Recent Posts...
Page 28 of 266
Archive
New Year Blog | Dec 29, 2003 10:59
For a town that has noticeably emptied out for the holidays, Auckland does seem to be offering rather a lot of New Year's Eve action. Me, I'm booked for a grown-up's evening at home, with the option of a dart up to Ponsonby Road later on if things get frisky.
New Year's Eve dance parties don't appeal the way they used to. I have very fond memories of Phase II's 'Reachin'' heralding midnight at the Brixton Academy, 1989-90, but these days navigating around piles of out-of-it 18 year-olds doesn't seem so attractive.
Any sort of frolicking is contingent, however, on dispelling a festive season attack of the gout. Yes, I should have seen it coming and I should have curbed my instinct for December merriment. And I shouldn't have given my dodgy foot such a pounding on Christmas Day, showing the kids how to do a lay-up on the freestanding basketball goal we bought them. And then again on Boxing Day, boogie-boarding at Piha and running around the beach like a demented terrier throwing a Frisbee into the north-westerly and catching it again. Yes, I know that.
Still, any excuse to lie on the couch and watch test cricket. The contrast between the contemporaneous tests in Melbourne and Wellington is interesting. Melbourne - as cricket usually does in Australia - feels like history: a huge crowd, huge innings and all the tradition of the Boxing Day test at the MCG. (I'm not a Paul Kelly fan, but I do love Behind the Bowler's Arm.)
Wellington has been, well, Wellington: the dominant environmental factor throughout New Zealand's game against Pakistan has been a classic northerly wind. The crowds are smaller, the achievements quieter: Richardson grinds his way to 82, while Ponting plunders 257.
But it wasn't all that way. Australia could have done with Ian Butler, who took six Pakistani wickets, five of them in his blistering spell with the second new ball. For all that the Australian commentators love to talk him up, Brett Lee had India two down and miles behind, with Ganguly shuffled up the order and batting like he was on drugs, seven overs till stumps …and he basically bowled like a chump. Quite good, really.
Less happily, the devastation in Bam is quite unfathomable. I find it hard to get my head around a predicted 40,000 people dying in a single incident. I've been reading some Iranian blogs, of which there are many. Many of them are written in Persian - Persian is the third most popular language for weblogs in the world - but quite a few of their authors, mindful of a western audience, are also beginning to translate their posts in English. They vary widely in character, political orientation and literary merit. This is what the Internet is for. I touched on this in my current Listener column, about the World Summit on the Information Society.
This story from July 2002 looks at the start of the Persian blogging phenomenon, and offers some insight into what a contradictory nation Iran is: the mullahs fending off liberal elected representatives; newspapers being shut down but a dynamic Internet culture; women behind the veil but making up 60% of university enrolments.
With this much to lose, and the shambles in Iraq, you would hope that the neocons have given up their fantasies about invading Iran "next". Rumsfeld doesn't appear to have publicly mused on the subject lately.
Speaking of the evil one, the non-profit National Security Archive has plucked some newly declassified documents which cast a lot of light on exactly what Rummy said to Saddam when he went to meet the Iraq dictator on the US government's behalf in 1984. Despite the fact that the Reagan administration knew Saddam was making "almost daily" use of chemical weapons against Iranians and Kurdish rebels, Rumsfeld was sent to convey the message that that he could still be America's friend. The New York Times has a story. The archive has also recently obtained documents showing how Kissinger gave the personal thumbs-up to the Argentinian generals' terror campaign against their political opponents in 1976, and how Bechtel, recipient of billions of taxpayer dollars in the new Iraq, threatened to evade economic sanctions against Iraq after Saddam's use of chemical weapons against the Kurds finally became an issue in 1988.
All this, you must understand, was necessary in the interests of the big picture at the time.
PS: Feel free to read Damian's most recent post and share the indignation. These people (and their imaginary friends) need to have a little bit of a think about their behaviour here. One would think that they're skating on thin ice.
Thwack | Dec 23, 2003 12:02
Of the things that warmed my heart this past weekend, none was toastier than the sight of Daniel Vettori making his maiden test century in front of a home crowd in Hamilton.
He still displays the odd goony-bird flourish, but the shots he played on the way to 137 not out on Saturday had purpose and authority. Many of them were orthodox, a few were pleasingly unusual: twice, he managed to scramble around deliveries pitched outside his off stump and crack them through mid-on for four. It was good to watch.
