KEY POINTS:
I will confess that the only reason I wanted to be a journalist when I grew up was because I had to be Mary Tyler Moore. I needed her life. The cool pad, the big M on the wall (I'd only have to turn it upside down!), mad
friend Rhoda, gruff but supportive Lou Grant, great clothes with all those knits, pantsuits and striped tops.
When I did grow up, I spent two days in the smoke-filled newsroom of the Auckland Star, had my bum pinched once, was yelled at in a very unsupportive manner twice by someone who looked like Lou Grant but reeked of booze and chauvinism and realised Mary was nowhere to be found.
My father had warned me of this. "If you think you'll be doing a Mary Tyler Moore you are sadly mistaken," he announced on hearing my journalism intentions. But I've never forgotten Mary and in the past few weeks as "the media" becomes the convenient whipping boys for any news the public, politicians, and television news readers don't feel like hearing, I've been forced to ask myself: "What would Mary do?"
When Winston Peters called on Herald political editor Audrey Young to resign over her excellent work searching out the truth about whether Owen Glenn gave him some money, I think Mary would have got on the phone and assured Audrey that she had the full support of the 100-strong Women in Media lobby group.
Mary would be the secretary of Women in Media, which meets once a month - of course - and has shown itself to have significant impact on the maintenance of equal pay, gender balance and support for frontline women engaged in hard-line journalism.
Women journalists around the country would be contacted and provide ongoing phone and email support for Audrey as she continued her battle with the Minister of Foreign Affairs.
When Winston stormed off from a press conference because the reporters were getting too close for comfort, Mary would have followed, pad and pen poised and ready for action.
"Mr Peters!" she would have shouted. "We pay your salary, come back here and earn your living." Or she might have said: "You can't take the world on with your smile any more Mr Peters," before rushing off to file her piece on the exciting wardrobe of visiting US Secretary of State, Condoleezza Rice.
Mary would have been at her best perhaps when the Most Spectacular Fall from Grace by any New Zealand Celebrity occurred a few weeks ago.
The media were attacked for their part in delivering the news that Tony Veitch allegedly beat his former partner then paid her money to keep it quiet. Mary would have simply replied that that's what the media do. They report news.
With a little help from Lou, she might have quoted 19th-century historian Thomas Carlyle on the role of the Fourth Estate, the journalists in the Reporters' Gallery, the "public press", the guardians of democracy, defenders of the public interest.
She might then have explained that there is no censorship in freedom of the press.
Back at the office, she would have crossed her pant-suited legs and done a little research to gauge the public interest in the Veitch saga.
She would have discovered that the very people accusing the media of relentless attention to the story were producing stories and opinion pieces which were keeping it very much alive in the media. And on the New Zealand Herald website weeks after the Veitch saga disappeared from the front pages there were still 120 pages of comments from interested members of the public.
Mary would have pointed that out to Lou Grant. Then she would have gone upstairs to chair the TVNZ in-house committee investigating who in management knew what about Veitch and when they knew it.
Unfortunately, Mary doesn't exist in the real world, as I realised on day-two of my brilliant career. We must simply sit and read what our journalists and editors produce for us and trust that stories about finance companies with cashflow problems, city council spending, and dying women having their power cut off are all part of our right to be informed.
Even if it means sometimes you have to wade through 16 broadsheet pages of "unauthorised" information on the most boring man in the world, John Key. It's called freedom.
