KEY POINTS:
All the Veitch saga needs now is for the disgraced news reader to do a Lord Lucan or a Keith Murdoch, sneak out of the country disguised as a pilgrim to Sydney, then scarper north and out of our lives.
As yet more horrific details emerge of his
alleged wife-beating, he's not the sort of person I want bouncing into my living room every night courtesy of the state broadcaster. And for once, I'm sure the vast majority of New Zealanders would agree with me.
Then again, in a society where one out of every seven voters has signed a petition seeking to restore the legal right to whack their kids, I could be wrong.
After all, PR maven and one-time TVNZ board member Michelle Boag was quickly on screen to suggest a week on the naughty stool was all the punishment required. And a week after the story broke, the blokes that run TVNZ and Radio Sport, Mr Veitch's other employee, are still in a dither about what to do.
For an organisation with a penchant for dumping highly professional newsreaders - both male and female - the moment a grey hair shows, the current indecision is beaming out very mixed signals. What is worse in their eyes - growing old gracefully, or using the missus as a punch bag?
TVNZ has a chequered history when it comes to doing the right thing. These are the people who happily waste the $15 million special annual grant from the Government for public service "charter" programmes on pap like Sensing Murder and Mucking In, and on core business they should be producing anyway, like the Sunday programme.
And the state broadcaster continues to host another wife-basher, Craig Busch, the star of popular family-hour show, The Lion Man. He was found guilty last year of assaulting his partner after he came home and found her in bed with another couple.
She suffered a fractured lumbar and rib, bruising and stitches to her head. He pleaded guilty to two charges of assault. Nine other charges were dropped after the victim decided not to give evidence. She got reparation of $8000.
Should what people get up to in their private lives affect their work situations? In the case of television "personalities" the answer must be yes. They're paid large salaries to be more than newsreaders.
They're supposed to be our friends as well. To charm us, to persuade us they're one of the family. That their values should be ours. They front charity events, such as "It's Not OK" against family violence.
For TVNZ to have celebrities parading across the screen in regular advertisements saying it's not OK to bash your wife, while presenters who do just that pop up afterwards, makes a mockery of the campaign and the state broadcaster.
Around the world, TV and radio "personalities" are dumped for all sorts of reasons. A few years back, Sydney's Channel 7 popular host, Stan Grant, got dumped for leaving his wife for a romance with another high-profile media star. The network boss said he didn't want to read about it in the newspapers.
Controversial London radio Talksport host James Whale was recently sacked for urging listeners to vote Boris Johnson in London's mayoralty campaign. He ended up on home shopping channel bid TV.
In 2006, Eva Herman, a presenter of a flagship news programme on German public television NDR for 18 years, was sacked after lauding family planning policy under Hitler. Earlier this year, in London again, the BBC cancelled a repeat of one of its most popular children's TV shows when the presenter was arrested after his fiancee was found dead in their bath from a cocaine overdose.
However inflated their own opinions of themselves, celebrities are not bigger than the show, or the organisation, they work for. The possibility of getting dumped when they no longer fit is built into the large pay packets.
Prime Minister Helen Clark zeroed in on the central issue when she declared there was a moral crisis at TVNZ if senior managers knew Mr Veitch attacked his former partner and did nothing. His bosses now say senior managers were told a sanitised version of the incident by their employee last year, but he did not give them a blow-by-blow account. They regarded it as a civil issue which could be handled privately.
As journalists, it's hard to believe their instincts didn't persuade them to dig a little harder. But now the full laundry basket of dirty linen is being hung up piece by piece, why the delay in rescuing the organisation's good name?
As National's SOE spokesman Gerry Brownlee says, it's like "amateur hour." If it wasn't so serious, it's the stuff of sitcom. Charter funded, of course.
