The John Campbell question

Once again, state-owned TVNZ has obligingly provided a platform from which its best-known (and no doubt highest-paid) journalist, John Campbell, can flail the government.

This is extraordinary and unprecedented. The government’s most potent communications medium has been hijacked by one of its employees and co-opted in a highly personal political mission.

Campbell’s anti-government agitation is more than simply provocative. It can only be seen as a direct challenge to the government and a gesture of contempt to all the deplorables who voted for change because they didn’t like where we were going under Labour.

Campbell clearly decided on October 14 that New Zealand had made a grievous mistake in electing a centre-right government and set himself the task of leading the Resistance.

Someone in authority should have told him then that this was not his function as a journalist. If he refused to accept that, he should have been told to pack his bags.

That this didn’t happen tells us that TVNZ is happy for its Chief Correspondent, aka the nation’s Hand-Wringer-in-Chief, to continue his crusade.  Now we’re in the unfortunate situation where someone in government may be tempted to strike back, because no government is likely to tolerate a situation where one of its own employees is so feverishly working to undermine it.

Journalism is in a potentially perilous situation here. Battles between the state and the media rarely turn out well.

The danger of vindictive politicians punishing troublesome journalists hardly needs to be pointed out. But Campbell has put us in this invidious position by brazenly abusing his power and thus inviting retribution. A combative politician like Winston Peters, whose early role model was media-baiter Robert Muldoon, would need little encouragement to retaliate.

The finely balanced relationship between journalists and the government, whereby politicians accept the inconvenience of a critical press as the price of an open democracy, is at risk of being destabilised when one side is seen as wilfully defying the established norms – which is what Campbell has been doing with his series of assaults on a government that’s ideologically not to his liking. 

The danger for the government is that unless it acts to deter egregiously partisan journalism from its own media outlets, Campbell and others like him – including some in RNZ – will feel emboldened to continue.  

As a product of the corporate world, Luxon will be familiar with the management maxim that “What you accept, you approve”. Well, it applies here.  As long as Campbell and others like him feel empowered to attack the government with impunity, National and its coalition partners can expect to endure a prolonged and self-inflicted form of Chinese water torture.

Lest this article be misinterpreted, I’m not presenting an argument for more pro-government journalism. That phrase is a contradiction in terms, because it is not the function of journalists to support governments.

Neither am I rushing to the defence of this government because I support it. I didn’t vote for it and I have little confidence in it, but the government was legitimately elected and it deserves a fair shake. It's impossible not to be struck by the sharp contrast between media attitudes toward the previous government and this one.

Rather, I’m appealing for a return to traditional journalistic values of impartiality and balance, the decline of which can be blamed for steadily diminishing public trust in the media. Contrary to what budding journalists are taught in universities (of which Campbell is a product), journalism is not activism.

Campbell’s attacks on the government – and in a broader sense, the sustained offensive from the media at large since last year’s election – place National and its coalition partners in difficult territory. Convention says the government shouldn’t interfere in the editorial decisions of its media outlets. Any such intervention would be portrayed as an intolerable attack on freedom of the press.

There would be uproar from the media and their academic fellow-travellers. Those with long memories would recall the bad old days of the 1960s, when the New Zealand Broadcasting Corporation was firmly under government control.

Fear of such a backlash is what Campbell and his bosses will be counting on to prevent the government from acting, but there comes a point when Campbell’s moralistic crusade becomes so brazen and arrogant that it can’t be ignored.

The question then becomes, what would be an appropriate response? In different circumstances, a stern word in private with TVNZ management might have done the job. But Campbell’s adversarial attitude to the government is so public and so obvious that a low-key strategic retreat is not possible. We’ve moved beyond that point. In any case, TVNZ is complicit in his misconduct.

Besides, this is an open democracy and the conduct of government affairs shouldn’t be carried out via covert, Yes, Minister-type manoeuvrings. If action is to be taken, it should be done in such a way that we can all see it.

That points to the nuclear option: a brutal, decisive and very public sacking on the basis that Campbell has betrayed the fundamental duty of impartiality that the public is entitled to expect of journalists in a state-owned media organisation.

If the TVNZ directors objected – as they would presumably feel bound to do, given that they have at least tacitly condoned Campbell’s activism – then they should be encouraged to go too.

In those circumstances, the government would need to be cleaner than clean in its appointment of a new board. Nothing would destroy its credibility more surely than the recruitment of political favourites and brown-nosers.

All this must sound odd, coming from someone who has written two books about the importance of media freedom (the only ones, to my knowledge, that examined the issue in a New Zealand context). The suggestion that a journalist should be fired because of his political views goes against the grain. 

But media freedom cuts both ways. Journalists must be able to report vigorously and fearlessly on matters of public interest. Generally speaking, in New Zealand the law allows them to do so.

But if the media are to retain the trust of the public, they must demonstrate that they can be relied on to report on issues of public interest in a fair, balanced and non-partisan way. Once the media betray that trust, they put their protected status at risk.

It goes without saying that Campbell is as entitled as anyone to say what he thinks about the government. The crucial difference, in his case, is that his personal opinion is seen as carrying the weight of a major state media organisation which is supposed to be apolitical.

He would be in a very different position if he worked for a privately owned media outfit, but employment by a state-owned organisation imposes a special obligation of impartiality. TVNZ is owned by the people, whose allegiances and sympathies cover the entire political spectrum. It takes a special type of hubris to assume that being the Chief Correspondent (whatever that title means) for such an organisation entitles him to impose his own narrow political biases on his audience.

Mention abuse of media power and people tend to think of press barons such as Rupert Murdoch, but Campbell is guilty of abuse in a more subtle form. In fact it could be argued that Murdoch is a more honest abuser of power because he doesn’t seek to disguise his actions behind an ostentatious façade of morality and compassion.

Campbell presents himself as the conscience of the nation, but by positioning himself as the implacable opponent of a democratically elected government, he’s effectively spitting in the faces of the majority of his fellow New Zealanders who voted for it.  He clearly regards himself as above them and above democracy.

He appears to interpret media freedom as giving him licence to wage a divisive and potentially disruptive political campaign, with the backing of a powerful state institution, against a government that he doesn’t think deserved to be elected. It needs to be made clear to him and TVNZ that his position is offensive and untenable, even in a liberal democracy. If that means sacking him, so be it.

 

An epic display of dummy-spitting

As a believer in free speech, I would never question John Campbell’s right to unburden himself of a long, whiny lament about where New Zealand is going under the new government.

I do object, however, when it’s published on the website of a taxpayer-owned broadcaster, TVNZ, which has an ethical obligation to observe editorial balance and political neutrality.

If you wanted proof that brazenly activist journalism is not only accepted but encouraged, even by state-owned media, there it is, right there. Clearly, TVNZ is untroubled by the fact that the man it calls its Chief Correspondent adopts an unashamedly political posture and sets himself up as an outspoken adversary of a democratically elected government.  It’s a measure of his ego that he can take such a provocatively defiant stance and expect to get away with it.