We waited until he'd made his ton before we went out to a barbecue that proved to be top value. There were a few expats back for Christmas; in some ways more receptive to and interested in New Zealand's virtues than full-time residents. They were quite interested in the housing boom.
On Sunday morning, we all went along to see The Return of the King. I'll refrain from reviewing it - everyone else has - save to say that I liked it a lot. Apart from this one from the Taipei Times, which takes issue with the treatment of the story, most of the bad reviews seem to focus on what are really problems with Tolkein's source text.
I read the trilogy years ago, and have no wish to do so again, especially after reading the odd passage out loud to the kids and finding it not unlike jogging through porridge. I find the Harry Potter books hard going too: good yarns with onerous sentences, I guess. I was inclined to go with The Guardian reviewer's verdict:
With enormous energy and a passionately exacting eye for detail, Jackson has made the regressive-romantic legend live again. He has given the Tolkien myth a turbo-charged rush into the 21st century. It's tripe. But he's made it mind-blowing tripe.
Anyway, the Herald has a poll showing growing - but still limited - public support for Ahmed Zaoui. And Steven Price had an excellent comment on Mediawatch showing just how far that paper has moved since it started out describing Zaoui as "a terrorist on the run with links to sinister organisations". In handing out stern editorial lectures to the SIS, the Herald ought to have noted its own role in peddling unfounded sensation.
Still, I'm not inclined to bash the Herald. It still seems the most substantial of the big papers (even when it's pinching "exclusives" from The Independent), and the Weekend Herald's Review & World section has been consistently the best few pages of newsprint in the country.
There's clearly no doubt that war in Iraq was the year's big story. I frequently wonder how history will see this. The summary jettisoning of the original basis for war - the unconventional weapons that it appears do not exist - is startling enough now. How will it look in a couple of decades?
We do not, after all, always get a proper picture of these matters at the time they are unfolding. There's a useful reminder here of what was officially said and done while Saddam was committing the worst of his atrocities, and of who was unsuccessfully raising the alarm at the time: those pesky lefties and liberals.
It would be foolish to deny that Iraqis are well rid of their despot, and that his capture has changed things. But there has been remarkably little Western coverage to reflect the tone of what's coming out in weblogs. Did we really wage war and sacrifice lives so we could arrest children in their classrooms because they had been seen on protest marches? Raed noted the official high school kidnappings and said: "Too many things happening the last couple of days, it looks that the capture of Saddam started something."
Riverbend has more on the story, plus buying gas on the black market, the new coalition-approved militias, and the general weirdness where she lives:
These last few days have been truly frightening. The air in Baghdad feels charged in a way that scares me. Everyone can feel the tension and it has been a strain on the nerves. It's not so much what's been going on in the streets- riots, shootings, bombings and raids- but it's the possibility of what may lie ahead. We've been keeping the kids home from school, and my cousin's wife learned that many parents were doing the same- especially the parents who need to drive their kids to school.
We've been avoiding discussing the possibilities of this last week's developments… the rioting and violence. We don't often talk about the possibility of civil war because conferring about it somehow makes it more of a reality. When we do talk about it, it's usually done in hushed tones with an overhanging air of consternation. Is it possible? Will it happen?
New Zealander Gordon Sloan, blogging from Baghdad, has more hairy tales, including an encounter with a psycho:
This place is mad. There is every type of psycho, and urban myths are real. Yesterday we attracted another stalker. Chatting pro-Saddam shit he followed us to the hotel, convinced the staff we were friends then came to talk to us about how Americans should have their heads cut off and drowned in the river and that Saddam was good and never did a bad thing. It's quite hard to tell gun-packing psychos to piss off without hurting their feelings then getting killed.
Editor & Publisher's Greg Mitchell looks at the latest document linking Saddam to al Qaeda - given the credulous treatment by the Sunday Telegraph and hailed as conclusive proof by the usual cheerleaders. Conclusion? Bogus: impossible to square with known facts about Mohammad Atta's movements and handily provided to the Telegraph's reporter by a "senior member" of the Iraqi Governing Council. The reporter admitted to Newsweek that he had no way of verifying the document, but wrote the story anyway.
The number of Americans who believe - absent all evidence - that Saddam was "personally involved" in the September 11 attacks is rising again - up from 43% in the last Gallup poll to 53% this month. At what point do people become culpable for their own gullibility?
