Case studies in self-absorption and overkill

(First published in The Dominion Post, May 13.)

Is the world going mad, or is it just me?

On second thoughts, don’t answer that. But please consider, just for a moment, some of the issues that have been making headlines over the past couple of weeks.

First, Hilary Barry. The announcement of her resignation from MediaWorks was reported as if Earth had momentarily tilted on its axis.

Here I was thinking Barry was just a newsreader – a competent newsreader, admittedly (although her pronunciation and personal asides sometimes grate), but just a newsreader, nonetheless – someone who reads words written by other people.

Obviously I completely misunderstood her place in the life of the nation. If the media coverage of her resignation is any guide, she’s a totemic figure whose career moves are a matter of urgent and compelling public interest.

No doubt media people would justify the fuss over Barry’s resignation by saying it was the tipping point that led to the departure of the unloved MediaWorks boss Mark Weldon. But they didn’t know that then.

Even if they did, it was an example of media people being too absorbed in their own affairs, and assuming that the ordinary punter in the street shares their fascination. My advice would be to get over themselves.

In television especially, detached judgment in journalism is old-hat. The rule now is that if journalists are interested in it, it must be news.

Hence the deaths of David Bowie and Prince also dominated news bulletins. On TV3, Bowie’s demise in January took up the entire first segment of the 6pm news.

This can’t be justified by any objective measurement of public interest or importance. The reason the two singers’ deaths got saturation coverage, quite simply, is that the journalists who make decisions about what’s important are of the generation that idolises Bowie and Prince, and they insisted that everyone should share their grief and desolation.

Bowie was a unique talent, to be sure, but he hardly justified the emotional incontinence triggered by his passing. As for Prince, hmmm.

Now, the Panama Papers. After all the frenzied media coverage of the past couple of weeks, I have to ask: where’s the smoking gun, exactly?

Reporters eagerly burrowed through truckloads of leaked documents from Mossack Fonseca and came up with … nothing much at all.

The conspiracy theorists struck out here. The only damning disclosure related to John Key’s lawyer, who used his relationship with the prime minister as leverage to secure a meeting with Revenue Minister Todd McLay – a worrying blurring of the lines of propriety, but that's par for the course from a government that sometimes gives the impression of having had an integrity bypass.  

And oh, the schadenfreude. While media outlets that had been granted advance access to the latest Panama Papers leak struggled to find anything newsworthy in it, those denied that privilege (if that's the right word) took delight in pooh-poohing the whole affair as a non-event.

Hence TV3 political journalist Lloyd Burr triumphantly announced that no bomb had gone off. In other circumstances Burr, if he’s like most political journalists, would have been keen to find the bomb and detonate it himself. It was hard to escape the conclusion that he was more concerned with scoring a point against TVNZ, which was one of the media organisations that had the inside running on the release.

As for the general public, I imagine a lot of people would have switched off the moment they learned Dirty Politics author Nicky Hager was a key player in the leak. People are justifiably sceptical about those who describe themselves as journalists but pursue a political agenda.

There was a breathless post on the Radio New Zealand website about the thrill of collaborating with Hager in sifting through the supposedly incriminating documents, but RNZ and TVNZ severely compromised their credibility by aligning themselves with a man whose ideological crusades are a matter of public record. What on earth were they thinking?

For the third placing in this column’s trifecta of weirdness we must turn to the police, who have bullied two Canterbury secondary schools into cancelling after-ball parties under the threat of a $20,000 fine.

One of those parties has been run by the Ashburton Community Alcohol and Drug Service for 17 years, apparently without problems. Now the police have told the organisers they’re breaking the law.

It’s a sad commentary on law enforcement priorities that while 111 calls from victims of crime routinely go unheeded because police are supposedly too busy, they always seem to find the time and resources to crack down on soft targets.