And it’s not as if this was the first such column. In an epic display of dummy-spitting, Campbell has grizzled repeatedly about the election outcome – here, here and here. I’m surprised he hasn’t demanded we vote again and keep doing it until we get the right result.

That he doesn’t like the new government is not so much the issue here. That’s his right as a citizen. What’s offensive is that he misuses his position as a high-profile journalist – one who has spent a large part of his career in the state-owned broadcasting system, with all the power and privilege that confers – by petulantly and very publicly railing against a government that his fellow New Zealanders voted for. The Labour Party may be beaten and demoralised, but that’s okay because Campbell has set himself up as the de facto Opposition.

It possibly doesn’t occur to Campbell – nor to TVNZ, obviously – that his political partisanship seriously compromises his journalistic credibility among the many New Zealanders who voted Labour out and welcomed the policy U-turns that he finds so egregious. What chance do New Zealanders have of hearing politically neutral comment from the state-owned TV network’s Chief Correspondent? What chance of a straight, unbiased account of any contentious issue about which Campbell holds strong opinions? The answer, it seems, is zero. That being the case, shouldn’t it matter to TVNZ that viewers who object to Campbell’s posturing are likely to switch off or turn away whenever his face comes on screen?

Nearly three months on from the election, Campbell still appears unable to accept that the country voted emphatically for change. I suspect that like many journalists, six ecstatic years under Labour misled him into thinking that a radical left-wing government was now the natural order of things. He exemplifies the elitist metropolitan commentariat which, for those six years, so dominated media discourse that dissenting opinion was all but smothered. 

Nowhere in his anguished lamentation does Campbell acknowledge that the government he objects to was legitimately elected by ordinary people exercising their one chance in every three years to influence public policy. Perhaps he avoided mentioning this because he’s too polite to come right out and say his fellow New Zealanders are thickos, racists and reactionaries, although the implication is clear enough.

The falsity of his carefully crafted image as a Man of the People has thus been laid bare. He displays nothing but contempt for the government and, by extension, for the people who elected it. He has made a career out of oozing empathy, but his goodwill toward his fellow New Zealanders stops short of accepting their right to vote for a government he doesn’t approve of.

Having said all that, let’s give Campbell his due. He writes very well, albeit a bit too emotively. He is achingly sincere. You can feel his pain. I think he genuinely cares about his fellow New Zealanders. The thing is, so too, no doubt, do Christopher Luxon, David Seymour and – who knows? – perhaps even Winston Peters. That presumably is why they entered politics.

The mistake Campbell makes, as is frequently the case with the sanctimonious Left, is that he thinks he has a monopoly on virtue and compassion.

On a broader note, the government has a problem. It owns two powerful media organisations, TVNZ and RNZ, that are essentially hostile to it and will function as centres of resistance to its policies. Democratically speaking, this is intolerable. The obvious solution is for the government to send a signal by sacking the TVNZ and RNZ boards, but the question then becomes: would it replace them with strong, competent, independent directors, or would it succumb to the temptation to install political toadies? I wish I could be confident of the answer.

To finish on a personal note, I hesitated for a long time before writing this because my wife and I were good friends of John Campbell’s parents. They are (or were, in the case of his late father) lovely people. The two degrees of separation that characterises New Zealand society sometimes makes things awkward, but there it is.

 

The pleasure of having one's prejudices confirmed

I forced myself to watch Web of Chaos, Tuesday night’s state-funded TVNZ documentary that promised “a deep dive into the world of disinformation”.

It’s sad that I should regard it as a chore to watch something I helped to pay for, but that’s the way it is. I wanted to satisfy myself that Web of Chaos was exactly what I expected, and so it turned out. There are few things more richly satisfying than having one’s prejudices confirmed.

The first clue was in the name of the director: Justin Pemberton. I vaguely recalled the name from somewhere else, and it soon came to me. Pemberton made Capital in the 21st Century, which I described in 2019 as a masterpiece of the propagandist’s art.

I wrote then that “The film uses every trick in the documentary-maker’s book to dramatise its message, which is that contemporary capitalism is overwhelmingly rigged in favour of the ultra-rich and basically rotten to the core”.

Web of Chaos uses similar techniques – powerful images, slick editing, ominous music – to create a sense of dread and foreboding. It’s a clever piece of work that will have chilled the hearts of anyone open to its message, which is that shadowy, dark forces on the far Right (that term again) are using the internet to promote hatred, division and paranoia.

If the name of the director wasn’t a pointer to the likely tone of the doco, the identities of the participants certainly were. The names were almost comically predictable: self-described “disinformation researcher” Byron C Clark, cultural historian Kate Hannah from the shadowy Disinformation Project, “media literacy expert” and activist Sanjana Hattotuwa (I presume that being an expert on “media literacy” means we can trust him to tell us which sources of information are safe), celebrity TV reporter David Farrier (memorably, if unflatteringly, described by Sean Plunket this week as a gutter-snipe journalist), the achingly woke Marc Daalder, Newsroom’s in-house proselytiser on climate change and right-wing extremism, and University of Otago philosophy professor Lisa Ellis, the one name unfamiliar to me, whose online resumé tells us she writes about “climate adaptation justice”, whatever that may be, and edits a magazine called Political Theory. Enough said.

In other words, the usual suspects: a tight little coterie of mutually supporting (and apparently well-resourced) activists marching in lockstep with a radical leftist government and mainstream media. All are caught up in, and simultaneously promulgate, a moral panic over so-called disinformation, which can loosely be defined as any information or opinion they dislike.

So … not exactly a balanced line-up, but polemical documentaries like this – even ones funded, albeit involuntarily, by the taxpayer – don’t pretend to be balanced. Would I turn to any of these “experts” for guidance on what I may safely watch, read and hear? Absolutely not. No one should.

No surprises, either, in the political phenomena that the doco presented as proof of the far Right’s baneful influence: Brexit, climate change denial, Donald Trump, toxic masculinity, evangelical Christianity (white Christianity, to be precise) and pandemic conspiracy theories all got a raking over.

There was talk of gullible people falling down rabbit holes, yet it occurred to me that the participants may have fallen down a few themselves. (Ah, I can almost hear them say, but their rabbit holes are okay.) They have immersed themselves in the same febrile, conspiratorial netherworld as the people they rail against. Perhaps they all deserve each other.

It also occurred to me (as it did with Stuff’s recent Fire and Fury documentary) that by amplifying online hysteria and paranoia, and probably doing their enemies a favour by doing so, they become part of the problem they purport to deplore. A detached observer – someone living in the real world, perhaps, and thus immune to overheated conspiracy theories from either side – could hardly be blamed for wishing a plague on all their houses.

What particularly struck me about Web of Chaos was the feeling that what really vexed the participants most is that they’re unable to control the digital conversation. Much of the leftist idealism that drove the internet in its early years has evaporated and anarchy has moved in. This is not how it was supposed to play out.

