MEDIAWATCH: Why RNZ is failing

1. It has to be remembered that RNZ is the last bastion of actual journalism in NZ – and its funding instead goes to the vapid and persuadable TVNZ. National desperately want it to fail – they’re struggling now, coherent critique will sink them without trace.

   • Agreed! And we’ve had the same excuses why we can;t have a decent system since we had a population of about 2 million, and increasingly since the 80s neolib reforms.

   • How? They fired their last actual journalist, Mick Hall, several years ago.

2. Right across the PSB system – too many in the managerial class, too few actual content producers.
   And the current CEO cum Editor-in-chief and his BFF seem to think PSB is just commercial radio without the ads.
   NZoA, CEO, Board, Sales and Meerkating team
   TVNZ CEO, Board, Sales and Meerkating team
   RNZ, CEO, Board and raft of overseers,
   Kordia, CEO, Board, Sales and Meerkating team

   The salaries for all these peeps is quite sizeable last time I looked.

   And then
   Min for C&H (supposed oversight)

   RNZ has its good and bad points, and I don’t expect to like everything I hear 24/7, however its becoming more about the cult of personality and commercial style bullshit.

   NZ could have
   RNZ National
   Concernt FM
   A yoof Radio/ New Music/ ups and coming artist platform
   Properly funded Iwi radio

   Television 1 Commercial-free, predominently news, current affairs and children
   Television 2 with limited sponsorship (to allow for things like Hyundai Country Calenday and shit style 7 Blunts with “our friends from Dilmah Tea)
   Commercial Television 3 where content producers get a sizable portion of the ad revenue

   Meantime, thank God RNZ has a few good people (e.g. Mark Bullen – who, together with Craig Soper and Daran Ponter were the main reason MTS finally got off the ground)

   Time for Paul Thompson and his BFF to move on. Maybe let the likes of Peter Thompson to have a go.

3. The battle to control the narrative is as intense as ever. A lot is at stake. Most of us ordinary folk can only surmise at what goes on, the process involved and how msm end up with the product. Unless you’ve been an insider in the boardrooms of msm – or on the various committees that help to keep things ticking along – or an outsider with a sharp understanding of how the media space works. The role and purpose of msm in today’s world is more complex than ever.

   Most of us tend to think the product, the content, reflects some kind of factual truth – although in a post-truth world even the least critical surely have suspicions they are being manipulated. What is covered, how it is framed, who is asked for their viewpoint and how the narrative is constructed- it all adds up.

   Way back in the day my own father used to read the daily newspaper cover to cover – like many of his generation – but life experience had taught him not to believe everything he read. I vaguely recall some conversations. Yet like many of his generation he must have accepted a great deal as truth (my favourite as a boy was the weekly publication Truth! – which he also bought).

   Shift to today and a good many ordinary folk do have a gut feeling but often take the default position it’s all bs anyway. Others are more aware that what we see and what we read in msm – at least in the political and economic space – is constructed, a narrative with an agenda. The story reported depends on who you ask – and equally, on the questions being asked, and how these are framed. In a post truth environment the discerning media consumer needs to be ever more vigilant – and be prepared to look for alternative viewpoints. For a good many however time is short and many folk just accept the narrative they are offered without too much critical insight as to its purpose and how it came about. Probably not much has changed since the advent of the printing press.

   Not trusting the narrative in a post truth environment is one thing but understanding how process eventuates in the product is something else – closely related for sure but a bit of a mystery for the uninitiated.

   • Ah… the topic is RNZ not the print media.

4. Poor old RNZ, the name change tells us everything. A set of letters that give the impression of a ghost sliding around a corner with a well-said report from the past .echoing in its wake. Was that cheery Merv Smith, Peter something, Kim is that, was that you, devoted proponent. And so it goes.

   Now here is what we should have to illustrate our jumbled lives and our unsteady Neros fiddling at something, in or near their pockets, while Home burns.
   https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=41kQGoJX_8Q
   Songify the News – @schmoyoho

   Another song – The Buggles Video killed the Radio Star
   https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W8r-tXRLazs
   https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Buggles

5. Meerkating team – that’s a doozy OWT. I can just see their raised inquisitive noses smelling out the opportunities and financial benefits round the honeypot.

   • That’s because they do (raise their noses smelling out the financial benefits).
     My point is, why does the often managerial class get the pudding whilst the actual producers of content get the slim pickings.
     So many other questions too.
     – Why is RNZ funded by NZonEar rather than simply a service of NZonEar (eliminating the need for quite a few overpaid hangers-on
     – Why not have a few Commissioning Editors by genres – such as News and Current Fears, Science and Technology, Sport, Arts and Kulcha, Children, Bizzniss, Specimens that have grown up in the digital age, Music. None of them precluded from also doing presenting and other bits and pieces, but people who’d also decide which of the platforms their commissioned content would air.
     – The PSB is NZonEar with a Commercial Services Division that operates the Commercial channel and Kordia Transmission and Technical services where any advertising revenue is split equitably between NZonEar costs and the actual content producer.

