A woke government, served by a woke broadcaster, might just be persuaded to embark on a bold new broadcasting journey.
NOBODY HAS YET come up with a credible case for amalgamating Radio New Zealand and Television New Zealand. Even so, the merger proceeds apace, costing the taxpayer a ridiculous amount of money – to no good end. No one truly believes the quality of the broadcasting product will improve. The present audiences of both networks have longstanding gripes with the overall direction of their public broadcasters, but the response of those in charge has been to double-down on the very policies their audiences find most objectionable. With no clear rationale for the amalgamation of RNZ and TVNZ on offer, the cynicism of those who were formerly public broadcasting’s strongest defenders can only grow.
The pall of pessimism which has settled over those who still believe in the possibilities of public broadcasting has not been lifted by vague references to the need for a reliable source of public information. Citing the growing strength of the purveyors of misinformation and disinformation on social media, government mouthpieces have presented the new “entity” as the place where New Zealanders anxious to learn what’s really going on can go to for “the facts”. They are being encouraged to think of the new entity as a sort of beefed-up version of the Prime Minister’s infamous “podium of truth” during Covid.
God save us!
The newsrooms and current affairs production hubs of RNZ and TVNZ have become ideological monocultures. Senior executives, producers, journalists, technical staff and, seemingly, the entire workforce of the public broadcasters, subscribe to a single version of economic, political, social and cultural reality. A journalist wishing to put together a programme on the bitter divisions rending the women’s movement over transgender issues, for example, would not only be denied permission, she would be lucky to hold on to her job. The RNZ and TVNZ of today grow only a single crop. If you don’t like the taste of “Woke” – then you had better find an alternative menu of ideas.
Perhaps it is this complete indifference to the traditions of free inquiry and frank debate that enlivened the public broadcasters of yesteryear that explains the new entity.
At the summit of both RNZ and TVNZ sit people who despise the whole Reithian concept of broadcasting as a public service. It was the first Director General of the BBC, John Reith, who formulated the original three word mission-statement of Britain’s public broadcaster. The purpose of the BBC, said Reith was to “inform, educate, and entertain”.
For many years Reith’s formula underpinned the operations of publicly-owned radio and television in New Zealand. It could not, however, survive the onset of the neoliberal project in the mid-1980s. The latter reduced TVNZ to a commercial operation indistinguishable from those operating in the private sector. It’s job was to sell eyeballs to advertisers and to hell with “inform, educate, entertain”.
RNZ would likely have suffered a similar fate, had it not been so vociferously defended by its loyal listeners. Thwarted in their mission to simply wipe out RNZ, the neoliberals opted to starve it to death by refusing to fund it adequately. Committed to public service broadcasting, RNZ management and staff contrived to do more with less year after year. Ultimately, however, it was the government of the day that appointed the Board of RNZ, and the Board that appointed its CEO. Inevitably, the day came when the Reithian rear-guard was overwhelmed.
At the summit of RNZ, an idea took root that it was morally indefensible for public broadcasters to assume they knew better what the people of New Zealand needed than the people themselves. By this reckoning, RNZ was an educated, middle-class, Pakeha Baby-Boomer redoubt: an island of intellectual snobbery and unconscious bias in a sea of younger, browner, New Zealanders with very different values and tastes.
In the estimation of both the RNZ Board, and its CEO, the time had come for a mighty shake-up. Their first move was an attempt to downgrade and marginalise the Concert Programme and replace it with a youth-oriented network modelled on a hip, Black, New York radio-station. But, in what was very likely the last great public campaign to save Reithian radio, the supporters of the Concert Programme – led by former Prime Minister, Helen Clark, forced the RNZ Board and the CEO to put their plans on hold.
Not to worry, there is always more than one way to skin a cat. With the election of a majority Labour Government in late 2020, a pathway opened for those who wanted to radically remake RNZ. A woke government, served by a woke broadcaster, might just be persuaded to embark on a bold new broadcasting journey. By merging it with the brain-dead TVNZ, the cerebrally-vital RNZ would finally be in a position to ditch its elitist Boomer audience and show Aotearoa what Generations X, Y, and Z could do.
If this is what happened, then, obviously, the new state broadcasting entity will be run by the bright boys and girls at the top of RNZ. TVNZ really will become “radio with pictures”. Just how much informing, educating and entertaining will go on in the new, clumsily named, “Aotearoa-New Zealand Public Media” is anybody’s guess. By those Boomers who fought so hard for RNZ and its Reithian virtues, “F-Boy Island” is unlikely to be received as an adequate substitute for Kim Hill and Jim Mora.
so very true!
Watch channel 26 & you will be educated.
Fantasy channel for christian cultists wanting to intellectually cripple their watchers.
Nobody has yet come up with a credible reason for selling the local underclass to foreign people farmers, and yet here “we” are.
The new unified government channel could just play endless re-runs of Country Calendar. LOL
what is old is new again
LIVE NOT BY LIES – ALEXANDER SOLZHENITSYN
History indeed rhymes.
Why would increased funding of RNZ change its woke monoculture? For that matter why would turning TVNZ into an RNZ with video change its monoculture?