This is not to deny that some of the online content deplored by the virtuous participants in Web of Chaos is poisonous – but in the information wars, the poison flows both ways. The documentary didn’t mention neo-Marxist vitriol on Twitter or the routine cancellation of any opinions, no matter how reasoned or moderate, that run counter to woke orthodoxy. Neither did it consider the possibility that conservative opinion has been driven underground because it was locked out of mainstream social media channels such as Facebook and Twitter.

Extremism is bound to thrive when dissent is suppressed by members of a pharisaical caste that takes upon itself the right to determine what others may read and hear. This was the less than surprising conclusion to be drawn from Web of Chaos – a documentary accurately assessed by the aforementioned Sean Plunket as having the same level of journalistic integrity as Fire and Fury, but with the important difference that it was made using public money. Hence we all become accomplices in our own indoctrination.

And speaking of brazen, state-funded journalistic bias, how about the latest Sunday programme on TVNZ? In a lifetime of television viewing I’ve seen some atrocious reportage, but rarely anything so egregiously slanted as Mark Crysell’s report on the consequences of the US Supreme Court’s reversal of Roe v. Wade.

Crysell took it as given that it’s a fundamental human right to take the life of an unborn child. Not for a millisecond did he bother himself with the consideration that many of the people watching his report find abortion deeply repugnant. Insofar as objections to abortion were acknowledged at all, they were presented as being confined to a slightly mad and dangerous religious fringe.

He informed us that what’s unfolding in Texas, where abortion is now illegal unless the mother’s life is threatened, is a “human tragedy”. But wait! This could be to New Zealand’s benefit, Crysell revealed, because disenchanted American medical professionals are thinking of emigrating. This could be the solution, he suggested, to the staffing crisis in our health sector.

Really? I’m not sure I’d welcome doctors and nurses who want to leave the US for the sole reason that they’re no longer allowed to kill foetuses. I subscribe to the quaint idea that we’d be better off with health professionals who are concerned with saving lives rather than terminating them. Yet Crysell portrayed the Texas abortionists as being motivated by high principle. It was a striking illustration of how grotesquely warped the abortion cult has become.

As is invariably the case in media coverage of abortion, the unborn child was unmentioned and invisible. Easier and more convenient to ignore it.

Crysell’s report was a “f*** you” gesture to all the mugs in Sunday’s audience whom he must have known would find its tone offensive. They pay his salary and pick up the tab for his flights, hotel bills and rental cars (not that they have any say in the matter), and in return he exercises an assumed right to impose on them his personal prejudices on a profoundly contentious issue.

What a contemptible creep. As an arrogant abuse of media power, it’s equal to anything Rupert Murdoch ever dreamed up.

 

Why we should be sceptical about Kris Faafoi's grand broadcasting project

In a previous life, I served for two years as a member of the Library and Information Advisory Commission (LIAC).

You’ve never heard of it? That’s hardly surprising. Not many people have. It was established by Helen Clark’s government for the purposes of, among other things, “maintaining a strategic overview of the library and information sectors” and “providing stakeholder perspectives on issues and proposals”. Make of that what you will.

I was nominated for a seat on the board by the Newspaper Publishers’ Association and accepted, naively thinking LIAC might occasionally deal with issues related to freedom of information.

I can’t pretend it was an onerous job. It involved driving to Wellington once every couple of months for an all-day meeting where various people reported on various things and we were given a pleasant but simple lunch. For this I was paid a modest emolument.

Our minister was Marian Hobbs, whose responsibilities included the National Library. I recall the board strolling across Molesworth Street to the Beehive for a meeting with her and wondering why we bothered, since there seemed nothing of any substance to tell her. But apparently it was a statutory requirement.

My fellow board members were a likeable bunch but came from the public sector and spoke what seemed to me to be a foreign language. That is to say, I recognised the words but struggled to comprehend the sentences they were arranged into.

I particularly remember the late Paul Reynolds, a loquacious Scotsman with a background in IT, who would talk at great length and with irrepressible enthusiasm about the rich potential of the digital information sector. It was impossible not to like Paul, but he needed an assertive chair to rein him in. More to the point, I don’t recall anything actually happening or being decided as a result of his effusive rhetoric.

My occasional protestations that I needed a translator were usually met with the slightly condescending assurance that I served a valuable purpose by keeping my fellow board members grounded in the real world. But after serving one term I decided that keeping LIAC grounded in the real world – if indeed I succeeded in doing so, which I doubted – wasn’t enough to justify my continued presence. So I resigned.

Here’s the thing: at the end of my two years, I was no clearer about LIAC’s purpose than I was at the start. I still had no idea what I was doing there and couldn’t see what, if anything, our meetings were achieving. To me it was just talk, talk, talk, with no discernible outcome, though I admit I seemed to be alone in reaching this pessimistic conclusion. Perhaps I missed something.

Before writing this, I went to the Department of Internal Affairs website to check that LIAC still exists (it does), and to remind myself what it was set up to do. I’m still none the wiser, since its terms of reference are described in woolly bureaucratese that can mean anything and nothing.

Its remit is a masterpiece of vague abstractions and circular reasoning, empowering LIAC to do whatever it thinks might be worth doing, but not actually explaining in simple, practical terms what that is, or guaranteeing that anyone will take any notice of it anyway. It’s there because it’s there. Where LIAC’s reason for existing should be clearly explained, there’s a vacuum.

I came to the conclusion that LIAC was one of those quangos that Labour politicians, in particular, love to create because they create a perception of action, change and dynamic forward momentum.

You can see how this happens. Labour typically languishes in opposition for prolonged periods (in that case, nine years), chafing with frustration and grinding its teeth at all the things it thinks the government should be doing. By the time it eventually gets its hands on the levers of power (mixed metaphor alert!), a massive head of reformist zeal has built up.

All that energy has to go somewhere, so it tends to get diffused in a frantic welter of political and bureaucratic activity that employs legions of public servants, consultants and advisors but often produces no lasting, tangible or beneficial results.

Labour, after all, is a party of change. It has a compelling urge to re-invent the wheel; to re-arrange things, sometimes for no better reason than that it has the power to do so. In this respect it’s fundamentally different from National, whose instinct is to leave things alone. (Unfortunately, National’s inertia means quangos created under Labour often survive a change of government, which may explain why LIAC still exists.)

No doubt there are other LIACs lurking out of the public view, all hoovering up taxpayer money and consuming energy that might be better expended elsewhere. In fact on a government profligacy scale of one to 10, LIAC would barely register 0.5.  I mention it only because I happen to have had personal experience of it. (The Taxpayers’ Union does a very good job of exposing the countless other government feel-good exercises which squander public money, like the new Hamilton-Papakura commuter train that in its first week often carried fewer than 30 passengers per trip.)

