Concerns for public broadcasting as TVNZ propose more changes – E Tu
Workers at TVNZ have today been notified about an upcoming change process at TVNZ which union members are worried could lead to further job losses as the state-owned broadcaster.
Management have initiated this process with the claim they need to increase their annual earnings by $30m, by either increasing revenue or reducing costs.
Earlier this year, TVNZ cancelled significant news and current affairs offerings as a cost-saving measure. E tū Negotiation Specialist Michael wood says today’s development demonstrates a worrying trend at TVNZ.
“E tū members at TVNZ and across media have been campaigning hard to ‘Save our Stories’ so that New Zealanders continue to have access to media that informs and holds power to account,” Michael says.
“As such we are concerned that TVNZ is looking into further significant changes that could lead to even larger cuts than we have already seen.
“The good news is that because union members at TVNZ have successfully campaigned on this issue, and defended their rights in the Employment Court, there is now a proper process in place to have union members at the table and involved in discussion about possible change at a much earlier stage.
“We will be taking this process seriously. An ongoing move towards a digital future at TVNZ is a reality, however we will fight hard to ensure that as this change happens, TVNZ fulfils its obligations to New Zealanders by ensuring that it produces high quality content, by skilled and experienced media workers. TVNZ, and the Government as the sole shareholder, cannot and must not use this process to walk away from news and current affairs, and telling the stories that matter to New Zealand.”
Michael says that further cuts at TVNZ demonstrate the need for rapid Government intervention to save our media landscape.
“Decent journalism is an absolute necessity in a well-functioning democracy. That’s why TVNZ needs to be supported as a public broadcaster.
“It makes no sense to allow such a crucial tool for information and accountability to gradually wither away as the traditional commercial model for media becomes less financially sustainable in the digital age.
“TVNZ, and the wider media landscape, must be supported by the Government to thrive – and we should all be gravely concerned about a future where purely commercial interests dictate the way we conduct our public discourse.”
Just like TDB warned you, here come the Paywalls!
If you look at how hell bent this Government is on user pays and privatisation…
Bishop talks up value-capture & congestion charging
Bishop talks up value capture and congestion charging
Infrastructure, Housing and RMA Reform Minister Chris Bishop gave a major speech about infrastructure to Local Government New Zealand in Wellington on Friday, including:
talking up the use of value capture, congestion charging, water meters, tolling, and Public Private Partnerships (PPPs);
…the question has to be asked how soon Paul Goldsmith will start pushing for paywalls for TVNZ.
Paywalls are increasingly being used from the Democracy Project to all Newspapers and many media outlets meaning poor people don’t get access to public information which adds to their reliance on misinformation and disinformation.
TVNZ using Paywalls would be a means for National to argue people are showing their trust in TVNZ while providing a revenue stream.
National wants user pays to replace public funding, so why wouldn’t they try Paywalls on as a means to undermine accountability and do it cheaper.
The Paywalls are creating two classes of citizen, those with the money to see facts, those too poor and are reliant on lies.
The truth is behind a Paywall, the lies are for free.
The Democracy Project at Wellington University is the new dystopian information paywalled reality we now live in.
We need a new public broadcasting model or we will disintegrate as a democracy.
Less than 50% of revenue for American Newspaper in the 1800s was generated by advertising revenue, over 50% was subsidised from civic movements because media always needed subsidisation because of the importance of its role in shaping Democracy.
Readers were citizens needing informing, they weren’t just consumers.
I drop this note because the Reactionary Right always scream media should stand on its own when it never could.
We are a sparsely populated country on two huge Islands, we have always needed the State as the foundation upon which everything is built because the advertising model was never going to work here.
The market is broken with social media giants taking content and not paying for it while draining the exisiting advertising market.
TVNZ is being lined up for privatisation and paywalls.
At a time when disinformation and misinformation is rife and warping disgruntled citizens into foaming redneck Qanon antivax crackers, we need an information landscape better than paywalled elitism.
How to Save TVNZ and Public Broadcasting?
We need a mix of ideas:
Fund TVNZ 1 commercial free – If we can have commercial free radio, why not commercial free TV? By removing TV1 from the ratings you can focus more on quality public broadcasting that can critique the economic culture. Allow TV2 and Duke to be the advertising spaces.
NZ on Air ‘Read between the Flags’ Kiwi journalism – In a world of disinformation, we need journalism we can trust. We all get the ‘swim between the flag’ model of surf life saving, NZ on Air should be given extra funding for ‘Read between the flags’ Kiwi Journalism. This money is to ensure plurality of voice for independent media, Māori media, specific communities, news blogs and mainstream news media who become eligible if they agree to a set of Journalistic Principles. If you do agree and sign up, you are entitled to funding and must have a Kiwi Journalism flag on your site to show you are obliged to the Journalistic Principles Code of conduct.
You would have an awareness campaign to urge NZers to ‘read between the flags’ for trusted information.
Promoting Journalism in the Pacifc to counter other influences – I think one way NZ could uniquely promote its interests into the Pacific could be via Journalism. AUT run the excellent Pacific Media Centre to promote quality Journalism throughout the Pacific. What if NZ saw the promotion of quality Journalism as a craft throughout the Pacific as a strong way to counter corruption and external influence? Scholarships, Pacific News Media websites and support of local ethical journalism, these could be the pillars of promoting corruption free politics and holding those Governments to account. Promotion of Journalistic standards throughout the Pacific could counter external influences and promote NZs strategic interests.
