Bringing the watchdog to heel

Paul Holmes' comments about Kofi Annan will end up with the Broadcasting Standards Authority. JEREMY HANSEN looks at the BSA and its new head.

Jane Wrightson has an unruly halo of dark red hair, a big laugh, a let's-get-straight-to-the-point manner and an impressive CV. The 45-year-old has been the country's chief censor, the manager of television programme funding at New Zealand on Air, and head of independent programming at TVNZ. A few weeks ago, she became the new chief executive of the Broadcasting Standards Authority (BSA).

This latest career move has raised eyebrows. The broadcasting industry is in almost open revolt against the authority, with some executives seriously considering setting up their own complaints body. Wrightson's wealth of broadcasting experience and big personality should make her the perfect person to smooth over this tension - but her new role is strangely powerless.

She has no say in the authority's rulings, or any choice of people who make them: broadcasting complaints are assessed not by her, but by the chairman and its four-person board, all Government appointees.

This all makes it seem as if Wrightson, former commander of multimillion-dollar budgets, has suddenly found herself in a strangely diminished position. When you ask broadcasting industry people about her appointment to the BSA, you invariably get the same three-part response.

First, they welcome her appointment by praising her straight-shooting manner and wealth of broadcasting experience. Then they say they don't expect her to achieve much because of the constraints of the job. Finally, they ask, mystified: Why the hell would someone as well-qualified as she is take on a dead-end position?

Compared with the autocratic thrills of the censor's office and the God-like power of approving programmes at New Zealand on Air, the Broadcasting Standards Authority can't help but look as petty as many of the complaints it deals with.

It was set up by the Broadcasting Act in 1989 with high enough ideals: making sure broadcast media keep to appropriate standards of good taste, decency, accuracy and fairness.

The reality is more tedious. Rather than leading the media to new levels of classiness, the authority is a reactive body that deals mostly with the grievances of people with little better to do than to complain about what they see on television or hear on radio.

To be sure, many complaints the authority hears are valid, and few in the industry disagree that it needs to be kept in check. But how the authority interprets the wide-open wording of the Broadcasting Act has frayed broadcasters' tempers.

"We have some pretty significant concerns about the BSA," says one radio executive, who, like most of the industry figures interviewed, felt more comfortable venting off the record.

"Sometimes their logic can be quite baffling and it's very hard to get any clarification out of them. It's a minefield for broadcasters now, particularly for television. So we're saying, let's have a self-regulating system - that way we would get away from some of these dumb-ass decisions that they make."

A producer at TVNZ says when he and his team are working on current affairs stories, the spectre of a complaint to the authority creates more headaches than the possibility of legal action.

A lawyer can scan a piece for possible defamation, he reasons, but the BSA's decisions are so unpredictable, it is almost impossible to discern whether an item conforms to its standards.

You will also hear moans from within the broadcasting industry about how much work the complaints process takes. The number of complaints has remained relatively stable since the early 1990s (usually fewer than 200 a year), but now broadcasters say they need staff working full-time to handle complaints.

Some accuse the authority of encouraging complaints to justify its own existence.

"They really try and wind them up a lot of the time," says another disgruntled broadcaster.

For her part, Wrightson is unfazed about the challenges the authority faces. "It isn't a popularity contest," she says. "Every time the authority hands down a decision, someone is going to get annoyed. If I got a sense that a range of decisions seemed to be causing more conniptions than normal, I might adopt a management strategy to deal with that. I think part of my job is to make sure the authority members know the impact of the decisions they take. If it's going to be controversial, they should know about it."

Few recent decisions have been more controversial than the ruling on Prime Minister Helen Clark's complaint against TV3's "Corngate" interview when John Campbell confronted the Prime Minister with allegations in Nicky Hager's book Seeds of Distrust that the Government had covered up the accidental release of GM-contaminated seeds.

In a labyrinthine ruling , the authority found the interview breached standards of fairness, balance and accuracy.

TV3 is appealing the decision in the High Court, arguing that the authority took into account irrelevant considerations or ignored relevant ones in making its ruling.

To many broadcasters, each paragraph of the authority's 100-plus page decision feels like another step away from reality into a twilight zone of after-the-fact bureaucratic nitpicking.

"Corngate just sends shivers down my spine," says one broadcaster. "Whichever way they jumped on that, there was going to be trouble. So their decision was muddled."

Much discontent focused on the fact that Government appointees on the authority were deciding on a complaint from the Prime Minister. Even veteran broadcasters familiar with the jobs-for-the-boys reality of political appointments get steamed about this one.