This brings me to the point of this blog, which is the work going on behind the scenes toward a reinvention of public broadcasting in New Zealand – or to be more precise, a merger (although the government doesn’t like that word) of TVNZ and RNZ.

No one has satisfactorily explained why this is necessary, still less urgent (as Broadcasting Minister Kris Faafoi seems to think), or what benefits it will bring. But it’s going ahead regardless, at pace and mainly out of public view, and you get the feeling it’s likely to happen whether it makes sense or not. It looks like Faafoi’s big legacy project – one that’s almost inevitably fated to be dismantled and reconstructed by some other reformist minister further down the track, because that’s what happens.

The potential pitfalls in the proposed amalgamation are obvious. The two organisations’ cultures are fundamentally incompatible. Yoking TVNZ and RNZ together would be like trying to mate a komodo dragon with a barn owl.

Admittedly, the model the government is considering, which would combine a commercial television service and a non-commercial radio network under common management, has worked satisfactorily in the past. It’s pretty much how the old New Zealand Broadcasting Corporation operated before it was broken up (under a Labour government, as it happens) in 1975.

The NZBC was funded by commercial revenue not only from television but also from its profitable ZB radio network, which was sold off in the 1980s. This income was supplemented by a licence fee, similar to the one that funds the BBC, which everyone with a TV set was required to pay, and which theoretically funded non-commercial broadcasting.

But that was then and this is now. Under the NZBC and its immediate successors, a strong public broadcasting ethos prevailed despite the hybrid funding model. The people who ran the two state TV networks that emerged from the 1975 overhaul were still influenced, consciously or otherwise, by the lingering legacy of British-born Sir James Shelley, New Zealand’s first director of broadcasting. That was apparent from their programming policies, which strove for a balance between populist entertainment and more serious content – and mostly achieved it. Ratings were important, but not paramount.

That can’t be said of TVNZ, which long ago shed any trace of its origins as a public broadcaster. It has been commercially driven – aggressively so – for decades, despite futile attempts (notably the Clark government’s meaningless “TVNZ Charter” in 2003, which the broadcaster appeared to ignore) to impose public service obligations on it.

I would be the first to applaud the restructuring of broadcasting if it signalled a return to public broadcasting values, but I suspect that genie is well and truly out of the bottle as far as TVNZ is concerned.

People might feel happier if Faafoi could at least present a succinct, compelling case for change, but he hasn’t. We’re told the new organisation must be “fit for purpose” – but what purpose, exactly? That’s conveniently undefined. “Fit for purpose” is a fashionable phrase that, like LIAC’s terms of reference, can mean anything or nothing. We should be very suspicious of politicians who take refuge in jargon whose meaning is impossible to pin down.

A key justification advanced for the creation of a “strong new public media entity” (the officially endorsed terminology) is that the media sector is in crisis and needs government help. But a cynical interpretation is that the “crisis” – if it exists, which commentators such as Newsroom's Mark Jennings dispute – offers a perfect opportunity for a deep-pocketed government to step into the market and swamp private operators.  This raises the worrying prospect of a state-controlled media behemoth.

Commentators on all sides have expressed scepticism, and not all of it can be dismissed as self-interest or politically motivated. They have also expressed disquiet at a lack of transparency.

As Stuff’s Tom Pullar-Strecker wrote in a perceptive analysis a couple of weeks ago, the longer the government holds out against demands for wider involvement in the exercise, “the more likely it is that people may feel the merger is something that is being done to them, rather than for them”.

Pullar-Strecker also pointedly asked: “Might this simply be a case of public sector empire-building by Faafoi, himself a former TVNZ journalist?”

He went on to suggest that it’s possible “there simply is no strong thinking behind the new public media entity and it is just the product of ill-defined aspirations that have been allowed to snowball in a policy vacuum”. 

In other words a bit like LIAC, perhaps, but on an infinitely grander and costlier scale.

 

Why we should be concerned about a TVNZ-RNZ merger

I sometimes get the feeling that the lobby group that calls itself the New Zealand Taxpayers’ Union is seen by journalists as a front for the National Party. This would explain why it doesn’t always get the media attention it deserves.

The perception of political partisanship is understandable, given that one of the NZTU’s co-founders was opinion pollster and Kiwiblog owner David Farrar, who is closely associated with National.

But it’s also unfair, because since its establishment in 2013 (under a National government, as it happens), the NZTU has generally been consistent and even-handed in its attacks on the wasteful use of taxpayers’ money. It was often critical of National when the party was in power and has even supported Labour policies.

If anything, this places it more in ACT’s ideological territory than National’s. National may profess to believe in limited government, but the party has often been happy to spray money around if there was political advantage to be gained.

The NZTU has further demonstrated its worth by monitoring local government spending. Some of the outrageous rorts perpetrated by councils and their misnamed bastard children, the so-called council-controlled organisations, might have escaped public attention if it weren’t for the union’s vigilance.

Whistle-blowers such as the NZTU should be especially valued in an election year, when political parties go all-out in a shameless bidding war for votes. The public needs to be constantly reminded that it’s our money they’re generously volunteering to spend – and in many cases, waste.

The Provincial Growth Fund calls for particularly close scrutiny, although we probably have to accept that we’ll never know the true cost of the prize demanded by Winston Peters in return for his puny 7 per cent share of the vote at the last election.

That’s because the PGF – alternatively known as the New Zealand First Survival Fund – makes nonsense of all normal rules relating to transparency and accountability.  

But it wasn’t irresponsible spending that prompted one of the NZTU’s recent public statements. Demonstrating that it also keeps an eye on wider public-interest issues, the union asked some sharp questions about the government’s proposal to merge the two state-owned broadcasters, RNZ and TVNZ.

People forget that we have been down this road before. State radio and television co-existed under the same organisation, the New Zealand Broadcasting Corporation, until 1975, when they were split into separate entities.

What’s more, both radio and TV earned revenue from advertising without compromising the public service broadcasting ethos – so contrary to broadcasting purists’ fears, it’s possible to manage the conflict between the two.

But the media environment is very different now, and as the NZTU statement pointed out, the prospect of a TVNZ-RNZ merger raises other issues. These relate to such crucial democratic concerns as freedom of expression and diversity of information sources.

At a time when most privately owned media outlets are struggling to survive, a taxpayer-funded super-broadcaster would wield enormous power. Cushioned by state funding while still free to earn commercial revenue, it could push private competitors to the wall. A probable consequence is that New Zealanders would be deprived of alternative sources of information and opinion. 

Almost inevitably, such a monolithic broadcaster would lean politically to the left. That’s the default setting of state-owned broadcast organisations internationally, and there’s no reason to suppose things would be different in a New Zealand super-broadcaster. The evidence is there already.

As NZTU spokesman Louis Houlbrooke said: “In today’s opinion-led, personality-dominated media environment, journalism tends to push one political narrative or another.