Burglary clearance rates are a scandalous 10 per cent, brazen young thugs virtually rule the streets of South Auckland and hapless motorists are subjected to extortion by criminal windscreen washers, but don’t worry: you can rest easy in the knowledge that the police are fearlessly cracking down on the organisers of harmless after-ball parties, heavying law-abiding citizens with oppressive alcohol checkpoints at all hours of the day and supplying the media with a seemingly endless procession of officers eager to lecture us on our bad habits.

Why I'll no longer be watching 3 News

At about ten past six last night I switched off my TV in disgust. Then I sent a text message to Mark Jennings, TV3's head of news and current affairs, telling him I wouldn't be watching 3 News again anytime soon. I doubt that he'll lose any sleep over that, but at least I felt marginally better for having registered a protest.

What I'd just seen on 3 News made me feel literally sick to the stomach. The network reported that Kaikohe police had arrested a 15-year-old girl for an assault that was captured on video and put online.

Journalist Karen Rutherford's report on the incident included the video footage. It was hard to watch, as only real-life violence can be - the more so when the perpetrator is a teenage girl.

The assault was shocking in its savagery and intensity. The victim, a girl of similar age, was reportedly ambushed as she got off a bus. She attempted to defend herself but was overwhelmed by the sheer fury of the attack, which involved knees to the face and head as well as a hail of punches. The assailant looked as if she had done this sort of thing before.

That a 15-year-old girl should be capable of such sustained and clearly premeditated violence was only one of several reasons to be shocked. Another was that someone, probably an associate of the attacker, captured it on video and put it online for others to enjoy. A third was that bystanders stood around and did nothing.

But this simply tells us there are feral people out there who indulge in behaviour (presumably learned from, if not encouraged by, their elders) that most of us find reprehensible. We knew that anyway.

What was inexcusable was that 3 News magnified and compounded the outrage by screening the footage - and not just briefly, which would have been all that was necessary to convey what had happened, but at length. And repeatedly.

I replayed the item this morning. Rutherford's item ran for more than two minutes, during which there were six video segments - that's right, six - showing the attack. The longest ran for about 13 seconds and cumulatively the footage ran for nearly a minute.

It was stomach-churning, and what made it all the more repulsive was that the incident was reported with the hypocritical tone of moral disapproval at which television journalists excel.

We were told that the Kaikohe police were disgusted that someone had filmed the assault, and an academic interviewed by Rutherford suggested that the person who did the filming was no better than the perpetrator of the attack.

Amen to that. But where does that leave 3 News, which obviously liked the footage so much that it showed parts of the attack two or three times?  A few seconds would have been sufficient to show us how ugly it was, but the footage was gratuitously replayed over and over, even as Rutherford was telling viewers in tut-tutting tones how despicable it was.

If the person who shot and uploaded the footage was morally complicit in the offence, then 3 News is too - in fact far more so, because 3 News took what would previously have been seen by only a very limited online audience and replayed it, at length, on national television.

I would feel complicit too if I continued to watch a news bulletin that demonstrated such an abysmal lack of ethical judgment, so I won't.

What's really interesting about the David Cohen affair

It’s rarely that I feel moved to write in defence of a Labour Party leader, but TV3’s attempt to skewer Andrew Little over an unpaid bill is pure mischief-making.

Two nights in a row, Patrick Gower has tried to beat this up into a major embarrassment for Little. Last night he went so far as to say it signified the end of the honeymoon for the Labour leader. The  rest of the media don’t seem too excited over it, but when TV3's political editor says it's the end of the honeymoon - well, it is, at least as far as TV3's concerned.

Gower does some very good work, and I’m mostly a fan. But when he gets bored, he tries to inflate minor issues into crises. Conflict and drama are meat and drink to him, and when there isn’t any he’ll manufacture it. On this occasion his friend and stablemate Duncan Garner, on RadioLive, seems to have been an enthusiastic accomplice.

If the affair of the unpaid bill is embarrassing to anyone, it’s Little’s chief of staff Matt McCarten. Everything Gower has reported suggests that’s where the blame lies for not paying freelance journalist David Cohen the $950 owed to him for advice given during Little’s bid for the party leadership last October.