"Impartiality is a problem," says one senior television executive. "The Government gives these people their jobs, the Prime Minister makes a complaint - so what are they going to do?"

"I don't think that the current system of appointments is working," says a broadcasting lawyer, "because there have been so many changes and they don't have the requisite degree of broadcasting knowledge. I think there's a growing feeling in the industry that the authority no longer plays a valid role."

Things are already changing: board member Judy McGregor has stepped down to become the Equal Employment Opportunities Commissioner, and been replaced by Diane Musgrave, a former television producer. More crucially, Peter Cartwright, the husband of Governor-General Dame Silvia and the authority chairman, has said he won't seek a second term.

The instability caused by this personnel churn is something Minister of Broadcasting Steve Maharey hopes to minimise. Maharey, who says he is finalising arrangements with a new chairman of the BSA, expects to announce the appointment in late October.

While the broadcasting industry prays for a sympathetic chairman, it looks enviously at its colleagues in the advertising world, who, despite their reputation for flashiness, regulate themselves with disciplined ease.

The Advertising Standards Authority, which was set up to pre-empt any troublesome statutory obligations, has a board double the size of its broadcasting counterpart, yet it processes complaints more quickly and costs less.

The broadcasting industry would like to create its own equivalent. "We would like to construct a new model where the industry itself took a much greater responsibility and the BSA is used much more in the role of appeal body," says David Innes, executive director of the Radio Broadcasters' Association and chairman of the Advertising Standards Authority.

"The BSA has a judicial process, whereas the ASA is quasi-judicial, heavily overlaid with common sense. At the ASA, we're bound by a strong sense of social responsibility."

It all sounds reasonable, but as Wrightson says, the BSA's role is already enshrined in legislation, which means it is not going away. She is unflustered by the industry's fighting talk, giving the impression that she places some value on non-conformism herself.

Suggest, for example, that her career amounts to a distinguished record of public service, and she will almost bristle. "I have never been in the core public service," she says, "and I doubt that I will be."

She claims to have never had a career plan. After growing up in Hastings, she "got really average marks" in her BA from Victoria University and later spent almost a decade working her way up the ranks of TVNZ's programming department.

She describes the role of chief censor, which she occupied for three years, as "an overrated job - it had the capacity to get you in a lot of high-profile trouble. You had to be careful not to overestimate your own importance."

The television programming job at New Zealand on Air preceded her appointment as the chief executive of the Screen Production and Development Association. Along the way, she squeezed in a part-time MBA and got to know almost everyone in the broadcasting industry.

"She is extremely well networked and held in high regard by broadcasters because she knows what it's like on our side of the fence," says TVNZ's chief executive, Ian Fraser. "She'll be good with the relationship stuff."

Despite some broadcasters portraying it as an uptight sort of organisation, the authority's rulings on what constitutes good taste and decency have caused few ructions with drama programmers, who say the BSA has a relatively clear view of what it considers appropriate in this area.

Broadcasters might talk big, but like recalcitrant kids in school, they know that in the end they don't have enough power to change the rules. Some say the whispers of revolution are predictable, as they have all been uttered before.

"There are moments of turbulence in the relationship with the BSA, and things have been fraught over the past two years," says Fraser. "But I'm optimistic, and I think everybody agrees that there needs to be some form of regulation."

A review of broadcasting policy has given faint hope that the authority might be forced to change the way it works. But Maharey does not feel the industry's pain. "I don't perceive that there's an issue to do with the BSA," he says.

"The industry tends to dislike anything that will be perceived as regulation. But I think people now see that the Government is serious about having an interest in broadcasting, and it's here to stay."

Fraser, however, sees scope in the Broadcasting Act for the BSA to become more proactive in creating a vision for the industry.

This is exactly how Wrightson sees her new role. The more she spreads the word about the BSA's objectives, the theory goes, the less confusion and resentment will result.

Wrightson's ability to empathise with the industry should make her a more able operator of the BSA's pressure valve. "I don't yet get the sense of a building head of steam," she says, "and if there was, I would like to think that when I leave the BSA, that would have been dealt to."

Wrightson claims she is not playing a high-stakes game. She says she is not as ambitious as people tend to believe, and is content to spend her spare time hanging out with her 8-year-old daughter in their Mt Victoria bungalow.

"The trick with jobs is to stay in them long enough to get the important things done, and not so long that everyone gets sick of you," she says.

She has not come to the BSA with any particularly grand plans. But her generous self-confidence suggests she is not at all threatened by its constraints. "I applied," she says simply, "because I thought it was a job I could do."