The fourth estate within a democracy has a sacred obligation to hold the powerful to account so that citizens are aware of wrong doing and broken promises come election time.
Without this feature, citizens vote blind and corrupt governments rule.
How can that responsibility to be the fourth estate keep citizens informed if voters have retreated into social media echo chambers and believe unchallenged conspiracy theories?
The only reason the RNZ-TVNZ merger is gaining traction is because top echelons of the power matrix in NZ have realised the ease with which the electorate can be manipulated via social media.
In the age of the deep fake and troll bot farms, a multi-platform source of journalism you can trust has become essential to a democracy.
The New Zealand Broadcasting Agency (the RNZ-TVNZ merger) is being considered as a national interest.
The TVNZ/RNZ merger idea would see:
- TV One going commercial free (leaving MediaWorks commercial breathing space), and becoming far more public service orientated.
- TV 2 and Duke staying as a commercial entity.
- RNZ staying as it is commercial free.
- Concert FM staying as it is.
- Expanded news room to enable a 24 hour news channel utilising +1 channels on Freeview and Sky.
- Becoming a multi onine-platform for voices that are ignored by the mainstream.
This will cost around $100m+ per year but the National Interest reality of it will force Grant Robertson to open the cheque book.
Right now as a culture and as a society we have this yawning chasm of alternative facts and opinion replacing truth at an unprecedented rate. Public Broadcasting is no longer a nice to have, it’s become a desperate antidote to a free market media environment which has increasingly created a landscape open to obscene manipulation and makes basic social policy almost impossible.
The New Zealand Broadcasting Agency is a solution to this problem.
Whatever NZ Inc wants it will largely get. The public have been duped by Labour in this area three times in the last forty years, so not much hope this time.
“Top Echelons of NZ”?? I’d love some names for that.
I guess getting back to the situation where all we have to worry about is that the media defends the status quo rather than doing it’s job is an advance but it shows how far we have fallen that this is considered an aspiration.
Of course something that might have come out of an abused and distrusted media landscape is that people learn to use their own judgement – it could take a while but I refuse to believe that the social media swamp will send us forever downhill to a place we’d never escape from. History shows that people eventually figure out they’ve been duped. It can be messy getting there but if it didn’t happen we will still be living in the dark ages with a King who rules over all and was not subject to his own laws.
If the $100 million was proposed as a gift for impoverished rich people, to go towards the America’s Cup or, say, a Peter Jackson Museum, it would be seen by government as a bargain-basement no-brainer. Somehow, when democracy’s at stake, not on your life.
Something has got too change.
Listening to radio jocks pontificating about Prince Andrews interview and giving their opinion on his guilt or innocence scrapes the bottom of the barrel.
This particular station is supposed to be playing music not wittering on about did he didnt he.
Makes a change from the rugby i suppose.
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