That’s as it should be. Party leaders can’t be expected to deal with the minutiae of housekeeping.

Little could probably have got himself off the hook by saying the problem lay in McCarten’s office, but of course he wouldn’t because it would look like he was dumping on his right-hand man. And what fun Gower would have had with that.

The most interesting aspect of the non-story to me is the revelation that Cohen was engaged to work for the Labour Party.

I know that freelance journalism is a precarious way to make a living, and that there’s a powerful temptation to take work wherever you can get it. But conflict of issues arise when people who comment on matters of public interest (Cohen is National Business Review’s media columnist) are simultaneously involved in political work behind the scenes.

I suspect this goes on much more than we know. Cohen has come out in the open because he was understandably pissed off at not being paid. Otherwise his relationship with Labour would probably have remained secret. How many other notionally independent commentators, I wonder, are potentially compromised by connections we don’t know about?

TV3: too clever for its own good

You sometimes have to  wonder about TV3's news judgment.

There's  a place for aggressive reporting that pushes the boundaries, and Patrick Gower has become the pacesetter in the parliamentary press gallery - at least in the electronic media. But some of the channel's decisions lately have been downright silly.

It greatly overplayed its exclusive on Kim Dotcom's ownership of a signed copy of Mein Kampf. (Memo to TV3: "exclusive" doesn't necessarily mean it should lead the bulletin.) More recently, it excitedly led with a non-story about Justice Minister Judith Collins firing a pistol in circumstances which, under what could only be called a nitpicking interpretation of the gun laws, might have been technically illegal (but even if it was, didn't amount to a hill of beans). TV3 should note that for all the hype, neither of these stories led anywhere. They were largely ignored by other media, and rightly so.

Now the channel has suffered the unusual humiliation of being rebuked from the bench of the High Court and banned from further camera coverage of the John Banks trial - this, for showing footage last week of Banks absent-mindedly doing something nauseating with ear-wax while listening to the evidence against him.

What was the purpose of this shot? It was utterly gratuitous. It shed no light on the case, it was unnecessarily humiliating to Banks and it was repulsive to look at. Small wonder that Justice Edwin Wylie gave TV3 a whack around the ears.

There's not necessarily any disgrace in a media organisation upsetting the judiciary. In some circumstances it can be a badge of honour. But in this instance, the judge's indignation was entirely justified.

It was a case of TV3 once again getting a bit too clever for its own good. To the channel's credit, TV3 lawyer Clare Bradley, who was evidently party to the decision to screen the shot, now admits it was a bad judgment call.

Amen to that. Perhaps the channel will now dial back its propensity for shock and overkill.

WHY I'M WATCHING TV ONE AGAIN

I’ve been doing something over the past couple of weeks that surprises even me. I’ve found myself watching the TV One news again. And what’s even more surprising is that it’s not too bad. Perhaps I’m going soft in my dotage.

I gave up on One’s news years ago, repelled by the touchy-feely presentation style (which began way back with Judy Bailey), the silly gimmickry (the tandem newsreading technique, which goes back even further, still strikes me as absurd, as does the more recent fondness for live crosses to reporters who could just as easily be in the studio), the preposterous jargon (as in “Lisa Owen is across developments”), the promotion of celebrity reporters (step forward, Jack Tame) and TVNZ’s obvious preference (Jack Tame notwithstanding) for young, attractive female journalists over older, more experienced hands.  All this drove me into the welcoming arms of TV3, whose style by comparison was restrained and sensible.

But bugger me, everything seems to have been reversed. It’s TV3 now that habitually overcooks everything, while One seems to have reverted to a more sober, no-nonsense form of presentation. There seems to have been a subtle but important shift in One’s news values. More of the stories we’re seeing each evening are about matters of substance rather than froth. It no longer seems to be assumed by the news editors that viewers have the attention span of goldfish, or are incapable of dealing with stories about serious issues. What’s more, some of those attractive young females, given the chance to relate the news without gushing and simpering, have shown they’re capable of a lot more than merely looking decorative.

