My doctoral thesis was about the impact of the printing press – a new information technology – on law and legal culture in the England of the 16th and 17th centuries.
One of my associated “side studies” led to my continued interest in the growth and development of news media from print to radio and television – the latter two broadly categorised as “broadcast media”.
The development of broadcast media differed from print media. With print media, the authorities were continually playing catch-up in trying to regulate the content and use of technology.
In the fledgling US, press freedom was guaranteed in the First Amendment to the Constitution, although a study of history reveals this was a hard-won battle.
Broadcast media, on the other hand, has always been subject to a large degree of state control.
Private radio may seem to be a given to today’s audience but who can forget the frisson of delight as the ship Tiri sailed from the Viaduct Basin in 1966 to establish an offshore “pirate” radio station just beyond territorial waters between the Coromandel Peninsula and Great Barrier Island?
Television (like radio) has been under stricter control and it was not until the heyday of the Lange Labour government that the iron grip of the state on TV licences was loosened to allow TV3 to broadcast. The newsroom of the inheritors of that organisation – Newshub – is now about to close.
One of the interesting things about broadcast news media that it has inherited from the print paradigm is its business model, which is essentially a centralised programming one-to-many distribution model – for radio and TV.
Furthermore, legal constraints have been imposed on broadcast media by the Broadcasting Act 1989 and the Broadcasting Standards Authority that monitors complaints about broadcast content.
The inevitable post-mortems by news media – which love reporting about themselves – attributed the downfall of Newshub to a number of factors including the suggestion that the Broadcasting Act was no longer fit for purpose.
Although, according to Glen Kyne of Warner Bros Discovery, another factor, the Fair Digital News Bargaining Bill, would not have made a difference.
Declining advertising made the continuation of Newshub financially impossible. And TVNZ is in trouble as well, although it is maintaining its business model while cutting staff and content – rather like shifting the deck chairs on the Titanic.
But perhaps there is more to it than just that. The Broadcasting Act may no longer be fit for purpose because the prevailing broadcasting business model is no longer fit for purpose in the digital paradigm. For one thing, “appointment viewing” is outmoded in an age of streaming.
One suggestion of Kyne’s was the aggregation of newsgathering activity, the content of which would be sold or licensed to outlets. Shortsightedly, this was rejected by TVNZ, despite a $16 million-plus loss in its first half.
Kyne’s proposal for a sort of broadcast version of the NZPA or Reuters may have gone some of the way to addressing the problem.
I think the broadcast media have overlooked what media commentator Marshall McLuhan said in the 1960s: “The medium is the message.” Broadcast media’s fascination with content (the message) has blinded it to the nature of the paradigmatically different digital medium. The movie and music industries largely seem to have made the shift.
So it is not just the Broadcasting Act that is unfit for purpose. The broadcast-news business model is, too, and needs rebuilding from the ground up.