Thanks Chris, your article makes more sense, than the article on this matter yesterday.
We need more Ken Burns and less MasterChef. This merger will make it happen. This must be pushed thru at any cost.
Its the beginning of the end for Main Stream Media — few Kiwis totally believe in them…good riddance to bad rubbish, and their over paid talking heads
“..TVNZ really will become “radio with pictures”. ..”
The “National Programme” has its RWP trend as well ..
How about both Kim Hill and Jim Mora on “F Boy Island”?
Kim Hill is part of the woke monoculture. She has revealed she has a side in the gender ideology (no) debate, by referring to women who challenge things like self id as Terfs.
She reluctantly interviewed Kathleen Stock (a GC feminist) and gave a trigger warning before the interview that some people would find it offensive. Kathleen Stock, a Philosopher who was based at Sussex University, was articulate, have good arguments and there was nothing offensive about what she said.
I suppose you think being transgender is a sin, and that transgender people should be shunned and made to suffer until they repent and follow the true path of the dead Palestinian carpenter.
“gave a trigger warning before the interview that some people would find it offensive”
You need to understand Kim Hill is a master of sarcasm and irony, amongst other things.
What a stupid ignorant comment about Kim Hill, obviously you must have some strong winds blowing in that canyon between your ears.
How about explaining what exactly is “stupid” and “ignorant” about the comment? Would you care to enlighten us?
I think nothing like that at all Millsy. I think for the very small minority of people who have intense gender dysphoria life must be very hard.
My objection is to gender ideology which amongst other things see young teens being fast tracked onto puberty blockers that are not licenced for this condition. Kids with mental health problems going into internet chat rooms and being told transitioning will be the answer to all their problems. Then being on drugs and having surgery, such as double mastectomies as young as 16 years. If you really care about people with gender dysphoria, watch some of the videos of de transioners. This plus the shutting down of women who don’t want male bodied people in their spaces
Fair enough, but you have lined up alongside various figures of the Christian right — these people who want to put trans people in prison. And gay people. And ban abortion, birth control, and the rest of it.
How is whatI said stupid and ignorant? Not possible. Kim has referred to GC women as terfs (its a rather juvenile smear) and two Kim offered a trigger warning before Kathleen Stock.
@Anker ignore Millsy, he’s employing the woke rhetorical tactic of conflating trans ideology with trans identity group. Then casting any challenge to ideology as an attack on the group.
Most trans people have no interest in being a political football but trans activists use them as both human shield and battering ram for woke ideology.
You can say the same about any other woke domain (race, sex, sexuality etc).
you and Anker are the ones joining up with evangalicals to launch massive progroms against the LGBT community.
‘NOBODY HAS YET come up with a credible case for amalgamating Radio New Zealand and Television New Zealand’
Where have you been?You need to look at private media companies and understand the synergies,economies of scale and increased efficiencies that result from these …mergers!
ie Amalgamated it will be cheaper and nastier and more bombastic than otherwise, as long as it can reach an audience that is vaguely palatable to those who live by money, and will have us die by money, for the need of it, the lack of it, having it and throwing it away on momentary pleasures, gambling it away, our lifeblood in the materialist society, where we insert it where flowing human love has dried up, where some die from poverty of pocket as well as mind and soul,; dust to dust, ashes to ashes, without ever being awakened to our higher intelligence, our personal being of prodigy and sensitivity.
I don’t know why you think RNZ can ‘save’ TVNZ chris, it’s the voice of middle class karens
One of the two will either lift the standards of the other or, do the complete opposite.
It’s not looking good either way you look at it. But anyway. Who watches tv or conventional radio anymore? Very few people in the whole scheme of things.
The internet is where it’s at. Online everything and all kinds of flavours 24/7.
“Ideological monocultures”. Absolutely bang on.
There is still almost a non existent coverage of what is happening overseas with the closure of the Tavistock GIDS clnic due to safety concerns. And the changes being brought about as a result of Senior Paedeatrian Hilary Cass review. Puberty blockers not to be prescribed to younger adolesencent, then only prescribed if they are part of a rigourous ressearch study. Affirmation only for gender dysphoric teens is out the window.
I belive sweden — yup that’s right sweden has banned hormones/puberty blockers for children
I have not forgiven RNZ’s newsroom for their petty negativity on every effort of the team of 5million during the first two years of Covid. They elected to be the mouthpiece of small business, Chris Bishop and all things selfish. I have no faith that the merger will save these sinking ships.
An era of fiction being stronger than fact, and a lack of scepticism enabling a person to tell the difference. Judgment as in pronouncing a sentence for pronouncing a sentence in the non-aligned way is the norm. Incurious minds, settled in certainties by the myriad of thoughts both trivial or wickedly fallacious that surround like a swarm of biting insects, and while this was often the way for teenagers who would expand more as they grow older, now advance in adulthood in a far more restricted area, despite the long reach to knowledge that judicious on-line use of hoards of human thought can provide.
