Ending The Quest.

Dead Woman Walking: New Zealand’s media industry had been moving steadily towards disaster for all the years Melissa Lee had been National’s media and communications policy spokesperson, and yet, when the crisis finally broke, on her watch, she had nothing intelligent to offer. Christopher Luxon is a patient man - but he’s not that patient.

MELISSA LEE should be deprived of her ministerial warrant. Her handling – or non-handling – of the crisis engulfing the New Zealand news media has been woeful. The fate of New Zealand’s two linear television networks, a question which the Minister of Broadcasting, Communications and Digital Media could have settled long ago, remains inexcusably obscure. Given the simplicity of its answer, Lee’s failure to offer it is unacceptable. Prime Minister Christopher Luxon should sack her.

He won’t, of course, for the very simple reason that Luxon and his colleagues do not believe that Lee has done anything wrong. National and Act have a visceral aversion to state participation in cultural affairs. Were it not for the practised intervention of elite patrons of the arts, it is probable that the leaders of both parties would decree that if cultural producers cannot attract paying customers, then they should share the fate of every other business that fails to satisfy the market. Though they could never afford to admit it, National and Act would likely find much to commend in the words of the Nazi-sympathising poet and playwright, Hanns Johst, who famously admitted: “Whenever I hear the word ‘culture’, I reach for my pistol.”

Winston Peters and NZ First almost certainly do not share such extreme attitudes towards the arts. They are as much cultural, as economic nationalists, with an altogether firmer grasp on the vital relationship between a nation’s culture and its politics. It is even possible that Peters and NZ First understand the vital role played by free-to-air television networks in the fashioning and preservation of social cohesion. But for one thing, NZ First and its leader may well have been filling the policy vacuum created by Lee’s inaction.

Unfortunately, that “one thing” is the television networks’ history of unrelenting hostility towards and, at times, active sabotaging, of Peters’ political career. Winston wouldn’t piss on the NZ news media if its bum was on fire – which, of course, it is.

[In spite of all the above, but certainly on account of the political failure it describes, the Prime Minister, Christopher Luxon, finally relieved Melissa Lee of her broadcasting portfolio on Wednesday, 24 April 2024, replacing her with Paul Goldsmith - C.T.]

So, what is this “simple” answer to the television network’s problems? The resolution to the financial difficulties afflicting both TV3 and Television New Zealand requires nothing more than that this nation adopt the solution long ago arrived at by the countries with which we like to compare ourselves: Australia, the United Kingdom, Ireland and Canada.

Nominally publicly-owned TVNZ should become a genuine, non-commercial, public broadcaster like the ABC, the BBC, Raidió Teilifís Éireann (RTÉ), and the CBC. This would allow TV3 to pick up the advertising revenue currently accruing to TVNZ. There may not be enough advertising dollars in our economy to sustain two commercial television networks, but there are more than enough to sustain one. The money currently allocated to New Zealand on Air would go to fund the public broadcasters RNZ and TVNZ.

If more financial support was required, then it wouldn’t be hard to find. According to Myles Thomas of the Better Public Media Trust: “TVNZ’s annual budget is roughly $300 million. For the cost of just $5 a month per capita, New Zealand taxpayers could fully fund TVNZ so that it need no longer rely on any advertising at all”. Given that a huge number of Kiwi’s shell out in excess of $15.00 per month for streaming services such as Netflix and Neon, a broadly comparable deduction for public broadcasting shouldn’t be too big a shock to the nation’s system.

A blindingly obvious solution? Of course it is! So, why on earth didn’t Labour and the Greens, in office for six years, do the blindingly obvious thing? Knowing the answer to that question would certainly help New Zealanders understand why the parties of the Left failed so comprehensively to accomplish so many other blindingly obvious things.

One possible answer is that the sort of people who now inhabit New Zealand’s political parties are loathe to approve anything that might turn out to work brilliantly. The idea of a state-owned entity rising boldly and innovatively to the challenges of the twenty-first century makes them uneasy. Very few politicians in this country are comfortable with people and/or institutions that take the independence vouchsafed to them by the system seriously. The New Zealand state may hand out the crayons and the colouring books to its creative children, but it expects them, always, to stay inside the lines.