The turning point for me came when I switched on 3 News the night both channels led their bulletins with that painful interview with the parents of the Weekes triplets, who died in a Qatar shopping mall fire. It wasn’t the interview itself that repelled me – as far as I can tell, the content was pretty much the same on both channels – but the mawkish tone of Mike McRoberts’ intro, which seemed designed to milk the tragedy for all it was worth (and I say that as someone who has generally admired McRoberts).  A story like the deaths of the Weekes triplets doesn’t need embellishment. Viewers don’t need to be given a cue as to how they should respond emotionally. It’s an insult to them, and to the Weekes family.

That emotionally manipulative style of news treatment used to be One’s domain, and it pains me to see 3 News adopting the same meretricious techniques. But it comes on top of other aspects of 3 News that have perturbed me, such as the aggressive, highly opinionated reporting style of Patrick Gower and former political editor Duncan Garner and the increasingly frequent, gratuitous and often loaded throwaway lines from newsreader Hilary Barry. It seemed 3 News had decided it was no longer enough merely to report the news; it had to take an assertive, even provocative, position. Well, Fleet Street operates that way too, and it doesn’t seem to have earned itself much public respect.

So now I’m watching One News again, and while there are still aspects of it that grate (Wendy Petrie always reminds me of those girls at school who weren’t terribly clever but always sat at the front of class, took part in everything and were eager to impress the teacher), it’s currently by far the better of the two options at six o’clock.

What’s behind this change? Well, it seems more than a coincidence that it’s happened since TVNZ acquired a new head of news and current affairs, Australian Ross Dagan. I can only conclude that Dagan has presided over a partial reversion, at least, to old-fashioned, no-frills news values. Blessings upon him, if that’s correct.

My tentative conclusion that we have Dagan to thank for the improvement was reinforced by New Zealand Herald media writer John Drinnan’s column yesterday, in which Drinnan revealed that Dagan is reviewing the use of American news consultants Frank Magid and Associates.

A consultant to TVNZ for 20 years, Magid has had a huge and baneful influence on how One presents the news. It’s generally accepted that he’s behind the frothy, populist approach and all the accompanying fatuous gimmickry. As one anonymous TVNZ news executive told Drinnan, Magid-style bulletins are all about the sizzle, not the sausage.

I rejoice at the prospect that Magid, under whose guidance the TV news came to resemble something only marginally more edifying than a Wild West medicine show (and whom Drinnan reckons costs TVNZ $1 million a year), is about to get the heave-ho. Perhaps there is a God.

That "infamous" Orewa speech

Sometimes it’s the apparently offhand remark, the casual throwaway line, that gives the game away. A journalist can convey almost as much with a single loaded word as with a full-on rant.

In an item about National MP Georgina te Heuheu’s impending retirement last night, TV3 political editor Duncan Garner referred to her falling-out with former National leader Don Brash following Brash’s “now infamous Orewa speech” – Garner’s words – in 2004.

Let’s get this straight. “Infamous” means evil, vile or disgraceful. Brash’s Orewa speech, in which he attacked race-based privilege and advanced the perfectly laudable principle of one law for all, was infamous only in the eyes of Maori radicals, the Left and much of the parliamentary press gallery.

The media attacks on Brash that followed his speech were some of the most savage I can recall, but his message resonated with the wider public and took a previously down-and-out National Party within a whisker of victory in 2005. That election gave Labour such a fright that it threw its previous fiscal prudence to the wind and embarked on a desperate three-year vote-buying campaign that substantially contributed to the mess we’re in now.

Garner’s use of the word “infamous” suggests that elements of the media are still determined to portray Brash as racist. But if Garner really considers the speech to have been infamous, he’s hopelessly out of touch with what most New Zealanders apparently think.

Nothing new there, of course. Political journalists may be up with the play in Wellington, but they’re ill-equipped to know what people are thinking in places like Dannevirke, Hamilton and Timaru – and don’t believe them when they try to convince you otherwise.

