Now let's cross to Mt Eden Prison, where nothing is happening

(First published in the Manawatu Standard and on Stuff.co.nz, August 7.)

One night last week on NewsHub Live at 6pm, or whatever TV3’s news bulletin calls itself at the moment, I watched journalist Adam Hollingworth reporting “live” from outside Mt Eden Prison with the breathtaking news that an inmate had been diagnosed with measles.

I felt sorry for Hollingworth. It was dark and probably cold and he fumbled his lines.

For reasons that I don’t quite understand, any story containing the word “measles” seems to get editors’ pulses racing. But more to the point, it was impossible to see what purpose was served by Hollingworth reporting live from a locale where nothing was happening: no flashing ambulance lights, no stricken felon strapped to a stretcher, just a sign in the gloom identifying Mt Eden. 

He could just as easily have delivered his report from a warm, familiar newsroom where, if he fluffed his lines, he could start again – an option not open to him when he was speaking live to camera. But the assumption in both main TV networks’ newsrooms seems to be that “live” reports convey a dramatic sense of immediacy, even when there’s nothing to see.

Later in the same bulletin another NewsHub reporter, Cleo Fraser, reported from the scene of an incident in the Hutt Valley in which the rogue driver of a road roller had terrorised a gathering of boy racers.

Again, why? The event she was describing – let’s call it road roller rage – had taken place nearly two days before. (And no, the story wasn’t about the roller driver being hailed as a national hero, although it would have been no surprise if he was.)

Fraser was reporting from a darkened stretch of road that could have been anywhere. She could just as easily have been standing in a service lane behind the NewsHub studio. No one would have been any the wiser and her employers would have saved some petrol money.

Now before I go any further, I should disclose something. When it comes to the television news, I’m a fundamentalist. I like my news delivered without unnecessary embellishment.

For a start, I regard the dual newsreader setup favoured by both main TV networks as pointless gimmickry, and for that reason I often opt for the no-frills Prime News read by Eric Young at 5.30pm.

Imagine that – a solo newsreader! But it’s how all our TV news used to be delivered, and it’s still the method of presentation used by most respected broadcasting organisations overseas.

Our TV bosses, however, apparently don’t think we can be trusted to tune into the nightly news bulletin, still less persevere through a full hour of it, without endless frippery to hold our attention.

And so we get ever-more-intrusive window-dressing. It’s no longer enough, for example, for the bulletin to open with a boring shot of a newsreader sitting at a desk. Instead, he or she now often stands, ever-so-carefully posed, against a wall-sized backdrop representing whatever story has been chosen – usually on the basis of its perceived emotional impact rather than importance – to lead the “news hour”.

The emphasis on “live” reports when they add nothing to the story, and are often beyond the competence of nervous reporters, is just one of many pointless elements in a news format that can best be described as selling the sizzle rather than the steak.

Add to that the silly and awkward gesticulating and flapping of hands in an attempt to dramatise whatever point the reporter is making, the increasing use of elaborate three-dimensional graphics that distract the viewer rather than enhance our understanding of whatever’s being reported, the use of “vox pops” to tell us what ordinary New Zealanders think about the complex issues of the day (as if questioning half a dozen shoppers chosen at random in a mall reveals anything of value or insight), the reporting of hysterical tweets by social media non-entities and the contrived chumminess of the interactions between newsreaders and reporters, and it all adds up to what I regard as debasement of the news.

Oh, and did I mention the tendency of some newsreaders to comment on whatever item has just been screened, apparently in the misapprehension that we might be interested in what they think?

Meanwhile, basic but essential things – such as captions identifying the people talking on screen – are commonly overlooked, leaving us scratching our heads about who they are and where they fit into the story.

In an informed democracy, news deserves to be treated seriously. It doesn’t need to be propped up by gimmickry.

To surround it with silly contrivances indicates disrespect for both the news and for the audience watching it - a sense that the news isn't capable of standing on its own merit and must be gussied up to make it more appealing. But to borrow the nightly sign-off line of the legendary American newsreader Walter Cronkite, that's the way it is.

Must TV cameras intrude on private grief?

(First published in the Nelson Mail and Manawatu Standard, August 12.)

When I joined the now-defunct New Zealand Journalists’ Association in 1968 (union membership in those days being compulsory), I automatically signed up to the journalists’ code of ethics.

One of the rules in that code was that journalists should accept no compulsion to intrude on private grief. In other words if my boss asked me to seek an interview with a family that had just lost someone in a car accident, I was entitled to say no, and the union would back me.

The rule was generally respected, although ambitious young journalists often accepted such assignments nonetheless, knowing they were a source of good human-interest stories. I did such “death-knocks”, as they were known, once or twice myself.

