MEDIAWATCH: Labour will force TVNZ away from F Boy Island and towards Country Calendar

ByMartyn Bradbury

Broadcasting Minister Willie Jackson is showing Labour that Ministers have an obligation to keep working right up until the Election.

His push to ensure the TVNZ Board take their public broadcasting mandate seriously is in a wide ranging NZ Herald interview where he cites Country Calendar as the the public broadcasting template he wants TVNZ to set for community in NZ.

There is TV that TVNZ does excellently, like Country Calendar, and then there is crass ratings chasing crap like Fuck Boy Island that TVNZ makes.

Public Broadcasting has a much higher standard than commercial TV and Fuck Boy Island brings no one any mana.

The challenge has alway been how to make TVNZ take their Public Broadcasting seriously, and Jackson is the Minister to do that.

While the TVNZ/RNZ Merger didn’t go through, Jackson still got RNZ the largest budget increase they’ve ever received, he got NZ on Air an extra $10m, he ensured Māori media and community media got more funding, he forced Google and Meta to start paying media digital licence fees AND he is ensuring TVNZ takes their Public Broadcasting role seriously.

It’s interesting because a lot of other Ministers, if they had lost something a major as the merger, might have just gone and sulked in the corner, Jackson instead went on to deliver enormous budget increases in funding across the sector. I think this is driven because Jackson is a former Broadcaster himself, so he knows what the industry needs, he knows how the industry works and he sees how it runs off the smell of an oily rag.

For all the criticism he gets, Jackson has ended up delivering more to every sector of the Media Industry from public broadcasting to private media than any other Broadcasting Minister ever!

 

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12 Comments

  1. Bloody pleased to see Willie is not going to let it go.
    Now that JA, Hipkins and Albo have worked on improving Ao/NZers status in Oz, its way past time we got ourselves an ABC/SBS
    This time Willie, less of the consultant ticket clipping, and preoccupation with rebranding and meerkating.
    For the PSB we get, we have one of the most over-managed systems in the world.
    Perhaps start with NZonAir as the lead agency and as an ICE, removing the necessity for tiers of (mis)management – remember huge salaries that could be put towards actual programme content.
    PSB has been asset stripped in this country for a long long time: transmission facilities, frequency allocations, purpose built television centres, a broadcasting house that had some of the best acoustics around, natural history unit, etc.etc.
    Streaming and web-based systems yes, but ALSO terrestrial FTA. AT LEAST 3 radio networks and 2 television ONE at least commercial free, the second limited sponsorship *to allow broadcast of existing and historical content.
    And better support for iwi radio.
    Give us (we public) back our assets

    1. OWT you shine a bright light on the stage and the players. Now can we get on to the right path giving everybody some of what they want, also facts, achievements, information that we can use for good affect, and body-building of our country so it has good apps and curves, and is not only good to look at but with great character and expertise, and always to a standard that reflects what we want to be a high norm here in NZ/AO.

  2. I will glue my fingers to the main road to keep Country Calendar, and assist in the glueing of the Neanderthals trying to abolish Shakespeare and funding an ‘ opera’ about unruly Brit tourists. DNTV-2 used to produce a splendid local ‘Music Hall ‘ series, and the cold deep south also made jolly good wildlife programs, while Canterbury, I think, generated quality drama like ‘Hunter’s Gold’. Could be time to cancel Auckland and Wellington altogether if they don’t brain up. Could be nice to watch television again, especially unpeppered by hypermanic commercials.

    1. SW You are so right. Let’s have more of our own country stuff, our creations from our own clever brains and abilities, less or no commercials trying to sell us stuff coming from big organisations that are trying themselves to shed staff and install ‘more efficient’ robotics etc. Who do they think they are – men or machine? They have yet to organise a machine-consumer group, but when they succeed they can bypass us humans all together. And despite our many faults I think that would be a shame, don’t you?

      1. Grey Warbler. I think we’re pretty stuffed as a country, and neoliberalism contributed massively to this, enabled also by ruthless little opportunist immigrants like John Key, hypocritical dipsticks like Bill “ All our young guys are shits” English, witchy women like Richardson and Bennett straight out of Grimms Bros stories, and a lack of moral fibre ( nothing to do with sex! ) and thinking capacity among politicians nearly all dependant upon pr types and glib wordings to cut us down and build themselves up.

        We who know our pioneering ancestors’ histories, know that they were hard-working and very innovative in challenging circumstances, far from their own homelands, and that they accomplished much in a relatively short time. I like to think that we still carry those genes.

        It’s quite important that people, and especially children, have outlets for their creativity and original thinking which can lead to the problem solving skills which we need and always will. The education system is a good starting point, but it’s pretty damn hopeless now. Giving people voices, however it’s done, should be prioritised, instead of politicians trying to shut people up and expecting them to listen, or obfuscate and think that we don’t know what they’re up to.

        These over-paid television types should be tarred and feathered for trying to drag everyone down to their own level, but they seem too witless to know what they’re doing anyway.

  3. Fuck boy Island is kinda like NZ – you know fuck over people and we live on a island. NZ woke celebrate men now being able to self identify as a woman if it suits them and beat up and assault woman in protests and stop them speaking while the media cheers it all on and police stand down.

  4. I didn’t think TVNZ made anything these days; it’s all subcontracted out.
    And therein lies the problem. It’s purely a matter of chance whether or not you get a good result.
    Mostly it isn’t…

  6. The biggest challenge for NZ media is the only people I know who consume it are my parents and grandparents.

    The news has plummeted to 90, 000 in the ratings.

    Most Nzers under 40 are streaming foreign content like Disney plus, Netflix, Amazon, YouTube, TikTok

    We never listen to rnz or any radio as we have Spotify for music and podcasts if we wanna listen to something like TalkBack.

    Apart from young political activists, young people aren’t following the news, literally more interested in TikTok and memes.

    The last time I watched traditional broadcast media was 2018 when my internet went out. I streamed the 2020 debates and occasionally stream a news story but other than that I am just as alienated from NZ media as the rest of my generation.

    I don’t think anyone who thinks NZ media is important has any idea on how to get people under 40 to consume it and that’s the biggest problem for NZ media, justifying it’s existence if noone watches it.

    1. Yep.The days when we switched on for the 6pm news are long gone. One elderly neighbour turns her television on when she arises, but apart from that it seems to be watched mainly by people in care homes. The imported Brit comedies and dramas were well worth watching in younger days, and the whole country was glued to their sets for ‘The Avengers’ on Wednesdays evenings when electricity usage dropped nationwide.

  7. Here’s a good and long 42m discussion on what gets presented to us and why we react to it in particular ways and what is behind all that, and it is worth listening to and thinking about because it gets to the core of what is happening to us all now, and has taken over so many minds, and forewarned is forearmed etc. Sun Tzu might have some good points. He is handy to keep in mind when being convinced by rhetoric and fake facts, somewhere. I suggest have him as a little countervailing thought, ‘I wonder what Sun Tzu would say to that’!
    https://www.britannica.com/biography/Sunzi
    This is a good quote attributed to him. “Victory comes from finding opportunities in problems.” ~ Sun Tzu.

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