GUEST BLOG: Bryan Bruce – The Demise of Newshub + TVNZ cutbacks
I’m saddened by the news that many of my talented colleagues at TV3 and TVNZ in front and behind the cameras have had their programmes axed today.
I know how gut wrenching it feels because I was one of the first people to be made redundant when the documentaries department was shut down at TVNZ in the 1980’s when the neoliberal “reforms “ restructured the State Broadcaster.
It’s awful to lose your job especially when you have been doing good work and delivering really good audiences.
Looking at the bigger picture the demise of important factual progammes in our country is putting our democracy at risk.
Right wing governments and economies don’t like being made accountable and one way to avoid that is to turn off funding for public interest journalism or to let “market forces” push programmes that are asking inconvenient questions off the air.
For example, it has been made very clear to me as an independent programme maker by at least one broadcaster that they simply do not want to commission investigative documentaries from me even though they have been drawing significant audiences.
Well, speaking for myself, I will not be silenced. I intend to continue to speak truth to power and giving a voice to those who have no voice whenever I can and I think I have found a way to keep going
I will let you know about it soon.
In the meantime, to my friends and colleagues and their families on this difficult day – Kia kaha You have very important skills. There is always a way to use them . It just might be a different way.
PS. It hasn’t escaped my notice, and I hope it will not escape yours that the bean counters usually don’t get axed and remain on very good salaries.
Bryan Bruce is one of New Zealand’s most important and respected documentary makers.
We lose quality journalism to this type of crap. It just shows us how appalling people are to follow the trash of Hosking and Hawkesby. She’s not intelligent enough to learn from her husbands multiple mistakes.
https://www.stuff.co.nz/nz-news/350239551/bsa-finds-kate-hawkesby-comments-maori-and-pasifika-misleading-and-discriminatory
“PS. It hasn’t escaped my notice, and I hope it will not escape yours that the bean counters usually don’t get axed and remain on very good salaries.”
Indeed. Many on salaries not exactly commensurate with their abilities too. If a few were to be culled, in many cases there’d be less of a so-called ‘need’ to get rid of so much of the 4th Estate.
It’s interesting to think back and see what media assets have been stripped over the years since the days of the old NZBC.
Just because it may have been a propaganda arm of the gummint, we chose to go to the other extreme rather than fixing the system at the time: Asset strip, corporatise, commercialise and create a complicated structure for overpaid ticket clippers and media ‘stars’.
We lost the following contributing to the production of content:
– Demolition of Broadcasting House Wellington (some of the best studios at the time)
– Sale of the purpose-built Avalon Television Centre
– The TVNZ Auckland Television Centre/Sky City deal
– The sale and divestment of Outside Broadcast (OB) equipment
– transmission facilities to Kordia for profit. (Fine, BUT any profits should have been completely ploughed back into media
and the associated institutions contributing to the provision of content:
– The sale/privatisation of the National Film Unit
– The separation of the NZSO to a standalone entity, now reliant on separate funding, ticket sales and philanthropy
– The NZ Listener magazine
– A natural history unit we now have to pay to view
We’ve ended up with an over-managed complicated structure that now gives us less and less:
– NZ on Air
– Radio NZ
– TVNZ
– MTS (started on a shoestring and probably the better in terms of management to production staff ratio)
– MoBIE (Frequency allocation, Radio Interference)
– Kordia (Transmission and technical services)
– Freeview (essentially just a Master Control/Playout facility)
Think of the bureaucracy and duplication: CEOs and boards, HR people, sales and marketing!
Completely unnecessary in terms of what content we now get for it all
There was an opportunity to simplify using an INDEPENDENT Crown entity (rather than AUTONOMOUS), with CEO/Boards appointed along the lines Tim Selwyn suggested the other day.
I think that opportunity is now lost, and it may be the whole system will have to collapse and be burnt to the ground before we can begin some sort of resurrection. Not much is going to happen under Melissa and her ideologically driven colleagues – that’s for sure. It’s more than the fact she’s utterly out of her depth.
We need these people to drive trucks and lay out road cones!
That way they could at least become productive members of society (oh and meet some real people)
The mouths of the ‘people’ in the images are all pursed in the same way. It’s not cute it is unsettling. Make ordinary people great again. These ones are done up like a dog’s Christmas dinner.