“This is tolerable when audiences have a choice of outlets – we can always switch to a different channel. However, problems arise when the government tries to convert commercial operators into ‘public service’ platforms, with taxpayers forced to fund material they find politically distasteful.”

Houlbrooke urged Broadcasting Minister Kris Faafoi to instruct consultants PwC, who are putting together a business case for the merger, to include a requirement for political diversity.

Well, I won’t be holding my breath. As things stand, there’s a real risk that a left-of-centre government will green-light the merger proposal without much, if any, consideration of the need for an informed democracy to have access to a wide range of information and opinion. After all, it suits Labour and the Greens to have a powerful broadcasting organisation that’s broadly sympathetic to their political agenda.

All of this raises another important issue highlighted by NZTU chairman Barrie Saunders, a former journalist with public broadcasting experience. [Disclosure: Barrie Saunders is an old friend of mine and a former colleague.]

As Saunders says, the future of state broadcasting is too important to be left to politicians and broadcasting chiefs with their own agendas. Labelling the proposed restructuring process “disgraceful”, he called for cross-party involvement and public input. Proper practice, he said, would be for the government to issue a White Paper for public discussion.

After all, as Saunders pointed out, there’s no urgency – unless, of course, the process is being driven by political self-interest.  

It's the Friendly News with Dan the Smiling Weatherman

(First published in the Manawatu Standard and Nelson Mail, November 15).

Something’s not right here. I’m watching a 1 News item about Prince Charles being implicated in an international tax dodge, and the reporter is TVNZ’s own Chris Chang.

The story originated in Britain but Chang would have recorded his voiceover in TVNZ’s Auckland newsroom. It will have replaced a voice track supplied with the original item by the BBC. But why?

Are we really expected to believe that a journalist sitting in New Zealand, with no specialist knowledge of Prince Charles or his dodgy investments, is in a better position to tell us what’s going on than someone close to the action?

Of course he isn’t. But this deception is routinely practised by our state-owned television network. Almost nightly, TVNZ takes overseas news items and gets its own journalists to record a voiceover.

It’s dishonest, because it pretends TVNZ’s own staff have done the hard yards when in fact they’re piggy-backing on the work of correspondents overseas.

You could argue that it’s harmless, but it’s dishonest all the same – and entirely unnecessary. So why does TVNZ do it?

I suspect that it’s all about promoting TVNZ’s own journalists as “names” – celebrities, you might say – whom we are encouraged to regard as our personal friends. It’s just one example of the many ways in which TV news bulletins have been cheapened by gimmickry and the cult of personality.

Even in the digital age, when consumers of news have a veritable smorgasbord of options, the 6 o’clock news remains crucial in locking viewers in for the evening. 1 News remains the most-watched free-to-air programme, and TVNZ constantly tweaks it to ensure it retains our loyalty.

The debasement process was set in train decades ago when someone decided it would be a good idea to have two people, rather than one, reading the news.

The tandem male-female newsreading team is now such an entrenched practice that we no longer think of it as peculiar. But reading the news requires only one person, as radio and most respected overseas TV networks demonstrate. Two is pure gimmickry.

Let me remind you how this strange practice came about. In the late 1970s the newly launched TV2, desperate to establish a point of difference against the bigger and better-resourced TV One, pioneered a dual newsreading team consisting of John Hawkesby and Tom Bradley.

Even Hawkesby and Bradley seemed to recognise that it was all a bit silly, jokingly referring to themselves privately as the Bobbsey Twins, after the characters in a popular series of American children’s stories. But nearly 40 years down the track, this contrivance has become a permanent fixture.

Now let’s move from the merely irritating to the ingratiating. TVNZ newsreaders and reporters have clearly been instructed to encourage us to think of them not as detached, competent professionals doing a serious, important job, but as our chums.

It’s the Friendly News with Simon and Wendy, with Dan the Smiling Weatherman providing the warm-up act. This sense of easy familiarity is reinforced by the way the newsreaders address reporters when they appear live. Jessica Mutch is “Jess”; sports host Andrew Saville is “Sav”, and so on. They’re our pals.

We see it too when a reporter such as Paul Hobbs, one of TVNZ’s most favoured journalists, appears on screen. He often gives the impression that he’s less concerned with providing an authoritative report than with establishing a smiley empathy with viewers.

This approach can be traced back 20 years or so, to when an American consultant was brought in to retrain TVNZ’s journalists and newsreaders. His message, which TVNZ management heartily endorsed, was that viewers had to become more emotionally engaged with the news. They had to feel it on a more personal level.

Brian Edwards memorably called it the coochie-coo news. Some TVNZ journalists couldn’t bear it and quit rather than undergo what they called “potty training”.

What else bugs me about 1 News? Well, there’s the nagging suspicion that some reporters are hired for their looks rather than their ability. It helps to be young and attractive. Appearance seems to be valued over experience.

Then there are the ridiculously brief sound bites from interviewees – sometimes just three or four words. Is TVNZ worried that our attention span can’t cope with a complete sentence, or is it a way of making the news seem fast-paced and dynamic?

There’s also the ridiculous emphasis on reporting “live” from the scene of a story, even when the event being reported took place hours earlier and the “live” report adds nothing. It’s made worse when the reporter is not up to the challenge of speaking live to the camera, as is often the case.  

And don’t get me started about incorrect captions – indeed, often no captions at all, so that you’re left to guess the identity of the person on screen. Standard practice is not to identify the speaker the first time he or she appears. You have to wait for a second appearance before you learn who it is.

Again, why? Perhaps TVNZ thinks we’ll be so curious to discover who it is that we won’t be tempted to stray to a rival channel in the meantime. Who knows how the TVNZ corporate mind works?

My point is this: news is serious stuff. It deserves to be treated with respect, not gussied up with floss and tat better suited to a travelling circus.

In the 1920s, the BBC famously required its radio newsreaders to wear a dinner jacket, even though no one saw them. Over the top? Yes – but at least it showed that the BBC saw the reading of the day’s news as an occasion of some gravitas.

FOOTNOTE: Soon after my column appeared on the Manawatu Standard website, TVNZ supplied the following statement from Phil O'Sullivan, head of newsgathering. I reproduce it in the interests of fairness and balance.

"Mr du Fresne is perfectly entitled to his opinion on our news and we welcome his viewership but when he accuses 1 News of 'deception' and 'dishonesty', a response is called for.

"We frequently run international material from the BBC and the United States’ ABC network. When our Europe or US correspondents are not available, we will often pull together a story back here in New Zealand. Not all our affiliate material is suitable to run in New Zealand. The story may still be developing, it may be too long, too short or aimed too closely at an overseas domestic audience. Our aim is simply to tell a story that New Zealand viewers can relate to.

"Mr du Fresne is incorrect in stating as fact our reporter 'replaced a voice track supplied with the original item supplied by the BBC'. The reporter conducted his own research and reported the story using a range of affiliate material and sourcing. In no way did we deceive our audience and we believe they’d be smart enough to know if we did so.