Life is true to the depiction of Lewis Carroll’s ‘Through the Looking Glass’ story or may be Alice’s story. We are flooded with images, talking heads, need short times for reflection each day – more than meditation. Perhaps city workers can eat their lunch in a Reflection grotto where there is some precept on the wall and after a moment everyone comments briefly on what thoughts have arisen from it, then repeat . It would be a positive experience amongst other adults. and help mental process for the rest of the day
Lewis Carroll and Shakespeare would not have produced the breadth and depth of their work if television had been around; instead their minds were free to snake out in all directions and their work was written, printed, and easily accessible to those who care to take note centuries later. I don’t think Disney creations will have the same long empowering effect on the brain.
These snippets of Lewis Carroll all have a punch. https://www.goodreads.com/author/quotes/8164.Lewis_Carroll
“When I use a word,’ Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, ‘it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.
’The question is,’ said Alice, ‘whether you can make words mean so many different things.’
’The question is,’ said Humpty Dumpty, ‘which is to be master — that’s all.”
― Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking Glass
https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/12608-when-i-use-a-word-humpty-dumpty-said-in-rather
(However Humpty D did fall and get broken so didn’t have all the answers or defences)
or
“But I don’t want to go among mad people,” Alice remarked.
“Oh, you can’t help that,” said the Cat: “we’re all mad here. I’m mad. You’re mad.”
“How do you know I’m mad?” said Alice.
“You must be,” said the Cat, “or you wouldn’t have come here.”
― Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland
(Is this where we’re at or aren’t?)
or
“Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?”
“That depends a good deal on where you want to get to.”
“I don’t much care where –”
“Then it doesn’t matter which way you go.”
― Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland
or
“have i gone mad?
I’m afraid so, but let me tell you something, the best people usually are.”
― Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland
and
“It’s no use going back to yesterday, because I was a different person then.”
― Lewis Carroll
(Let’s discuss that, we who still have sparking brain cells open to questioning and pondering.)
Is this another version of this old saying?
No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it’s not the same river and he’s not the same man.
Heraclitus 500 BCE : https://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/heraclitus_107157
“Imagination is the only weapon in the war against reality.”
― Lewis Carroll
Have the entities set up for government oversight of broadcasting – enough insight and stretch of mentality outside their walls to handle vivid, flickering imagination? Or is it to lead us to be ‘Another Brick in the Wall?’ Co-operative living or coercive minds and living – which we are already on our way to.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F_lG5uGGiZQ
Meh. I already wrote about this in 2019 with Die MSM, Die – The New Zealand edition, and I addressed some post you’d made at the time lamenting the lost world. But I did make this point:
Which is to say – and this is where I love hearing once again from Lefties about how it’s all down to corporate ownership – that the journalists don’t change. The large group of reporters that currently stick it to Right-wing ideas – which occasionally intersect with National Party policy – and mostly cover for the policy failures of Green-Labour, will happily shift to this new structure, where they’ll “report” exactly as they do now.
And of course I couldn’t miss this quote from you Chris:
TV3, by some unanticipated quirk of late-capitalist cultural logic displayed more creativity, innovation and independence than the ideologically straightjacketed TVNZ. For the past 30 years, the privately-owned TV3 network has, heroically and paradoxically, filled the vacuum created by the deliberate destruction of public service broadcasting in 1989.
Paradoxical. Great word that. Mysterious too.
” At the summit of both RNZ and TVNZ sit people who despise the whole Reithian concept of broadcasting as a public service ”
It is when you read a statement like that you realise the extent of the damage inflicted on all our public institutions by the neo liberal revolution.
Public service was once sacrosanct , expected and protected in the ” old ” New Zealand and I am still young enough to remember pre 1989.
The carnage has bought us to where we are today and like many others I am sceptical that we will ever recover what has been lost.
We reap what we voted for and of course the change was almost invisible over the last three decades as we embraced new technological advancement and no longer relied on the corporate media that was never going to educate and inform unless it served the masters of our economic system.
We already have censorship with the corporate media allowing a story about the desperate people in Rotorua who inhabit the motels and suffer as a result of market policies and long imposed austerity measures but it was just entertainment and feel good fodder for all those who are financially comfortable and will never have to experience the destitution and despair of so many of their countrymen and woman.
Braindead TVNZ who paid its CEO millions of dollars to keep it that way shows where the priority is with wonderful programs like F**k boy Island to not inform or educate but to entertain a small section of its diminishing audience.
I wonder what Reith would have made of today’s public broadcasting ?
TVNZ will drag RNZ down to TVNZ’s level.
RNZ will not move the dial in the other direction.
You all know this is true.
This cat is already well and truely skinned.
The subservience by radnz, to the rancid and racist anti-Russian NATO//BBCNN propaganda feeds; plus the complete avoidance of any investigative balance in the covid/VAERS/SAD numbers game, has landed this smelly and very dead cat, flat on the desk of JA., the sainted one.
Reithian … hmmmm. Might be apposite to call the new entwined couple, what an unattractive thought, Pythian! Talking to an older German woman friend, we both agreed that British humour that brought forth Monty P, was very good, almost infectious. And we both realised that in our dealings with the Swiss, we had found them very precise and careful but lacking in humour and joie de vivre?. On that note or word, we might get some laughs, probably inadvertent ones, from the Tranzit Lounge.