     The current cistern is replete with a load of ticket clippers and hangers-on.
     But let’s not slag RNZ off too much – we should be bloody careful what we wish for. Although the gnats and Eeyore Seymores and others that have gone down the rabbit hole need to realise that what THIS gummint does can easily be undone by the next. Even within the first 100 days.
     Fuk ’em and all who sail in ’em

6. “… scrunity of small-time facts”? Is that an acronym for the coverage of trivia?

   What RNZ dies best imv are the guested slots, Music 101, Nashville Babylon, Retro Cocktail Hour (no longer?) and others on World Music and Jazz. I’m not really a music fan but find this broad coverage keeps me informed – and entertained. Media Watch provides a decent if not all too brief summary. Perhaps a few programmes unmentioned. The talking heads filling the day time slots… well, they do their best I suspect.

7. This is something I have compiled including a hard cutting piece from a writer who watches the USA and thinks which is becoming harder for everyone not only in the USA.

   Why we need different politics, politicians, and how we (do we?) get them.
   Also how do we learn about our world from present journalism.
   https://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/HL2508/S00013/the-american-people-are-inwardly-dead-are-all-western-peoples.htm
   …Skimming along the surface like water bugs, journalists like Jake Tapper and Ezra Klein the USA, and Timothy Garton Ash in the UK …[write, offer ideas, criticisms, but do we think hard enough? Are journalists asking seeking, all of the 5Ws?]*
   Without addressing the spiritual, cultural and philosophical levels of our descent into national and global darkness, we cannot understand how we came to this pass, much less how to halt the slide into the abyss…

   The commentariat on both sides of the pond are clinging to the wisdom-of-the-people illusion as what passed for democracy corrodes in real time.,,

   With regard to the present, when “the people” are moribund, it matters little how decent the candidate is. The way things played out was no accident of history, or the result of Jill Biden and the “politburo” (their word) around Joe concealing his decrepitude.
   Even now, with the benefit of double hindsight, there’s widespread willful blindness. Journalists, academics and the commentariat should have seen after Trump’s coup attempt that a growing darkness had engulfed America, and without a basic change in course authoritarianism was inevitable.

   Now, it’s much harder to rid a nation of a tyrant than to prevent him from rising to power.

   In a column I wrote in June of 2022, “Indict the Bastard,” I said that if Trump wasn’t indicted and tried for his political crimes in time to keep him out of office, he and the servile Republican Party would steal the election, as they had tried to do with the January 6 2020 coup attempt.
   Though I’ve never underestimated the stupidity of the American people, I didn’t think Trump would win cleanly over Biden or Harris.
   At the moment the Repubs are brazenly planning to steal both the midterm elections. They’re ruthlessly gerrymandering districts in Texas, and will do so in every other state they can under the direction of their dictator, who said today “we’re entitled” to add more Republican seats to the House and Senate.
   Trump knows that if the Democrats win both Houses of Congress, the House will impeach him for a third time, and this time, if the Democrats control the Senate, he’ll be convicted and removed from office.
   The governors of California and New York are saying they’re going to fight fire with fire. Kathy Hochul, the governor of New York, called it a war yesterday. America is entering a gerrymandering civil war, but without a living, irate citizenry behind them, the Democrats are going to lose again.

   Deadness of the heart is the cultural and spiritual background that allowed the iniquity of Trumpism to emerge, just as it is the underlying reality that allows Netanyahu’s campaign of starvation and genocide in Gaza to continue. Those who still have a beating chamber in their heart must face the virus of indifference if we are to rid ourselves of this global malignancy.

   * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five_Ws
   The “Five W’s” (and one H) were memorialized by Rudyard Kipling in his Just So Stories (1902), in which a poem, accompanying the tale of The Elephant’s Child,[29] opens with:
   I keep six honest serving-men
   (They taught me all I knew);
   Their names are What and Why and When
   And How and Where and Who.
   ,,,By 1917, the “Five Ws” were being taught in high-school journalism classes,[30] and by 1940, the tendency of journalists to address all of the “Five Ws” within the lead paragraph of an article was being characterized as old-fashioned and fallacious:
   The old-fashioned lead of the five Ws and the H, crystallized largely by Pulitzer’s “new journalism” and sanctified by the schools, is widely giving way to the much more supple and interesting feature lead, even on straight news stories.,,,

   (This structure seemed good and was being taught in schools from 1917 but someone always comes up with a new idea, which seems to confirm **Marx/Engels statement: ‘fast-frozen relations with their… venerable prejudices and opinions are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated …’ https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1848/communist-manifesto/ch01.htm)

   and
   ** Manifesto of the Communist Party (1888)
   Online Library of Liberty
   https://oll.libertyfund.org › pages › marx-manifesto
   It compels all nations, on pain of extinction, to adopt the bourgeois mode of production; it compels them to introduce what it calls civilisation into their …
   Should we read the above to see if that is proceeding under our noses at present or is it some other system overtaking our one previously understood?
   Further useful link – https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1848/communist-manifesto/ch01.htm

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