Putting Us In Our Place: RNZ management seems to glory in “disrupting” the expectations of its core audience. Those expectations, based on the “inform, educate, entertain” formula laid down by the first Director General of the BBC, John Reith, in the 1920s, and adopted without demur by New Zealand’s public broadcasting services ever since, are clearly out of favour with RNZ’s new breed of cultural commissars.
EVERYONE HAS HAD a
good laugh at RNZ’s “Music Strategy” featuring “The Ten New Zealanders”. The
idiocy of modern marketing is always good for a chuckle or two, and these crude
stereotypes have certainly provoked a lot more than that. Less amusing,
however, is the sheer vapidity of an in-house culture willing to lay such inanity
before its governing body. That the RNZ Board of Governors accepted such a
presentation, rather than throwing it back in the faces of its supposedly
professional authors, is way beyond unfunny – it’s just bloody sad.
Reading the material, one is shocked by the authors’ disdain
for making any kind of case more sophisticated than. “This is what we want, can
we have it please?”
Take, for example, RNZ’s supposed “goal” of expanding the
public broadcaster’s reach to encompass half the New Zealand population by
2022. This sort of “planning” is nothing short of Stalinist in its towering
ambition. It seems inconceivable that there was no one in RNZ who, when
presented with their bosses’ “Two Year Plan”, didn’t object that the
achievement of such a goal would require the setting aside of all professional
broadcasting standards. If such objections were made, however, then it is equally
clear that the answer from above was “So?”
Professionalism is not highly valued in these presentations.
Rather, it is not-so-subtly suggested that such considerations might actually
be part of the problem with RNZ. Certainly, there is a fairly obvious prejudice
against the high-culture featured on RNZ Concert. Such programming seems to be
regarded as evidence of Pakeha elitism at work. In the material presented to
the board, this is framed as being, if not a “bad thing”, then most certainly
as “something to be avoided”.
Permeating the whole “Music Strategy” is a level of
anti-intellectualism that, once again, would not be out of place at a
Soviet-era exhibition of “socialist-realist” art. Just as the Communist party
of the Soviet Union commissioned the production of endless paeans to the heroic
qualities of Soviet workers and peasants, RNZ’s “strategists” make plain their
urgent desire to cram the public broadcaster’s schedule with the heroic
cultural production of Aotearoa’s shamelessly neglected “youth”.
Indeed, it is clear from the material released by RNZ
Management, after multiple Official Information Act requests, that what was
being contemplated in the rolling-out of its “Music Strategy” was something
between an old-fashioned Soviet purge and an old-fashioned Bolshevik coup. The
quiet and deeply knowledgeable professionals at RNZ Concert headquarters in
Wellington were to receive the career equivalent of a bullet in the back of the
head, while the Auckland studios of RNZ were to be taken over by the woke
graduates of the nation’s “communication studies” courses – along with the
cream of the student radio stations RNZ’s strategists are clearly intending to
replace with “RNZ Music”.
In their own words, RNZ Music (Version 2.0) is “an entirely
new brand for young NZ (all 18–35). RNZ Music v 2.0 utilises traditional
broadcast and new digital technologies to generate and share content. Content
that is curated by influencer talent that RNZ will source from within the
diverse target audience. This will foster a sense of strong national identity
and will promote NZ culture to a young Aotearoa.”
If that isn’t a clear enough statement of intent, then try
the following description of the “talent” the new entity is looking to recruit:
• The new team will be Gen Z and Millennials.
• They will have social clout within the new audience
• They live the life and reflect the audience’s lifestyle
back upon itself
RNZ’s strategists even offered up an example of “Best
Practice” who can serve as a role model for their talent. Ebro Darden, of Hot
97 (New York) Beats 1 Radio, points the way forward for a public broadcaster
whose staff will no longer be “just radio announcers” (like those awful
cardigan-wearing old reactionaries at RNZ Concert!) but “musicians, comedians
and social media content creators.” They will use their “influence within the
community to spread the message far and wide to RNZ’s new social audience”.
Naturally, RNZ content will integrate “seamlessly within their personal feeds.”
There’s plenty of examples of Ebro Darden’s “best practice”
on YouTube. If RNZ’s management is serious about adopting Hot 97 (New York) as
a template, then they should lay in a good supply of flak-jackets – they will
need them!
But, maybe that’s the idea. RNZ management seems to glory in
“disrupting” the expectations of its core audience. Those expectations, based
on the “inform, educate, entertain” formula laid down by the first Director
General of the BBC, John Reith, in the 1920s, and adopted without demur by New
Zealand’s public broadcasting services ever since, are clearly out of favour
with RNZ’s new breed of cultural commissars.
Fuelling their contempt is an ageism so intense that, if
women, LGBTQI+, or people of colour were its targets, then the jobs of RNZ’s
bosses would be forfeit. They appear to hate their most loyal listeners with a
passion as odd and inexplicable as it is self-defeating. How else to explain
the unmistakeable decline in RNZ’s professionalism? As if the exercise of sound
editorial judgement and a strict adherence to the taxpayers’ expectations of
fairness and balance are yet more manifestations of white colonialist privilege
to be swept away.
The banality on display in “The Ten New Zealanders” section
of RNZ’s “Music Strategy” is emblematic of the organisation’s fundamental
misunderstanding of the public broadcaster’s role. RNZ’s job is not to swallow
up the entire radio audience by pandering to the lowest common denominator and
surrendering the professional broadcasting standards developed over decades to a
crass format designed to “integrate seamlessly” with the personal feeds of
18-25 year-olds.
The purpose of a public broadcaster is to set the bar so high
that its private sector competitors are dissuaded from letting it sink too low.
It is about letting people find that one place on the dial where commercial
considerations are absent; preconceptions are challenged; and the imaginations
of people from all cultures and classes are given wings. Like the public
libraries they so perfectly complement, public broadcasters are refuges for the
mind; places in the heart; tonics for the soul.
This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog
of Friday, 13 March 2020.