If truth is a currency, then there have been many counterfeit notes this year. The thing is, I don't dismiss the idea that more powerful nations might eventually be called on to relieve a sovereign nation of tyranny, or to cut off a genuine threat to mass security. But the way this war has been developed and prosecuted - all the shifting rationales, ideological blindness, lies and refusals to truly account for human cost - ought to disturb anyone.
Anyway, this is my last blog before Christmas, but they'll turn up periodically through to the end of January. There won't be so many posts to the mailing list.
It's been an extraordinary year for Public Address, and I'm grateful to everyone involved, including you, the readers. Please accept my annual blanket apology for not replying to an email you might have sent. Sometimes I just get communication fatigue.
But enough of that for now. The bad world is a pleasingly long distance away, and it's summer in New Zealand. The thwack of leather on willow, boogie boards at the beach, a cold beer out on the deck. I truly love it.
A good night out | Dec 19, 2003 11:01
So I gatecrash this going-off Christmas party and I've been there five minutes when Hugh Sundae rides in on a Segway. I've never seen one before. "You should have a turn," someone says. Just show me the way, I say.
Turns out the chap from Segwayhire.co.nz is nearby with two machines to play on. "Now, just think about leaning forward," he says. The Segway rolls slowly forward. "Now think about leaning back." The Segway rolls back, staying upright as it does so. I'm off. It's cool.
The only thing I have any problem with is the steering on the left handgrip; I turn the wrong way a couple of times. I take it fairly quietly, figuring I'll save the speed trial for when I'm sober and it's daylight, but by the time I've done a few laps of the car park, powered by my own momentum, I'm exhilarated. I'm not quite sure what enduring benefit the Segway will eventually bestow on humanity, but it's certainly good fun for parties.
"Do people ever just freeze and ride into walls or something?" I ask as I dismount.
"Oh yes," says the Segway man. "Oh yes."
Inside, Open Souls are playing soul-inflected hip-hop and later on, Scribe, who's been milling around, briefly gets up with them to freestyle. People dance. The party has a hip-hop theme, which one woman has interpreted by wearing nothing but a bikini stuffed with banknotes. She seems happy. I meet the host, Simon Hakaraia, founder of dot.ink, who has gone for the gold chain look. We talk about Jello Biafra and stuff until it's time to move on to the King's Arms.
Sleepers Union are playing. They're in a real Flying Nun tradition; they tease out a kind of sweet, psychedelic drone that ebbs and flows. I'm hypnotised by them.
I wait around for the Tokey Tones but I can't last all of their set: it's nearly 1.30am and I have a little bit of work to do in the morning before I'm all done for Christmas. Why are gigs so late these days? Back when Muldoon was Prime Minister, you could go and see two bands play at a pub and still get home in time for the late news. Bah, grumble, babysitters, etc …
If you wanted to go out after 11pm, you had to suss out the parties, a tradition immortalised in Mainly Spaniards' bittersweet Nun 45 'That's What Friends Are For' ("We'll find out where all the parties are/We'll go outside and we'll sit in the car"). Oh yes, we made our own fun back then. Bah, grumble, etc.
Anyway, that's me pretty much done on the paying work for 2003. I've certainly had worse Decembers. I think I'm going to lie down and read the new Vanity Fair now.
Oh God, she's quoting Nietzsche now. Wounded but unbowed by her critics, and so on. Well, one doesn't want to get all Brian Edwards about these things, so I'll pass on further debate on the Coddington report, I think. But how odd …
Seriousness | Dec 18, 2003 12:27
When he's bad, Holmes can be awful. When he's good, as he was during last night's Holmes show discussion on the foreshore proposal, he's a useful citizen. There was a sense of seriousness not always present in that programme, and that was good.
That sense of seriousness was doubtless enhanced by the government finally getting its presentation right. The advance release of briefing papers, then yesterday's policy lock-up tended to crowd out trivia and bickering. It helped also that there were many more answers available than there were in the wake of the original, slightly panicky announcement that the beaches would be public domain.
The New Zealand Herald - itself pretty skitterish after the original Court of Appeal decision - seems to have a reasonable take on the issue in today's editorial.
I can live with this, easily, and I can understand why many Maori might be angry as hell. Responding to an inconvenient court decision by simply changing the law will never really be wholly acceptable. But it's a decision that is not only about Maori but about all of us. We have gone along, defining ourselves by the land, assuming that the coastline was common to all of us, only to discover our assumptions were themselves founded in sand. Well, now we know, mostly.