"We agree 'news is serious stuff'. In the past year alone our team has reported from all over New Zealand and the world on stories as diverse as natural disasters to a general election. All of these stories have myriad challenges, not least keeping our staff safe while covering them.

"1 News is New Zealand’s most watched and most trusted TV news – we never take that position for granted."

I'm happy to accept Phil O'Sullivan's assurance that Chris Chang compiled the Prince Charles item, although I question the need to do so when the BBC could have been relied on to cover the matter thoroughly. I believe this reinforces my point about TVNZ wanting to put its own reporters forward. I have noted many occasions in recent months when TVNZ's own journalists have presented overseas news items for no obvious reason.

Incidentally, I notice that on the two nights since my column was published, 1 News appears to have changed its policy of not identifying people when they first appear on screen. Of course this could be entirely coincidental. Nonetheless it's welcome.

Rules won't eliminate the most troubling bias

I have some sympathy for the public service union’s objection to TVNZ’s ban on political journalists belonging to parties. The ban strikes me as an over-reaction to an embarrassing failure that was partly of TVNZ’s own making. (I say “partly” because Shane Taurima’s underhand behaviour was obviously the primary contributing factor, despite his ludicrous claim to have been vindicated by the report of an independent panel.)

Gavin Ellis, former editor-in-chief of the New Zealand Herald, argued on today’s Morning Report that journalists have to make a choice between reporting on politics and belonging to a political party. Some political journalists (I think Colin James is one) go even further to ensure purity. They don’t vote.

But with all due respect to such principled views, I struggle to accept that being a political journalist necessarily requires you to neuter yourself as a citizen.

The crucial issue, surely, is how you do the job. Journalists should be judged on the fairness and impartiality of their reporting and commentary. It’s possible to be a party member and still be even-handed as a journalist.

I can think of relatively high-profile journalists who hold strong left-wing views in private but still manage to do their work with integrity, as the journalists’ code of ethics requires. There are also journalists and commentators (Paul Henry and John Campbell, for example) who quite openly lean one way or the other – but since their politics are no secret, viewers can decide for themselves how much weight to place on whatever they might say.

These are not the people who worry me. The ones we should really be concerned about are the journalists who hold pronounced political views that are not declared, but which permeate their reportage. There are a lot of them about, probably more than ever before, and they will never be controlled by arbitrary rules – such as TVNZ is now imposing – about declarations of political interest.

If such people have no qualms about exercising bias in their work, they are not going to feel compelled to fess up to the boss. They are answerable only to their own conscience, which isn’t much help if they don’t possess one.

 

Tapping into that small-town connection

(First published in The Dominion Post, November 15.)

I'M NOT ABOUT to take back all the terrible things I’ve said about TVNZ, but credit where credit’s due.

This Town, which TV One has been screening in prime time on Saturday nights for the past few weeks, is a priceless series about ordinary New Zealanders.

Actually, that’s not quite correct. Many of them are extraordinary: eccentric, clever and colourful. But they are ordinary in the sense that they are not big names (with one exception: Lynda Topp of the Topp Twins, but even she was shown in a new light).

You won’t see any of them in the social pages of the Sunday Star-Times. What’s more, there are no attention-seeking presenters hogging the camera. This Town is a celebrity-free zone, and all the better for it. It’s also mercifully free of the irritating production gimmickry that intrudes on so many shows.

If you haven’t seen the programme so far, you’ve missed some great New Zealanders. Most of them have a passion for something (a greatly overused term these days, but applicable in this case), like the Otago family that built its own power station, the man who restored the moribund Wairoa movie theatre and the Kaponga (Taranaki) woman who turned her house into a horse museum.

One appealing aspect of the show is seeing Kiwi blokes – even the hard men who inhabit the Chatham Islands – speaking honestly and unselfconsciously about their lives and what’s important to them.

I especially enjoyed the episode that featured the Patea Maori Club, famous for its 1984 hit Poi E. Drive through Patea these days and it’s easy to get the impression it’s a town that has lost all hope, but not so. Patea still has a beating heart, as the stalwarts of the PMC showed.

Producer Melanie Rakena has done a superb job seeking out engaging characters with interesting stories and allowing them to tell them in their own way. The series takes me back to the days of Gary McCormick’s Heartland, which had a similar knack for unearthing unconventional but likeable people in out of the way places.

Many of us still identify with small-town New Zealand, though the number must be diminishing. For one hour on Saturday night, This Town taps into that emotional connection.

Perhaps the key to its appeal is that makes you feel good about being a New Zealander – which is not something that could be said for programmes like Police Ten 7 (or, come to that, Seven Sharp, which seems based on the assumption that we’re a nation of airheads).

* * *

ON SUNDAY morning I listened to Radio Zealand host Chris Laidlaw talking to Bryan Gould, a retired New Zealand academic who was once a British Labour MP and contender for the leadership of the British Labour Party.

It wasn’t so much an interview as a meeting of minds. Mr Gould was holding forth on his favourite theme, the wickedness of free-market capitalism, and it became clear as the interview progressed that the two former Rhodes Scholars were kindred souls.

By the end, Laidlaw was murmuring in agreement and lamenting that the spirit of egalitarianism on which New Zealand was founded had been “sold down the river”. Hardtalk it wasn’t.

Laidlaw may not regard himself as being on the left, as he told this paper on Wednesday, but regular listeners will have formed their own conclusions about his leanings long ago.

Now it has been announced that he’s leaving the programme at the end of the year. He says it’s because he wants to devote his time to his local government work, but some will wonder whether Radio New Zealand, which has a new chief executive, has decided the Sunday morning programme can no longer ignore the charter requirement that it be editorially balanced.

If so, it’s not before time. Laidlaw is entitled to his political views, but the state broadcaster exists for, and is funded by, all New Zealanders – not just a cosy, left-leaning elite.

* * *

SHARIA LAW proponents advocate cutting off the hands as a penalty for theft, but the idea also has merit as a solution to a persistent problem afflicting television reporters.

One News glamour boys Jack Tame and Matt McLean are among the many young TV journalists who seem incapable of telling a story without making extravagant physical gestures to emphasise their point.

An even worse offender is Breakfast weather presenter Sam Wallace, who waves his arms around as if he were participating in a demented game of charades.

Having observed them closely, I have concluded they suffer from a disorder known as tardive dyskinesia. A common side-effect of anti-psychotic medication, this condition results in repetitive, involuntary body movements and is often seen in psychiatric patients.

Whatever drugs TVNZ is giving them, I suggest the treatment be discontinued immediately.

The madness gripping the media

(First published in The Dominion Post, February 22.)

IT’S HARD to remember a new television programme that has been more relentlessly savaged than TV One’s Seven Sharp, but people should give it credit for achieving something no other programme has accomplished: it’s so bad it has forced the massive bloc of habitual, dyed-in-the-wool One viewers to change channels at 7 o’clock. This is a seismic shift.