It was well-known that bereaved people would often open up willingly to a reporter who turned up on the doorstep. It was a chance to pay tribute to the person who had died and it seemed to have a cathartic effect, as if it was the first step in the process of grieving and confronting their loss.

The resulting stories were usually handled sensitively. Complaints from families alleging that they had been exploited or manipulated were rare.

Despite knowing all this, I squirmed last week when One News showed footage of the three Nepalese sisters who lost their parents and younger brother in a fire in Waimate.

TV3 News, which I gave up watching months ago after it gratuitously broadcast video of an ugly assault involving teenage girls in Northland, apparently screened similar footage. 

The three sisters appeared to be comforting each other in bed. The camera moved in very close and lingered for an inexcusably long time on the weeping siblings.

The oldest sister tried to speak but mumbled only a few words before breaking down. I shouted at the TV set to leave them alone. My wife felt the same way but sensibly refrained from shouting, realising it probably wouldn’t have much effect.

I often feel uncomfortable watching people sharing their most intimate thoughts and experiences with television interviewers. I want to say “Stop! You shouldn’t be revealing these things to an audience of strangers.”

But I have to accept that they appear to be speaking voluntarily and in full knowledge of what they’re doing, even if the reasons escape me. When it comes to intrusions into privacy, there’s no bright, clear line separating what’s ethical or acceptable from what’s clearly beyond the pale.

Even the fuzziest line, though, was crossed in the coverage of the grieving sisters from Waimate. The camera made us all voyeurs in a moment of intense grief – and for what purpose? 

Did it tell us anything about the tragedy that we weren’t able to deduce for ourselves? Or was it just a cheap attempt to wallow in the emotion of the moment, as television loves to do?

Not only would the sisters have been emotionally vulnerable, but they were still relatively recent immigrants from a culture not accustomed to the Western media’s way of doing things.

That makes matters worse. They wouldn’t have had PR advisers on hand to advise them how to deal with the media.

That they agreed to the interview is no justification for its screening, as was apparently argued by someone from TV3 on Twitter. The sisters may have thought this was just how things are done in New Zealand. You suffer a tragic event and you let the TV cameras in to record your sorrow. 

What a shame no one told them they didn’t have to do this; that they were entitled to mourn in private.

I’ve heard it suggested that the sisters were persuaded not only to give the interview, but to make their grief obvious because it would encourage people to donate to a fund set up for them. But that’s a darkly cynical spin to put on events. I prefer to think they assumed this was what’s expected of bereaved people in New Zealand.

Either way, TV news editors should have had the discretion not to broadcast the footage, or at least to keep it to a few seconds. But no, the sight of distraught people struggling to come to terms with a personal tragedy was just too good to resist.

It caused me to wonder, yet again, why I bother to turn on the 6pm news when so much of it makes me cringe. The answer, I suppose, is that we human beings are social animals who need to know what’s happening in the world, even if we have to see it through the distorting filters of the news bulletin.

One good thing came out of this. On talkback radio that night there was an outpouring of disgust over the item. Many callers said they had switched off. “Vultures” was one of the more pithy epithets used.

Similar sentiments were expressed on a New Zealand journalists’ Facebook page. When even some of the TV journalists’ peers found the footage repugnant, and said so, perhaps there’s some hope for us after all.

Television paying homage to itself

It's sad that Paul Holmes has died. He was a very popular broadcaster and a man clearly loved and admired by family, friends and colleagues. But Television One's report of his death last night was grossly over the top.

It was television doing something it does very well: paying homage to itself. It was self-indulgence on a grand scale.

When reporter Paul Hobbs finished his succinct wrap-up from the front gate of Holmes' property four and a half minutes into the bulletin, I assumed that was it. It was, I thought, an appropriate amount of time to devote to the death of a man who, although a household name in his own country, was ultimately just a broadcaster - not a world statesman, not a national leader, and probably not someone whose name will live in history, television being arguably the most ephemeral of media.

But no, there was more. About eight minutes more, as it turned out. The tributes to the former TV and radio host went on ... and on ... and on. And as the bulletin progressed, I grew more incredulous. It was television celebrating itself as much as mourning the death of its biggest name.

Even after One News thoughtfully provided some acknowledgement of the other news events of the day, the editors couldn't leave Holmes alone. They replayed several minutes of his last interview with Janet McIntyre on Sunday. And then newsreader Simon Dallow had to get his own five cents' worth with another maudlin tribute. It's as if Holmes' death had created a halo effect over the TVNZ building and no one could bear to be left out.

It wasn't just the abandonment of journalistic detachment and restraint that caused my eyes to roll. Some of the sweeping inaccuracies were startling too, such as TVNZ journalist Mark Crysell's assertion that "before Holmes [in radio and TV], it was all plummy accents mimicking the home country".

Wrong. Much as it might appeal to myth-makers to credit Holmes with pioneering the use of genuine New Zealand voices on the airwaves, the trend was well under way and irreversible by the time he became a national figure. He may have been part of it, but he didn't start it.