What does puzzle me a little is the fiery objection from Margaret Mutu and others to having Parliament define their customary rights when what they have been deprived of is the opportunity to ask another branch of the state, the courts, to do just that. Iwi can assume rights, but they had not, and may not have been, assigned those rights by due process. It is the due process that they have lost - or, rather had summarily replaced with another process - and not necessarily their rights.
What remains to be seen is whether political support will be forthcoming. United Future will support the proposal in Parliament, but that won't be enough if Tariana Turia and Nanaia Mahuta vote against it, which puts the Greens in an interesting position.
Whatever their sympathy for iwi, if the Greens vote against the plan, they will be rejecting a universal protection of the coastlines, and a guarantee of limited customary rights, that has not before been present in our law. Support for a no vote may not, indeed, be very strong within the Greens' support base.
Bad timing department: after an internal police inquiry had found no fault with a high-speed chase that led to the death of an innocent girl, the Northland coroner Max Atkins yesterday decided otherwise. In theory, the chase might have been called off for safety reasons. In practice, he said, it was still on. Then, overnight, three people died in a chase in Auckland - officially 12 seconds after it had been abandoned. It's important not to lose sight of exactly who the bad guys are. But something about police practice - and the police's assessments of their own practice - is wrong here.
Useful reportage from Riverbend on Baghdad with Saddam in custody ("Things are very frightening these days in Baghdad. Going from one area to another is like going from one city to another- the feelings and emotions vary so drastically it feels like only a matter of time before we may see clashes... ") Dahr Jamail's diary on Electronic Iraq has a similar tone: however well rid Iraqis are of Saddam, their country seems still not quite far enough away from the brink of something awful.
But it's all okay, according to the man who coined the phrase "Axis of Evil" (and doesn't that seem a while ago?), former Bush speechwriter David Frum. It is, he declares, "becoming increasingly difficult to doubt that God wants President Bush re-elected." Perhaps Frum could prevail on God to stock the hospitals and get the power back on in Iraq too.
Non-essential US personnel being shipped out of Saudi Arabia. More terror on the horizon there, presumably.
Meanwhile, New Zealand in still apparently doing quite well shock. Four per cent GDP growth in the year to June, year to March 2004 revised up to 2.8%, etc. Bush really needs to ask God to intervene with the greenback, but until such time, it seems rude not to buy any consumer electronics. Yeah, I got an iPod and I really like it.
Speaking of music, The Smoking Gun has the documentation on that Jack White bar brawl. It's a Detroit thing.
And finally: trivial typing errors department: for two whole days my critique of the Coddington report referred to Jane Dunbar as "Jan". Ouch. Fixed now.
Oh, and I know who MediaCow is. I'm not inclined to outing, but I feel bound to say it casts a very interesting light on the Cow's OTT praise of Coddington's "superb" and "incredible" report.
We'll see | Dec 17, 2003 10:15
You can expect the respective judgements on the government's long-delayed proposal on the foreshore and seabed issue today to vary so widely as to create the impression that they are being ventured on completely different documents.
The different angles taken to the same briefing paper this morning by the Herald ("Maori appear to have won few major concessions …") and the Dominion Post ('New deal has more for Maori') have, one would think, effectively set the tone for the day.
The government's political problem is that whatever it does will inevitably leave lots of room for outrage at either end of the debate. Its task might be seen as one of expanding the middle and making the fringes as small as possible. We'll see.
Joe Atkinson plumbs a few more of the holes in Deborah Coddington's shambolic report alleging bias at National Radio. Among other things, he consults some actual research:
New Zealand Electoral Survey data on voter assessments of media bias during the last election show that, regardless of a respondent's party identity, National Radio coverage was consistently judged the least biased.
Between 85 and 74 per cent of partisans found no bias in public radio coverage, compared to the next least biased medium, TV3 (with 76 to 67 per cent).
But the killer figure for Coddington's analysis is that 75 per cent of Act supporters gave National Radio a clean bill of health on political bias, as compared to 68 per cent for TV3, 60 per cent for the "most-read newspaper" and 57 per cent for TV One. Indeed, 4 per cent of Act supporters thought National Radio was biased in their favour.