I watched the very first Seven Sharp and was aghast. If that was the best they could do with weeks to prepare, and with an expectant audience primed by a promotional blitzkrieg, then the outlook was surely dire.

But it seemed only fair to give the programme time to settle down, so I left it for a couple of weeks and then tuned in again. And what was the first thing I saw? Several minutes of trite, self-indulgent banter between the three gibbering hosts and youthful New York correspondent Jack Tame, TVNZ’s boy wonder, who had purportedly been named in a Valentine’s Day survey – about which I would be deeply sceptical – as New Zealand’s sexiest male media personality.

Only people employed in the self-absorbed world of television could assume anyone else shared their delighted fascination with this morsel of non-information.

I can only conclude everyone associated with this show has a death wish. Seven Sharp is so lightweight it threatens to float away.

Its attempt to woo a young audience, as evidenced by the quirky graphics and links with online social media, is symptomatic of a strange madness gripping the entire media industry.

Everyone in the media and the associated advertising business is obsessed with the cult of youth. It doesn’t seem to matter that TV One’s traditional, core audience consists of older viewers, or that the youth market actually isn’t all that interested in watching free-to-air television at 7pm.

The state-owned TV network (and please remind me why the taxpayers still own an organisation that has long since abandoned any sense of public obligation) seems determined to drive off its loyal, long-term viewers in the hope of securing a younger, “cooler” audience.

It’s well on the way to achieving the first of those objectives, but the second may not be so easy.

* * *

ONE intriguing aspect of the Novopay fiasco is that the government has gifted the teachers’ unions with a significant propaganda victory.

For years governments have fought the PPTA and NZEI for control of the education sector. It’s a battle that shouldn’t be necessary, of course, because we elect governments, not unions, to decide education policy; but a combination of weak politicians and arrogant unions meant the teachers often had the upper hand, defying and even sabotaging attempts at reform for reasons that usually had more to do with self-interest than with the quality of education.

Since 2008, however, there have been signs that the balance of power in education is shifting back where it belongs. Under a less teacher-friendly government, the unions have struggled harder to get traction.

Then along came Novopay, and suddenly public sympathy swung back the teachers’ way.

Whatever else might be said about teachers, they are entitled to be paid. Yet far from throwing tantrums over the disruption and inconvenience of recent weeks, they have behaved with admirable restraint – and no doubt earned brownie points from the public along the way. Unions have gone on strike with far less provocation.

No government could defend the chaos over teachers’ pay, still less the incompetence of the company to which the payroll contract was awarded, apparently in the face of pointed warnings about Novopay’s shortcomings.

The upshot is that the National-led government has surrendered the moral high ground to the teachers just when it seemed on the verge of subduing them. Nice work, chaps.

* * *

IT’S A PHRASE you see all the time in advertisements and newspaper articles, but there are few words in the English language more meaningless than “award-winning”.

Whether it’s an award-winning house, restaurant, book, wine or film, all the phrase tells you is that someone has at some stage decided it was the best of a bunch.

But often we don’t know who that “someone” was and who the other contenders were (or how many). So we lack the vital context in which to make an informed judgment about the award’s merit. An extreme example would be an award given to the best kosher restaurant in Woodville.

Anyway, all such decisions are ultimately subjective. And who knows what personal prejudices the judge or judges may have brought to bear?

I have been a judge in various awards myself and know how flawed the judging process can be, even when the organisers go to great lengths to make it as fair and objective as possible. Suffice it to say that, to paraphrase Groucho Marx, I wouldn’t want to win any competition in which I had been a judge.

John Key and that gay red jersey

(First published in the Dominion Post, November 16.)

ACUTE sensitivity disorder has gripped the nation again. The latest outbreak was touched off by prime minister John Key’s comment that a radio interviewer’s red jersey looked a bit “gay”. As predictably as Pavlov’s dogs learned to salivate at the sound of a bell, the gay lobby rose up in anger.

Protesters labelled it a slur against gays and took to the streets wearing red tops as a gesture of solidarity with the oppressed. Sir Ian McKellen, perhaps mistakenly thinking his on-screen aura of Gandalfian wisdom has somehow carried over into real life, went online to register his dismay.

I suspect most New Zealanders would have viewed the fuss with an air of worldly resignation. They have become well-accustomed to minority groups rearing up on their hind legs at every imagined slight.

If the gay rights lobby is to be believed, Mr Key’s statement was likely to excite prejudice against gay men. But what’s more likely to generate a backlash is the fuss gay activists make every time someone says anything that might be construed, however tenuously, as an attack on them.  

In many people’s eyes, it reinforces the impression – am I allowed to say this? – that they are a bit precious.

We live in a robust, liberal democracy. People say things every day that could cause upset if the maligned parties were of a mind to take offence. Most of us manage to ignore it and get on with life.

In Mr Key’s case, he was merely making an attempt to sound blokey in order to connect with that radio programme’s predominantly male, rural audience.

Politicians do this all the time, possibly without even realising it. I remember years ago hearing Helen Clark being interviewed on a youth-oriented radio station in Auckland. It was a different Helen Clark than I’d ever heard before: both her manner of speaking and the language she used were obviously calculated to communicate with that particular audience.

No one can seriously accuse Mr Key of being anti-gay. How quickly his critics forget that he has ingratiated himself with gay men too – for example, by speaking at the Big Gay Out rally in Auckland last February and posing for photographs with transvestites and bare-chested gay men.

That’s what politicians do: pander to whichever group they happen to be addressing at the time. But surely there are far worse things a prime minister could be accused of than trying to be one of the boys.

* * *

DEAR ME. The Labour Party’s problems are graver than I thought.

At the party’s annual conference on Sunday, leader David Shearer will deliver a speech that is being treated as a make-or-break moment. Many in the party are unhappy with his performance and will look to his address for a sign one way or another: either he can galvanise Labour with an inspirational, visionary speech or he becomes a footnote in the party’s history.

Trying to shore up his credentials in an article published in this paper last week, Mr Shearer was reported as saying: “I believe I have very strong views. I am very value-driven as a politician.” He went on to say he had lived the values of “opportunity, fairness and giving people a fair go”.

Really? Is that the best he can do? He “believes” he has strong views? Is he waiting for confirmation from someone else? Such equivocal language is likely to reinforce rather than counteract suspicions about his lack of fire.

And how strikingly unoriginal to say he believes in “fairness” and a “fair go”. Show me a politician who doesn’t profess to believe in a fair go. It’s probably the most shop-soiled cliché in the politician’s lexicon.

Mr Shearer’s comments ahead of his speech hardly seem likely to create a sense of feverish anticipation. But then, are his prospective rivals any more promising?

The Listener recently published a profile of another Labour Party David, the ambitious David Cunliffe, and it seems he too has trouble breaking out of the cliché trap. In his own words, he has certain ideals and values “and they are about fairness, about equity, about opportunity and it’s good old Kiwi stuff, you know”.

