Sunday, hosted by Miriama Kamo, is one of the shows that could end under a proposal for cuts at TVNZ.
Sunday, hosted by Miriama Kamo, is one of the shows that could end under a proposal for cuts at TVNZ.
Opinion by Diana Wichtel
OPINION
The end. We met via Zoom. We were in lockdown and on mute, so the manager wouldn’t have heard the air turning blue as 200 of us learned that Bauer Media New Zealand was pulling the plug. The Listener, North and South, Metro, the Woman’s Weekly -two of those titles were older than me and now they were gone.
Thirty-six years at The Listener. I loved the mag but for various reasons I’d been wishing for a way out. I hadn’t expected to bring down almost the entire local magazine industry with me.
Those scenes came back with a jolt with the news - what the actual heck? - of the death of the news. Or at least the news that has emanated from 3 National News, later rebranded as Newshub, since 1989. TV3 was a funny little channel then. It seems that stripping The Golden Girls and Benny Hill wasn’t enough to pull an audience all but superglued to TV1. And you shouldn’t always listen when people tell you what they want. There had been a call to bring back veteran newsreader Philip Sherry and his authoritative eyebrows to read the news as if delivered on stone tablets from on high.
That didn’t work. TV3 was soon struggling. It always pulled through and has always been our house’s news of choice. The style has been more relaxed, less ritualised and, in the early days, often quite mad. Bill Ralston, later to be TVNZ’s head of news and current affairs, was TV3′s political editor in the early years. The Nightline item in which he showed Jim Bolger being serenaded by a South Island school choir with the Beatles’ Nowhere Man was a classic Ralston provocation. It’s no good blaming opinion writers or “biased” journalists when just recording what politicians do can be more devastating to their PR than any columnist’s snark.
The Government’s initial response to the Newshub news amounted to an authoritative “yeah, whatevs”. “Well, look, I mean,” said Christopher Luxon, “the reality is that consumers are choosing their news and media in lots of different channels.” Broadcasting Minister Melissa Lee: “Well, there’s Sky as well. There’s a whole lot of other media...”
Broadcasting Minister Melissa Lee being questioned by media, over TVNZ and Seymour's criticism of their news. Photo / Mark Mitchell.
Days after the Newshub news, TVNZ announced cuts that will take current affairs out of the evening schedules altogether. Fair Go and Sunday are proposed to go. That’s just the beginning. David Seymour responded to these events by attacking 1News’s Benedict Collins for smiling while reporting, or something.
Why can’t we have more than one of anything in this country and why does nothing work? The intimacy of linear television, right in your living room, talking to its own audience, not just streaming into an uncaring cosmos, is its strength and its curse. Both channels rose to the occasion of the Christchurch earthquakes, the mosque attacks, the cyclone... The reporters’ commitment and empathy produced work that often moved me to tears.
That intimacy is also why people get triggered when they think their tribe is not getting a fair go from the media. It feels personal.
We all yell at the news now and then and the old habits of the evening news and current affairs need to change for new times. We need a properly constructed public broadcasting system like never before.
This may be the first time I have ended a column with wise words from Winston Peters. Despite his often-dysfunctional relationship with the media, he’s been around and can understand what’s at stake. He called Newshub’s imminent closure a disaster for democracy. “A critical part of democracy and a free society is an independent fourth estate and I’m concerned about where we’re going now.”
Me too. So many great journalists over so many years. The new generation is scarily good at training itself but how will decades of experience, skill and knowledge now get passed on? After Covid, most of the magazines came back. Television news and current affairs will reinvent. For now, this leaves a dangerous void in our public discourse. It’s a tragedy.