Still, the beleaguered Codders has at least two friends: Mediacow, which comes over all wounded on Coddington's behalf (feel free to go back and read my post from Monday and enjoy the strange spin applied to it by the Cow), and whoever is behind a new RadioNZbias blog, which, entertainingly, explains the research quoted by Atkinson thus: "He resorts to quoting public opinion of bias, which has been educated by a biased media."
This is very silly logic indeed - taken to its conclusion, it implies that we shouldn't even bother having elections. But even if we are all subject to creeping pro-interventionist mind control (where did I put my tinfoil hat?), that doesn't explain how Coddington has managed to devise conclusions which are perpendicularly opposite to those found in robust and professional research. It's not just that the public and Act voters generally didn't think National Radio was biased; it's that they thought it was more balanced than the Herald, TV3, and TV One.
On a mildly less daffy note, the vendor of a lollipop sucked by Orlando Bloom has been unable to achieve a satisfactory price for it on TradeMe and is now in negotiation with bidders. Thanks to Tom Semmens for the link.
The Guardian column looking at our experience with Ahmed Zaoui is here. Unfortunately, as can sometimes be the case with stories filed for the British papers by distant stringers, it's just a tad shallow.
Judith Tizard scored her own Slashdot thread, but it seems it was all a bit of a mistake.
PC World US gets on the e-voting beat.
Half the Net seems to have been churning with permutations of the more or less obvious since the welcome capture of Saddam. There seems little to add at the moment, bar two observations:
1. The White House has become quite good at lowering expectations. The US economy isn't quite as bad as it might have been (although Bush remains on target to be the first President since Herbert Hoover to have a net job loss over his four year term and the US deficit problem is truly ghastly); Iraq isn't quite as bad as it might have been (but still actually pretty bad), etc.
2. Iran's entirely justified proposal to bring its own war crimes charges against Saddam could get very embarrassing …
History pivots while we sleep | Dec 15, 2003 11:19
The thing that struck me is how different a weekend it could have been - if Saddam had somehow stayed safe in his hole and the terrorists had killed Musharaf.
Although it has inevitably been swamped by news of Saddam's capture, the Pakistani leader passing through 10 minutes before the bomb that had been set for him detonated is almost as a big a story. In a nation heaving with discontent, Musharraf, and virtually he alone, seems to stand in the way of darkness. This could have been a very ugly Monday.
As it is, the pictures are of Saddam, haggard and dirty like a tramp, being checked for parasites, having conspicuously failed to, as he promised, go out with guns blazing. His failure to die like an Arab leader should was clearly a disappointment to some of those spoken to by al-Jazeera. Salam Pax, on the other hand, sounded stunned and delighted when The Guardian got him on the phone.
Although this was the best possible news for the coalition, and for Iraqis hopeful of progress to peace and democracy, the absence of declarations of victory is prudent. The Iraqi insurgents don't appear to have been actively directed by Saddam, or motivated by a desire to return him to power, as this interview granted to Associated Press several days ago indicated:
A former Iraqi general who claims to be part of the insurgency against US troops says the guerrilla war around this Sunni Triangle city is being waged by small groups fighting on their own without direction from Saddam Hussein or others.
He and two other Samara men, who said they are in separate guerrilla units, insisted in interviews with The Associated Press that their fight isn't aimed at returning Saddam to power. They said it's about ending the US-led occupation and restoring Iraqi rule.
Then, of course, there was Newsweek's startling story last week about al-Qaeda's new focus on Iraq as the best place to kill Americans. Even as Saddam was being fetched from his hole, there was carnage west of Baghdad.
But destiny looms for one man at least: and as luck would have it, some sort of plan for justice was established only days before the former despot's capture: an open tribunal, run by and on behalf of Iraqis, where Saddam and his henchmen will be entitled to legal representation. And won't that be an interesting brief? The Reuters correspondent has looked at a few of the issues around the tribunal, including the application or otherwise of the death penalty.
Reports from members of the governing council who laid eyes on Saddam yesterday suggested that he remained defiant and unapologetic: those he had slaughtered by the thousand were but thieves and Iranian agents. Will he, in a final flourish, use the tribunal as a platform to try and embarrass his foreign captors?
And if he really has been spirited out of Iraq, where is he now?
Anyway, a few people have asked me about Deborah Coddington's "research" on bias at Radio New Zealand. I would point out this is not in any sense a response from Radio New Zealand, which may or may not be forthcoming, and probably won't. But given the extent to which, I, as the presenter of 24 minutes of National Radio per week, feature in it, some sort of personal response would seem to be appropriate.