Māori Media – Māori TV & Māori Radio need a baseline increase rather than extra budget for collaborations because the bigger players give very little back.
Unfortunately the Political Right want to keep you stupid and want to leash the fourth estate if not kill it off altogether.
Democracy dies in darkness and all National are doing is turning off the lights.
Even the poorest now have smartphones. No more information gatekeepers. TVNZ=Left operatives with bylines and increasingly not watched anyway, except by those aged 60+.
Do they always access accurate information on their smartphones? If you are willing to let ignorance be free while the truth is behind a paywall then you deserve whatever you get, you could look to the French Revolution for an example of a crowd going wild or the recent example in England where a crowd attacked a Mosque based on false information.
Bonnie – Does TVNZ have accurate information? Increasing it seems not to.
The “disinformation” argument was lost years ago. Look at the massive drop in public trust of the MSM across the West – and that was before the US version did their recent 180’s on Biden’s senility, just a few weeks after pushing the “Cheap Fakes” WH talking point.
I mean, that’s a separate problem from the question of how media is being consumed. The problem of idiotic counterjihad propaganda causing angry British people to attack a mosque, something the Rwandan who murdered those three girls would never have been near in his life, is a problem caused by allowing zionists to exist in a society. Solve that problem, disinformation problem solved.
Right wing operatives with bylines and increasingly not watched anyway, except by those aged 60+
Paid and bought to you by the business round table.
I made the mistake of watching breakfast the other day. What an embarrassing talentless shitshow.capped off when Daniel interviewed Hipkins and made the Freudian slip of referring to him as “our leader”.
The trouble with being completely partisan as the national broadcaster aside from the morality issue is half the country want to shut you down, and at some point they will.
And yet you have no issue watching Luxon. Hypocrite.
TVNZ is a tentacle of the abusers who exploit us, and always has been. The same can be said for RNZ which has long been lured into the deep dark woods. Remember goodbye to Kim Hill after she nailed dodgy as fuck *roger kerr’s arse to the floor? What we think of as our MSM who suck then swallows then vomits up toxic logical fallacies at the behest of the denizens of Remuera like the good little squeaky minions they are, is not ours at all. Remember when The Listener got neutered? Now it’s back as a third nipple on The Herald behaving as an ** Dose-responce word-laundering machine as exemplified by ferociously attacking the corrupt media only to achieve nothing other than telegraphing the message that resistance is futile and all The Herald had to do was gnaw at its own foot.
It was Martyn Bradbury on RNZ who mentioned ‘neo-liberalism’ that piqued my interest but then he got the terminal boot from the camp. Or did he? See what I mean? The psychology of what’s happening within our MSM is highly advanced and rather than being a community watch dog organisation has our MSM instead a script written by old rich crooks with the help if the worlds best lawyers to hide their ill gotten gains. I mean, if AO/NZ has the second most profitable banks in the world yet only 2-3 % of the population earns the money then AO/NZ must surely need to have the second most skilled lawyers in the world.
What we see, who we are and all that seems relatively ‘natural and normal’ isn’t that. So what the fuck IS going on?
* Roger kerr then chairman or what ever the fuck he called himself of the business round table now called “The New Zealand Initiative ”
https://www.nzinitiative.org.nz/membership/our-members/
The deeply disturbingly disturbing factor in all this, for me certainly, is the evolving cluster fuck that the natzo desperadoes and their MMP minions must now hide their past crimes of not only themselves now, but of horrible historic crimes against us all but specifically against our agrarian primary industry, the ones they exploited into suicide, loss and poverty just to have a beach house and a big ugly fucking boat to wank over.
** Dose-responce.
https://www.salon.com/2021/01/03/what-is-dose-response-the-theory-that-shaped-modern-medicine/
In the early 16th century, a Swiss physician named Paracelsus changed the course of the healing arts with his theories on chemical treatments for disease. A literal renaissance man given the era, he was part scientist, part alchemist, and part philosopher. Three hundred years before the advent of Pasteur’s germ theory, Paracelsus advised patients to keep their wounds clean to avoid infection. His study of chemicals revealed both their curative and harmful properties, and he noted that any treatment turns toxic once the dose is high enough.
TVNZ destroyed itself over two decades ago, it has long been a corpse.
Not much worth paying for at TVNZ. So if it goes to a paywall, market share will dissappear.
Instead shoul sack a few more high paid executive s/ middle magmt.
All I can say is thank fuck Hosking went to paywall, only the seriously deluded will pay for his right wing diatribe.
News? WTF is that anyway? An accurate snapshot, big and small, of the social, political, environmental, economic realities were our surroned by, or simply a (re) constructed version? And the medium of public television, a wonderful innovation of the 50s to bring it into living rooms in digestible content, reduces it to near meaningless content, sound bytes, editorial bias, semotic manipulation, you name it. That’s the 6 o’clock TV News.
Current affairs and critical analysis? Well, that’s another argument. Some good, some pretty average, some downright poor. Then there’s the TV versions of the Womans Weekly, as one TDB commentator put it a few days back. Those light and fluffy shows that tack on to the end of the evening News. Breakfast in the same boat. What an utter waste of time. But, who am I to determine what muddle NZ likes (and no different overseas from what I can see).
But back to TV News. A thing of the 50s and 60s struggling to find relevance in a changing world.
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