Brian Rudman: Broadcasting seeds of public discontent

The other night, State TV's late news began with a breathless report about New Zealand scientists having helped solve one of the riddles of global warming by drilling deep into ancient Antarctic rock.

They'd discovered that the last time atmospheric CO2 levels were just slightly higher than they are today, a large proportion of the Antarctic ice shelf had melted, raising sea levels worldwide. The story was illustrated, both in the start-of-bulletin teaser and later, with film of a polar bear adrift on a broken sheet of ice.

When I stopped guffawing, it struck me that this was probably a repeat of the 6pm bulletin and that in the intervening four hours, not one of Television New Zealand's 1000 or so employees had bothered to warn their on-duty colleagues of the embarrassing blooper - or at least suggested a better angle might be how the bear and its iceberg had managed to survive the 20,000km journey from its north polar habitat, through the tropics, to the drilling site.

Still, TVNZ seems to have long ago given up the pretence of being in the business of public service broadcasting, except when making submissions for more government funding.

It's such slovenliness in an area at the core of good publicly funded broadcasting that makes it hard to argue against the Government's decision to axe TVNZ's monopoly on the $15 million the Ministry of Culture and Heritage pays out each year to fund TVNZ's "social charter" obligations.

As National has long threatened to do, this money will now be tossed in the pot with the $70 million-plus New Zealand on Air distributes each year to television companies, private and public, for public service-type programmes.

The worry is that with the "charter" security blanket snatched away from the state broadcaster, little is left in the way of supporting material for those of us who hang on to the chimera that TVNZ could one day again be a public service broadcaster in the model of the ABC or BBC.

As just another commercial broadcaster, with only its stewardship of the state-funded, non-commercial digital channels 6 and 7 to justify its claim to public ownership, the state broadcaster is now even more vulnerable to being privatised.

For the past nine years, the Labour Government made half-hearted efforts to recreate a public service model and failed dismally. That the only grown-up discussion about politics occurs in a Sunday morning time slot better suited to Hymns for Insomniacs sums up the disaster perfectly. But is there any way back?

That was the question David Lloyd, head of news at Britain's Channel 4, pondered after a trip to New Zealand at TVNZ chairman Ross Armstrong's request in 2000.

He was asked to recommend ways to restore the culture of public service stripped away by the Rogernomics reforms of the 1980s. Channel 4 is Britain's brave experiment in "the provision of a broad range of high-quality and diverse programming". Part-funded by the Government, it sits alongside the BBC system.

Writing afterwards, Mr Lloyd said "perhaps there is some logic, if the free market broadcasting genie is ever to be put back in its bottle, that the first attempt should be made in a culture as literate, internationalist and egalitarian as New Zealand".

But he wasn't very hopeful, noting that while the wording of the new charter was "nicely articulated", it was open to interpretation and raised as many questions as it answered.

He recorded how the Government had provided confused signals about how successful delivery would be measured, that many TVNZ staff were rebellious, and that the Government "seems unprepared to forgo any of the nice, juicy revenues that have poured into the Treasury". All in all, "these are the ingredients for a truly poisonous brew". His scepticism proved to be justified.

TVNZ soon tossed the "charter" handout into the general programme-making coffers, the biggest proportion going to documentary making which, many critics argued, should have been a core activity of the broadcaster anyway. Last year, the broadcaster overstretched the patience of the then Government, siphoning $5 million of that year's charter cash into Beijing Olympics coverage.

Ten years ago, at a broadcasting symposium organised by New Zealand on Air to agonise over the parlous state of public television, broadcaster Ian Fraser - who was later to be TVNZ chief executive from 2002 to 2005 - declared that "television is describing a descending parabola" and that "without getting into an orgy of hand-wringing, it looks as though it's going to get worse".

He called for "a network which balances the need to keep up ratings with the public obligation to provide quality television" and "where the satisfaction of the individual viewer is the primary objective, where cultural objectives are as highly valued as commercial ones".

He added: "One of the jewels in the crown of our culture is a democratic form of government [and] I want broadcasting that will help to empower people towards better decision making.

Communication is the cornerstone of the democratic process [and] requires a searching, energetic, critical broadcasting system as a venue for discussion and debate."

He said the public had a higher expectation of TVNZ than TVNZ could discharge, "constrained as it is by its duty to be a good state-owned enterprise and return a commercial profit to the government".

Ducking the matter of which ownership model would be best, he said the real issue was producing better television in order to build our cultural identity.

The charter model experiment, introduced under Mr Fraser's watch, has not worked. Which takes us back to square one. How are we going to provide for ourselves the high-quality, public service television we deserve?