 to fix leaking windows and mould-damaged cladding, but decided instead to demolish the house and replace it with one built by Lockwood.

To be fair, it appears the problem was caused by the building products used rather than by any inherent design fault, but the owners clearly weren’t impressed by architect Gerald Parsonson’s reported refusal to discuss possible solutions.

It was hardly good publicity for the architect, and made even more embarrassing by the fact that the owners contacted Stuff after reading about another “award-winning” Parsonson home, this time in the Wellington suburb of Northland, that was pulled down last month because of similar leakage issues. This was after the owner had spent $200,000 on remediation.

She ended up selling the property to a developer for $1.4 million – the value of the land. Earlier attempts to sell the house for nearly $3 million failed when building reports identified moisture damage to the timber framing.

In this instance the architect’s shame should be shared by the New Zealand Institute of Architects, which gave the condemned Northland house its “Supreme Award” in 2003. Oh, dear.

But wait, there’s more. Stuff also reports that the Altera Apartments in Auckland, built by Fletchers in 2015, is the subject of a TV documentary (screening on Prime tomorrow night) which reveals the building has leaky curtain walling and is not fire compliant. Stuff reports that repairs are expected to cost $15 million which will be covered by the builders.

Do I need to add that Altera Apartments won a 2016 NZIA award for the architects, Warren and Mahoney? Probably not. Readers of this blog, being an unusually astute and prescient lot, would have sensed that coming.

I have long suspected that some architects design buildings chiefly to impress other architects. Obviously I can’t prove that this was the case in these instances, but let’s just say my suspicions haven’t been erased.

I have similarly suspected for a long time that advertising people make ads to impress other advertising people. Architects and advertising agencies seem to share an insatiable appetite for awards and peer recognition, to the extent that I believe the prospect of an award is often more important to some agencies than whether an ad succeeds in generating business for the client.

I’m encouraged in this belief by the advertising news updates that regularly arrive in my inbox, which largely consist of a stream of announcements detailing who’s won what in the latest awards, which seem to occur almost weekly.

No other industry celebrates itself, or congratulates itself, with greater zeal. But I often wonder where the clients’ interests fit in, if indeed they do.  

Further confirmation of this apparent obsession with what other ad industry practitioners think came recently from an unlikely source: Margaret Hayward’s 1981 book Diary of the Kirk Years, which is a fascinating account of 1970s politics from the inside.  At one point Hayward describes an exchange during the 1972 election campaign between Labour leader Norman Kirk and a young Bob Harvey (now Sir Bob, and a former mayor of Waitakere City), who was handling Labour’s advertising.

Kirk was trenchantly critical of Harvey’s efforts, and cited one of his ads – a TV commercial which a Labour supporter mistook for a coffee ad – as evidence that the ads were not hitting their target. To which Harvey protested that two other agencies had been in touch with him to say how good the ad was, as if that emphatically settled the issue.

Was it an award-winning ad? Very likely.

Footnote: The writer has never won any awards, though he vaguely recalls being awarded with a certificate for an editorial (on sport, of all things) that he was reluctantly persuaded to enter in a competition in the 1990s. 

 

Flat Earth News: a review

Any book about the news media that gets rave reviews from journalists as ideologically opposed as John Pilger and Peter Oborne deserves our attention. Pilger is an impassioned leftist crusader, the scourge of supposedly imperialistic western powers and a trenchant critic of “mainstream” journalism; Oborne is a contributor to the right-wing Spectator and an uncompromising conservative.

It’s unlikely there are many issues on which these two agree, but if the blurb on the dust jacket for Nick Davies’ book Flat Earth News is to be believed, Pilger described it as a “brilliant” book, “ruthless in its honesty” while Oborne said of it: “This is an exceptionally important book which should be read, re-read and inwardly digested by all reporters, editors and proprietors”.

Clearly, Davies is on to something.

