The media elite scream the election debate was boring.
Not enough detail.
Not enough blood.
Too much civility.
The mostly white male privileged broadcasters cried out that we have been tricked into a no policy debate. Tim Watkins, Barry Soper, Mark Jennings and Toby Manhire, names no one should know, have all clambered aboard tsk tsking with the lack of real debate.
Really?
Compare the ratings for the TVNZ 2014 election debate between Hosking, Cunliffe and Key – 600 000 was their best audience.
How many tuned in to see Jacinda and Bill?
1, 100, 000.
Half a million more viewers would beg to differ with the cynical mainstream pundits who while sensing the change in public opinion can’t explain why it’s happening.
The pundits response?
Cynical bitching about a political phenomena their position of privileged can not comprehend.
More people are engaging with this election than ever before, half a million more viewers tells us something incredible is happening while the privileged pundits spit and fizz as they collide with their own limitations.
And you can bet that Jacinda brought them there, not Bill. If it had been anyone other than Jacinda it would have been the same figure as last time. Jacinda got half a million more people to watch the debate. That’s quite a statistic.
Jacinda = Political earthquake shift to new interest in politics.
ilovejacinda
Hehe… they’re out of touch…
It WAS a pretty dull debate though, to be fair. I didn’t bother with the last one either, but tuned into this one – but only to see if Jacinda could hold her own against the potential right-wing rhetoric of Hosking/English. And… she can. Easily.
I wonder if the TV3 debate tomorrow will garner the same sort of interest. Gower will almost certainly be less civil/professional than Hosking, so it might hold some morbid appeal for me on those grounds. I’d be surprised if Jacinda walks into a Gower “gotcha”, though, so I’m expecting mostly fizzers.
I agree that it was pretty light on detail. The whole program was only an hour long, so once take out all the pretty intro and outro graphics and the ad breaks, the whole debate was probably only half an hour. Not much three people can say in that time. The TV3 debate will be an extra half an hour, and both the moderator and the leaders will want to expand on the ground covered on the TVNZ debate.
That said, these US Presidential style debates between the legacy party leaders really annoy me. Like the polls, I think the prejudice the outcome. By featuring the leaders of two parties and excluding the others (or relegate them to a patronizing “minor” parties debate), both major TV networks are seeding the idea that only one of those two parties can form a government. I’d prefer to see a weekly series of debates running all year, each one on a specific area of policy, with reps from any registered party that wants to participate.
Hosking didn’t let them go for it he intervened too much unlike Sundays Q & A session with corrin dann. We need to see the real bill we are and have already seen the real Jacinda.
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