Even more brash was the statement by Dallas Gurney of NewstalkZB that before Holmes, talkback radio didn't exist. I must be imagining all those talkback radio shows from the 1970s, which Gurney is too young to remember. Perhaps what he meant to say was that NewstalkZB was the first station to adopt a 24-hour news and talk format, which certainly was audacious at the time. But even that's debatable, since Radio Pacific had a talk format long before the 1987 launch of NewstalkZB, of  which Holmes was the spearhead.

As for Susan Wood's statement that Holmes was "the greatest broadcaster of all times", we should perhaps be charitable and infer that she didn't quite mean that literally.

It was ironic that the most measured contribution came from a vox pop survey of the "ordinary" people in the street who were supposedly the broadcaster's core constituency. This revealed a more nuanced range of attitudes toward him. Many of those questioned were unabashed fans, but just as many had reservations about his style. One said he got the feeling watching Holmes that it was more  about him than the news.

I started this blog by expressing regret over Holmes' death, and I mean that sincerely. His family and friends will be grieving. But was his memory really honoured by these outpourings, other than within the self-absorbed world he worked in?

Reassuring voices in the night

The mainstream media cop a fair old pasting, but they come into their own at times of crisis. This has been borne out in over the past 24 hours, when we have seen the much-derided MSM at their best.

Television New Zealand, whose treatment of the news so often fills me with despair, went a long way toward redeeming itself with its coverage of the latest Christchurch calamity. Some of its pretty young women reporters – whom I’ve maligned in the past, suggesting they were recruited more for their looks than their ability – did a superb job. Could it be that, confronted with a truly dramatic breaking news event that forced them to fall back on their wits, they forgot (or ignored) the lessons from their expensive American coaches and simply got on with the job of telling the story? There was no time for artifice, no slick stage-managing of stories. This was the journalistic equivalent of bareback riding.

Some also dropped their professional mask of journalistic indifference and allowed their humanity to shine through. An example was the One News reporter whose shock and sorrow was unmistakeable as he described the devastation in Lyttelton.

Radio, too, rose to the occasion. Both Radio New Zealand and Newstalk ZB dropped their scheduled programmes (along with all commercials, in the case of Newstalk ZB) and maintained coverage of the quake and its aftermath throughout the night. I didn’t cross to Radio Live, but it may well have done the same.

Radio’s role extended well beyond interviewing authorities and crossing to reporters at the scene. It broadcast important 0800 numbers and, in the case of Newstalk ZB, passed on messages and helped put worried listeners in contact with missing friends and family members. All-night host Bruce Russell also read from texts and emails coming in from all over the world expressing sympathy and solidarity with the people of Christchurch.

Radio, for all the recent talk of it being another dinosaur medium, comes into its own at times like this. Some champions of social media argue that Facebook, You Tube and (heaven help us) Twitter will make radio redundant, but they overlook radio’s ability to reach out instantaneously to a mass audience. For all their wishful thinking, digital media have yet to replicate that combination of immediacy and reach.

This is what makes radio so invaluable still to police, civil defence and other emergency services seeking to convey important information. But more than that, radio can serve as a unifying force, morale-booster and agent of social cohesion. The frightened, anxious people of Christchurch, many of them doubtless unable to sleep as they waited for the next aftershock, could tune in last night and know they were not alone. There is reassurance in hearing human voices in the darkness and realising others are enduring the same ordeal – and that people all over the world, total strangers, are thinking of them and willing them to pull through. That must count for something at a time like this.

Janitor's job axed in TV3 layoffs

The recession seems to be biting at TV3. They appear to have laid off the Ukrainian janitor whose duties, in between scrubbing the dunnies, included writing the captions for the six o’clock news.

The captions used to be habitually misspelled, a clear pointer to the fact that whoever was writing them had English as a second language; but at least captions appeared. Now 3 News seems to have dispensed with them altogether.

Night after night, talking heads flash on screen without being identified. Last night it was the turn of David Shand, a member of the royal commission that recommended Maori seats in the Auckland super-city.

Only those who remember Shand from the 1970s as a once high-profile Victoria University academic, Wellington city councillor and unsuccessful Labour Party candidate would have known who he was. The rest of the TV3 audience would have been left guessing, as they so often are.

Mind you, the soundbites on the TV news – and on commercial radio too, come to that – are now so brief and perfunctory that there’s barely time to register what’s being said, let alone who’s saying it. The fragmentary soundbite, like the fixation for pointless “live to camera” pieces, has nothing to do with informing the viewer. It’s merely a fashionable contrivance; a production device to keep the bulletin moving at a brisk pace so that feeble-minded viewers, who are known to have the concentration span of budgerigars, don’t lose interest.