Flat Earth News is a 400-page exposé of shonky practices by the British media – and not just the scurrilous London tabloids, which would surprise no one, but by some of the so-called “quality” broadsheets as well, including Davies’ own paper, The Guardian (though it must be said The Guardian emerges looking a little purer than some of its competitors).

Davies takes as his starting point the blizzard of misinformation disseminated by the media over Iraq’s non-existent weapons of mass destruction, and the failure of journalists to dig beneath the propaganda. He says he started out trying to explain “how we had managed to do so badly in covering what is probably the single biggest story of our era”. He goes on: “The more I looked, the more I found falsehood, distortion and propaganda running through the outlets of an industry which is supposed to be dedicated to the very opposite, i.e. to telling the truth.”

He develops several themes, among them:

The increasing influence of PR firms, spin doctors and pressure groups in manipulating the news agenda, and the media’s complicity in the process;

The advent of what he calls “churnalism”, in which credulous and/or overworked journalists unquestioningly process wrong, misleading or second-hand information;

The steady reduction in the number of journalists reporting unglamorous but important local news such as court proceedings and council meetings (I loved Davies’ line that judges in London courts are as likely to see a zebra as a reporter);

The emergence of a new type of newspaper owner whose papers are run according to the “logic of pure commerce” rather than by any commitment to journalistic values, for which Davies largely blames (I believe unfairly) Rupert Murdoch;

The increasing pressure, in the digital era, to turn news around fast, without adequate checking and verification;

The willingness of the British press, including supposedly respectable titles such as The Sunday Times, to use a wide repertoire of sleazy, underhand and sometimes illegal means to get stories – including bribing police officers, paying private investigators for illegally obtained information and setting up elaborate traps in the hope of catching corrupt politicians, even where there is no evidence of misbehaviour.

It’s an assiduously researched book, jam-packed with detail and well-written, as you might expect of an award-winning Guardian journalist. Davies forcefully reminds us of one of the most important journalistic values: question everything and accept nothing at face value.

But he’s not entirely consistent. Davies tries hard to be fair – he’s tough on Greenpeace and its alarmist publicity stunts, and he acknowledges a bad error of his own that was based on an ideological assumption – but his own personal preoccupations and political leanings intrude from time to time. At times one senses the familiar anguished cry of the idealistic leftie who’s frustrated because the media are ignoring the stories he thinks are important.

He’s not fond of Christians, Margaret Thatcher or Israel, and it might or might not be significant that all the unreported scandals he uncovers, for which he excoriates the media, are ones that reflect unfavourably on what might loosely be called “the establishment”.

At one point he describes, without criticism, a disgraceful act of deception in 1988 by Roy Greenslade, then managing editor for news at the Sunday Times. Perhaps Greenslade escaped Davies’ censure because of the former’s sainted status as a media commentator for the Guardian.

Davies also suffers from an occupational disorder, common among British journalists, that I call Rupertaphobia. Like many Brits, he seems never to have adjusted to the idea that a colonial upstart could take over so much of the British media. Never mind that it was largely through Rupert Murdoch that the British newspaper industry, which had long had been held hostage by greedy unions, was eventually liberated from primitive 19th century technology and disgraceful union rorts.

Ironically, Davies is fashionably dismissive of the notion of journalistic objectivity. I say “ironically” because it seems to me that his entire book, with its scathing indictments of secret agendas, distortion and manipulation, is a powerful argument for fair, neutral reporting uncontaminated by covert interests and biases.

None of the book’s failings should detract from the fact that Flat Earth News is an important, cautionary tale, and one that will shake people’s faith in British journalism. But British journalism has always been about extremes of good and bad: the scurrilous tactics of the Sun and Daily Mail (for which Davies reserves special contempt) on one hand and bold, resourceful journalism uncovering corruption and abuse of power (such as the Sunday Times’ exposure of the cash-for-peerages scandal) on the other.