For a start, Coddington needs to decide what her report is actually called. She heads it Saving Public Radio and then, on pages five and nine, calls it Supporting Public Radio. The report is plagued with mistakes and munged sentences. Sure, we've all had our trivial typing errors, but you'd think a document that sings its own praises as loudly as this one does would have been read more closely before it was launched.
Coddington's contention is that Radio New Zealand is biased against "pro-market" voices in favour of "pro-interventionist" ones. In making the argument she presents the majority of her facts out of context, apparently wilfully and sometimes ludicrously so. According to Coddington, Nine to Noon's commentator Murray Weatherston, is guilty of being "cited in a Green Party parliamentary speech responding to the 2001 Budget". (Jesus! Does the SIS know?) Yes, he was quoted: opposing the government's superannuation fund, in line with Act Party policy.
Another problem with taking all this in any way seriously as research is that Coddington has not only taken her own measurements throughout, but set her own benchmarks: she has defined "pro-market" so narrowly that not only does Weatherston, a financial planner, fail to make the grade, so does Rod Oram, one of the country's most prominent financial journalists. She gives the appearance of arguing less for diversity than for a fairly limited sector of interest.
A fair chunk of the report is dedicated to the show I present, Mediawatch: it's the only programme to warrant its own section. And I think Coddington is on rather shaky ground when she says "Mediawatch rarely reaches above shallow commenting or glib reporting of weekly media occurrences," given the shallowness of her own research. The only opinions from industry figures - Paul Thompson of the Press and Gavin Ellis at the Herald - are lifted (one credited, the other not) from Jane Dunbar's monograph, Can We talk about the News? and were expressed to Dunbar about 18 months ago (Coddington describes the Ellis comment as "recent"). Her other research is based very largely on information available on the Mediawatch website, which, unfortunately, contains only a portion of what we've done.
What's notable about Coddington's critical examples regarding myself is that almost none of them relate to something I've actually said or done in nearly three years of Mediawatch. Instead, she plucks a few sentences (or some cases, individual words) out of context from 12 years of Hard News. (And even then she gets it wrong. Hard News didn't exist as a weblog in 2000, and wouldn't do so for another two years. It was a radio comment slot whose script I posted to the Internet.) From it she divines that:
Brown does not appear to be well disposed to pro-market politicians or their messages.
Actually, I'd have Stephen Franks and Rodney Hide in my Parliament any day. They have their uses.
Although his prolific writing displays an effort on occasion to understand a pro-market perspective...
Stupid little hobbit that I am, I couldn't hope to understand it, but I do try...
...often it tends toward baser comments...
Perhaps it does. Hard News has been known to be pungent; more so in its years as a radio feature. Such is life online. I dare say you could find evidence to hang me for any number of things from a decade's archive of late-breaking Friday morning radio-rants. But I do wonder at Coddington's judgement in citing it as grounds for "revisiting the make-up of the team behind [Mediawatch]" in a report she has forwarded to the Radio New Zealand board.
As it turns out, in the course of several thousand words, she is able to cite one instance of alleged bias on my part on the show itself, and it is this:
Quite often, Mediawatch exhibits a subtle bias against commercial broadcasting (as opposed to public service broadcasting). One example of this bias was exhibited when the presenter interviewed a former commercial radio employee:
Newstalk's news operation comes from a public service background. Does what we've heard this week from Paul Holmes, and the general drift, suggest that it's moving away from that?
The comment, "what we've heard this week from Paul Holmes", was a reference to Holmes' widely-attacked comment on commercial radio that Kofi Annan was a "cheeky darkie". The underlying assumption the presenter is making is that such a comment would not be made on a public service broadcaster.
No, it probably wouldn't, and it hardly seems controversial to say so. But the point here is that Ron Sneddon, a former general manager at Newstalk ZB who now runs an ad agency, was on the show in part because he'd written an entertaining column weighing TRN's public broadcasting roots against the background of the Canwest team in the early commercial radio ventures. The context is right there on the page. She also fails to note that I subsequently suggested that commercial radio might have good reason to despise government, given the way it was stitched up by the government and the NZBC in the 1960s and 1970s.