I have noticed in the past that Australian political journalists, who lean overwhelmingly to the Left, are never more vicious in their attacks on centre-Right politicians than when they sense conservative ideas are gaining traction. Perhaps we’re seeing the same trend here.

On the other hand, maybe we should give Garner the benefit of the doubt. It’s entirely possible that a political editor who can’t pronounce Tuwharetoa (he insisted on inserting an extra syllable into it last night, not once but twice) doesn’t bother to check a dictionary to find out what “infamous” actually means.

What's going on here?

I'm puzzled by the reported fuss over whether or not to release photos of the dead Osama bin Laden. TV3 News had a photo of his bloodied, grotesque face in its 6pm News on Monday night, preceded by a warning that the picture was graphic (which it was) and that viewers might find it disturbing. Intriguingly, the same channel last night reported the White House's indecision over the release of the photo without mentioning that it had already appeared on their main evening bulletin two nights before. What's going on here? Did TV3 get heavied for broadcasting the image without authorisation? Was the photo shown on Monday night a fake? I think we should be told.

TV3 joins the wowser crusade

Sigh. Just when I was starting to think TV3 News wasn’t so bad after all (a cynic would say it’s because anything looks good alongside their competition), they do their best to drive me away again. Their lead item on Tuesday night was a shocker, though I mean that in the metaphorical rather than the literal sense.

It seems TV3, along with much of the mainstream media, has become an enthusiastic and uncritical accomplice in the concerted campaign of fear and panic over liquor abuse. This is the only possible explanation for its decision to lead the 6pm bulletin with a British “expert” on liquor and drug abuse, a Professor David Nutt, tut-tutting (or should that be nut-nutting?) over the government’s supposed capitulation to the liquor industry on the proposal to reduce the legal alcohol limit for drivers.

Nutt had nothing to say that hasn’t already been said by the vociferous New Zealand wowser lobby, led by the excitable Prof Doug Sellman. His statements were not new and neither were they news. They were simply one more expression of opinion – and a highly emotive one at that – by yet another sanctimonious academic who claims to know what’s best for us. The only thing new was that this time it was a sanctimonious academic with a British accent, which if anything made it even more irritating

As with climate change, we have given up expecting dispassionate, detached, objective statements from academics and health activists crusading for restrictive drinking laws. They are evangelists on a holy mission.

Nutt took the hoary old line that the government is in thrall to faceless liquor barons, and that only this can explain its decision to stall a reduction in the legal alcohol limit until more research has been done. This time-honoured wowser propaganda may play well to the impressionable, but it overlooks the fact that governments have wider responsibilities than to lobby groups, whether they represent the liquor industry or the latter-day temperance crusaders.

It may be that the government is holding the anti-liquor activists at bay because it recognises that there is a very large body of New Zealanders – those who don’t drink to excess, and therefore don’t deserve to be shackled by restrictive liquor laws – whose voices haven’t been heard in the debate. Much is made of the fact that the Law Commission report on the liquor laws attracted thousands of submissions, but by their very nature such exercises mainly bring out the committed activists. If the government is taking its time over liquor law changes because it wants to ensure the process isn’t wholly captured by the temperance evangelists (as the Law Commission appears to have been), then good on it. That’s called democracy.

Perhaps the anti-liquor campaigners, having succeeded in controlling the debate this far, suddenly sense the tide is turning against them. That may explain why they are turning up the volume, with “experts” like Nutt calling for lawyers to sue the liquor industry and urging a total ban on liquor advertising and supermarket wine sales. It might also explain Prof Sellman’s hysterical claims to a select committee recently about the level of alcohol-induced harm likely to result from the Rugby World Cup (70 serious or fatal road accidents, 400 babies with foetal alcohol spectrum disorder, more than 10,000 physical and sexual assaults … phew!).

It’s the wowsers’ prerogative, of course, to indulge in doomsday fantasies in the hope that we will all be terrified into complying with their agenda. But it’s disappointing that news organisations like TV3 should be buying into their alarmist nonsense and giving them spurious credibility.

What time’s the Prime news bulletin on? I might have to change my routine.