And how much of this, if any, is applicable to New Zealand? Certainly, New Zealand journalists will nod in recognition at some of the trends Davies describes: the baleful influence of PR and spin, the pressure on newspapers to do more with fewer staff, the gradual attenuation of the grassroots-level journalism (such as courts and council meetings) that was once the meat and drink of the daily press. Older New Zealand journalists probably also lament, as Davies does, the passing of an older generation of newspaper proprietors who, for all their stuffy conservatism, had a strong newspaper ethos, although we shouldn’t get too dewy-eyed over some mythical golden era.

On the really crucial stuff relating to ethics, however, the New Zealand media have kept their noses admirably clean. Ethical corners are most likely to be cut where multiple media outlets are competing toe-to-toe, as in the case of Fleet St (metaphorical home, at least, to 14 daily titles and 10 Sundays). In New Zealand, that sort of intense competition really exists only between the two major TV networks, the trashy women’s magazines and the Sunday papers. It’s in those branches of the media that journalists are most likely to be ethically compromised in the chase for the exclusive story, but even there it’s relatively rare. Let’s hope it stays that way.

Footnote: Flat Earth News, by Nick Davies, is published by Chatto & Windus. I obtained my copy online from Amazon UK and paid $46.74.

Much foot-stamping among the literati

There’s an entertaining catfight going on at the moment in New Zealand literary circles (and no one does catfights better). As far as I can ascertain, it’s all because the judges in the fiction section of the Montana Book Awards selected only four finalists for the shortlist rather than the five that they were entitled to choose. To an outsider this seems pretty minor, but apparently it’s caused much angry stamping of feet among the literati.

Graham Beattie, literary blogger and former managing director of Penguin, was on Kathryn Ryan’s Nine to Noon programme today wailing that a slew of famous and accomplished writers had been left off the list. Perhaps I’m missing something here, but surely if the judges had selective five for the shortlist, there’d be only one less author left feeling aggrieved. You’d still be left with a whole lot of wounded egos.

Anyway, isn’t this the nature of awards? The first point about competitions is that some poor sod has to choose the winners and there will always be arguments about their judgment. The second is that there will inevitably be more losers than winners, and some of those losers are likely to feel sore – especially if they’re big names.

Beattie seemed to be suggesting that because some of the excluded authors had illustrious reputations whose entries been well reviewed, the judges had grievously erred. But finalists can’t be selected on the basis of reputations; if they were, there would be no room for brilliant unknowns. In any case, it would have to be a very long short list to accommodate all the distinguished names Beattie rattled off.

Most competitions are not much more than a lottery. Lots of entrants may submit excellent work, but the winner will be the book that strikes a particular set of judges as just that much better than the rest. It’s a subjective process and a different set of judges might come to an entirely different conclusion. But if entrants who miss out are going to bitch endlessly about the results, then perhaps they shouldn’t have entered in the first place. They’d save themselves a lot of blood pressure pills.

You really have to wonder whether awards are worth all the grief they cause. The Qantas journalism awards have just had a thorough going-over – not for the first time – for perceived shortcomings. Wine competitions have been dogged by controversy. Many awards have huge significance for insiders but make bugger-all impact beyond the circle of the industry or profession concerned.

Some of the most respected wine producers don’t bother entering wine awards because they take the realistic view that it’s their customers they need to impress, not their industry peers or a set of judges. They’ve already proved themselves in the marketplace, where it really counts, and their reputation doesn’t depend on winning a trophy that will soon be forgotten by everyone but themselves. In the words of the old Mini ad, they don’t have to prove a thing.

I note that on his blog, Beattie says “authors are offended” by the Montana judges’ decision. Well, maybe it’s time authors learned to take offence less readily. Then New Zealand’s literary scene might start to shed its reputation for preciousness and bitchiness.

If writers and publishers want book awards, then they should accept that the results are not going to please everyone. If they can’t live with that, then they shouldn’t enter. Simple, really.