Elsewhere, her arguments are confused and confusing. She says "no pro-market commentators are associated with Mediawatch", then that the presence of commentators like Lindsay Perigo (both an engaging interview and a pre-recorded comment on the show this year) provides variety, but "if the 'Comment' section is removed from analysis, Mediawatch is found to provide a lot less diversity." So if you don't count the diversity, there's a lot less, um, diversity.
She notes that there are "two other members of the Mediawatch team: a producer and a journalist. Neither has written as extensively as Brown and Frewen. While their CVs were taken into account for the subsequent analysis of depth of experience, there was not enough data to accurately establish their political viewpoints."
Goodness. Pompous and lazy! As anyone who knows anything about radio knows, the producer generally has more to do with the composition of a programme than anyone else. But apparently our producer's CV didn't provide enough "data" (oh, get over yourself, woman) for her "research" so that was it.
I don't so much mind being the subject of a hatchet job, but did it have to be so patronising? The sheer snottiness of Coddington's tone - apparently my skills are limited to infotech and "punditry" and I know nothing of business and lack "a perspective on other aspects of the media" - is remarkable.
Look, I've been writing for business audiences since 1996 and have won awards for doing so. I own my own business and have had a fiduciary responsibility at 95bFM for years. I also helped launch Unlimited magazine and have written for it ever since - they seem to find me competent there. Deborah Coddington, so far as I am aware, has never written for a business publication. (Update: Somebody did a search and discovered that she has written five stories for the NBR.)
As it happens, I do think a greater diversity of views - the best of all arguments - would be good for Radio New Zealand, but it's not necessarily easy to achieve in a Reithian organisation. It's much easier in commercial radio, where flagship programmes are routinely based around personalities. When you choose Leighton Smith, Tau Henare or Ian Wishart to host talkback you can be fairly sure of your ideological settings for the next two or three hours.
It would presumably be possible to air The Liberal Right Hour on National Radio, but to do so would be to risk politicising Radio New Zealand beyond all reason. Once you have the Act Party show, are you then obliged to devise a New Zealand First show, or the Green Party Gardening Hour? How do you measure the competing claims for philosophical airtime? If United Future dives in the polls, does that mean less Christianity on air next year? At what point do you bump out sector-based shows on the arts or sciences? Do you continue to go for the best talent available or institute an affirmative-action programme for candidates with what Coddington describes as the appropriate "pro-market philosophical framework"?
And how do you explain it all to a substantial existing audience that, according to research rather more reliable than Coddington's, doesn't particularly think anything's broken?
There is an argument that the solid, central Reithian voice is outmoded, that public broadcasting now should speak with many voices. That argument has some merit, but getting there from here would require deeper thought than is in evidence in Saving Public Radio - which, as I noted above, argues less for diversity than for the divine right of a narrowly-defined sector of interest.
I discussed this a bit over the weekend with David Cohen - the anointed saviour in so much conservative grumping about RNZ - who offered that:
Correspondents, expert contributors, and the voices used in bulletins are far more important than who crams the opinion slots. RNZ can broadcast anti-market, anti-US, wacky conspiracy opinions till the cows come home, and as it already does, and I won't really care. What concerns me a lot more is the quality of its news and information services.
To take one example from an area close to your heart: Why does nearly every British correspondent used on Nine Till Noon and the morning show always have to be from the liberal-left? Hey, I have nada against Guardian writers - theirs is my favorite British paper and it so happens that Patrick Ensor was my first-ever editor - but it puzzles me why RNZ can't follow even the BBC's example in using a spectrum of different journalistic voices. No actually, it's not puzzling at all; they don't do so because they're provincial jerks with that hideous NZ attitude of always presuming to know what's best for listeners.
Or what about the coverage given to the Featherston girl who was murdered? If we're going to have the usual line up of dolts saying it was all about narcotics and the system breaking down then why not, say, have a born-again minister on to argue that it was because of ... I don't know, sin or something? Or a pro-capital punishment type to say it happened because there's no death penalty. (Or whatever.) That would seem fairer than only featuring the kinds of narratives that fit in with a young, do-gooding, secularly puritanical view of the world.
I don't agree with all of that, but Cohen had more that was useful to say in an email than Coddington managed in 10,000 words. A little ginger in the form of a report like hers ought to be a good thing. The Act Party ought to make an intellectual contribution. But Saving Public Radio is so ditsy, sloppy, capricious and nasty that it really doesn't contribute at all. I think I want my taxes back.
Page 28 of 266
Archive