Wow. There’s fresh thinking for you. Isn’t there anyone in the Labour hierarchy capable of elevating the political dialogue above the level of a 1960s bumper-sticker?

* * *

I WAS ASTONISHED recently to see a BBC correspondent named Jeremy Bowen reporting from the Middle East on One News.

How did this bloke ever get on television? He’s male, for a start, and he’s more than 50 years old – a veritable fossil. He’s got thinning grey hair and an unfashionable moustache. Doesn’t the BBC have any respect for its viewers?

Then there’s Orla Guerin, another BBC reporter who keeps popping up in world trouble spots. At least she’s female, but come on – she’s 46 years old!

What’s more, she doesn’t seem to care too much about her appearance. She doesn’t even wear makeup. Can’t they find her a backroom job somewhere?

How much nicer to see the pretty young things TVNZ and TV3 employ. Thank God our own broadcasters still strive to maintain some sort of basic standard, even if the Beeb doesn’t.  

Jack Tame: a recantation

Several times, in newspaper columns and in this blog, I have mocked TVNZ reporter Jack Tame as a lightweight, chosen for accelerated promotion through the newsroom hierarchy on account of his cute telegenic appeal rather than journalistic ability.

Well, today I formally recant.

The boy wonder, as I like to call him, was recently posted to New York as TVNZ's correspondent in America. And over the past week, in particular, he has proved himself up to the job.

His coverage of super storm Sandy was first-class. Like all good reporters, Tame thrives on big stories. He was popping up all over New York - rather like a jack-in-the-box, if you'll pardon the pun - and seemed to be on the job around the clock.

He segued from Sandy into another demanding assignment, the presidential election, and did a similarly impressive job. He still has that puppyish enthusiasm (and that grating Kiwi accent), but he reports with clarity and authority. He's relaxed on camera and ad libs fluently.

Now, if he could just work on that voice ....

Mary Poppins and the debasement of journalism

Radio New Zealand's Mediawatch quite rightly gave TVNZ a serve yesterday for the way it has shamelessly promoted the Disney stage musical Mary Poppins, now running in Auckland.

Prompted by an email from a Southland listener intrigued by the fact that TV2 chose to screen the 1964 movie version of Mary Poppins on the very same night the stage show opened at the Civic Theatre in Queen St, Mediawatch compiled a damning dossier that revealed TVNZ had assiduously been plugging the show since June.

Among other things, it revealed:

■ A "news" item on One News in June announced that the musical was coming to Auckland and helpfully told viewers when tickets would go on sale. Does TVNZ routinely do this whenever a big stage musical is coming to New Zealand, or was this a case of One News editors being instructed to include the item for commercial reasons? If the latter, as I suspect, it's a debasement of journalism - not that this would worry the people who pull the strings at TVNZ, and who probably regard the 6 pm news as just another marketing opportunity. (I mean, why run an expensive news bulletin if you can't take commercial advantage of it?)

■ Close Up carried an interview by boy wonder US correspondent Jack Tame with the male star of the show's Broadway production.

■ When Mary Poppins opened in Los Angeles, Breakfast's Rawdon Christie was flown over to interview the stars of the show.

■ As if that weren't enough, when the musical opened in Australia, Christie was dispatched again to interview the male lead (to whom he addressed such searching questions as: "What was the hardest bit?") If Christie wants to be taken seriously as a journalist, as I think he does, he would refuse to demean himself by indulging in this tawdry hucksterism. 

After all this buildup, TV2 played its part not only by screening the movie starring Julie Andrews and Dick Van Dyke, but preceded it with a documentary about the making of the stage version that was having its premiere in Auckland that night.

Coincidence? Absolutely, insists TVNZ. It was simply taking advantage of the school holidays and the "enormous" interest in the stage show - interest largely whipped up by the state broadcaster itself. It sounded indignant at the hurtful suggestion that its programming decisions might be influenced by outsiders. "Our scheduling is sovereign," it huffed.

You can decide for yourself how credible its denial is. But at least Mediawatch extracted the acknowledgement that TVNZ has a long-standing commercial arrangement with Disney that gives it rights to screen the American producer's films and programmes.

Now, Disney may make billions out of films featuring cute, cuddly animals, but it's not noted for sentimentality in its business dealings, so it probably has certain expectations of the TV networks to which it sells those rights. And it's probably not unreasonable to infer that Disney leaned on TVNZ to ensure Mary Poppins received a gushing buildup in New Zealand courtesy of the taxpayer-owned network, in which case it should be well satisfied with the outcome.

A few questions:

Did it occur to TVNZ to disclose its relationship with Disney when it bombarded viewers with promotional fluff masquerading as journalism? Of course not. What a quaint question.

Does One News subscribe to the long-standing principle that journalism shouldn't be influenced by commercial considerations, or has that now gone by the board?

Does TVNZ care that any reputation it still enjoys for the integrity of its news bulletins might be at risk? I would hope that among the organisation's journalists, at least, there remains some commitment to ethical practice. But Breakfast obviously no longer considers itself bound by the principles of good journalism (as Mediawatch pointed out, it's currently spruiking Tip Top ice cream), and it seems the boundaries are becoming dangerously blurred on Close Up and One News as well.

I also noted that One News  obligingly played along with the recent visit to Auckland by actress Eva Longoria, here to promote the new Shopping Channel, humouring her control-freak PR handlers by taking a mystery bus ride to a top-secret location to meet her (it turned out to be the Langham Hotel - who would have guessed?) and meekly complying with conditions dictating how many questions they could ask, and about what. This isn't news, it's promotional fluff; but tragically, PR firms acting for people such as Longoria  can be confident that the celebrity-obsessed media will go along with their pantomimes.

And to be fair, this isn't just true of TVNZ, although the state broadcaster is arguably the most egregious offender (and being supposedly a public broadcaster, has the strongest reason for remaining aloof from commercial contamination). As Mediawatch pointed out, Fairfax's Sunday Star-Times bought into the Mary Poppins malarkey too, though not nearly so brazenly, and it's impossible not to note the increasing frequency with which print media are compromising themselves by entering into commercial arrangements, such as competitions and special offers, which encroach on once-sacrosanct editorial space.

Once again we seem to be indulging in the old New Zealand habit of veering from one extreme to another. It wasn't so long ago that newspaper journalists zealously avoided any reference to a company or brand name, regardless of its news relevance, for fear that it might confer some commercial advantage. Journalists' Union representatives took it upon themselves to police the news columns to ensure no story mentioned Air New Zealand, or Dominion Breweries, or the local family-owned hardware business (unless, that is, the story portrayed them in an unfavourable light, in which case naming them was deemed acceptable - funny, that).

We are well rid of that ideological mindset, which was donkey-like both in its stubbornness and its irrationality.  But the accelerating trend now apparent, whereby "news" is subverted by commercial considerations, is potentially far more dangerous.