Māori Television, for example, was formally guaranteed full editorial independence and supplied with the money to make that promise real. The result? Its initial headquarters, in Auckland’s Newmarket, quickly became a buzzing hive of questing creativity. Its broadcasters, equally quickly, proved themselves to be among the best in New Zealand. In very short order, MTV began to show up TVNZ and TV3 for the crass, commercially-driven behemoths they had become.

What happened? What do you think happened! Māori Television’s journalists, in full accordance with its charter, began to ask questions – embarrassing questions. Not just of Pakeha politicians and bureaucrats, but of their own elites. What followed bore out the old trade union saying: “The bosses give you all the rights and privileges of free and independent citizens on only one condition – that you never use them.”

Pressured by the outraged Māori elites and their political mouthpieces, MTV’s Newmarket studios were shut down and its studios relocated to East Tamaki. The channel’s fearless journalists found it expedient to offer their talent to less “traditional” employers. Responsibility for MTV’s future was deemed to require an extremely safe pair of hands. Questing creativity no longer fizzed through its corridors.

Ask yourself. In all the fuss about Newshub closing down and TVNZ ceasing to produce “Sunday” and “Fair Go”, has there been any mention of Māori Television – sorry, “Whakaata Māori”? How many New Zealanders are even aware that it’s still broadcasting?

Now, some may say that all that bad stuff happened under National. But, in the six years they were in office did Labour do anything at all to restore Whakaata Māori’s questing creativity? Nup. Too risky. Even in its own caucus. Even in its own Māori caucus.

The contrast between the present Labour Party’s approach to public broadcasting and that of Norm Kirk’s Third Labour Government could hardly be more stark. The Broadcasting Minister of the day – a young, questing, entrepreneur of a politician called Roger Douglas – set in motion what most media historians still regard as the “golden age” of New Zealand television.

Kirk and his ministers understood what Labour politicians of the twenty-first century only fear: that giving creative and intelligent producers and journalists the freedom to make the best television they can is never going to work against the cause of developing a vibrant national culture; and that developing a vibrant national culture is never going to disadvantage the Left.

Pretty obviously, Melissa Lee, understands understood that too.

This essay was originally posted on The Democracy Project website on Thursday, 18 April 2024.

If Only We Had A Minister Of Broadcasting Worthy Of The Title.

Worryingly Uninterested: Given Broadcasting Minister Kris Faafoi’s evident uninterest in the classic Reithian principles of public broadcasting – i.e. to educate, elevate and entertain the people – any review of his motivations for rolling-up TVNZ and RNZ into a single, state-owned broadcasting entity, leaves one fearing the worst.

MORE OR LESS OFFICIALLY, this government is committed to merging TVNZ and RNZ into a single, monolithic, publicly-owned broadcasting entity. The temptation to support this idea enthusiastically is strong. For a Minister of Broadcasting to even contemplate such a dramatic revision of the public broadcasting status-quo surely implies a deep understanding of how poorly the current entities are performing, while signalling a firm intention to offer TVNZ’s and RNZ’s audiences something better. You would, however, be well advised to curb your enthusiasm. The chances of this policy proving successful are so low they make KiwiBuild look like a safe bet.

Consider the policy’s provenance: the Office of the Minister of Broadcasting, Kris Faafoi. This is the man who, having been briefed on RNZ management’s proposal, endorsed by RNZ’s board, to effectively destroy RNZ Concert – in favour of a “Yoof” channel – failed to identify any significant problems with the idea. That failure, along with the public outcry and political embarrassment it occasioned, should have seen him stripped of the broadcasting portfolio. Unfortunately, so uninterested is the Labour Cabinet in public broadcasting – and the media in general – that Faafoi continues to hold the warrant.

Given the Minister’s evident uninterest in the classic Reithian principles of public broadcasting – i.e. to educate, elevate and entertain the people – any review of Faafoi’s motivations for rolling-up TVNZ and RNZ into a single, state-owned broadcasting entity, leaves one fearing the worst.

The first motivation that springs to mind is straightforward, old-fashioned, cost-cutting. Rather than fund RNZ properly (as Faafoi’s predecessor, Clare Curran, promised to do more than four years ago) the current minister might simply be seeking the approbation of the Finance Minister by freeing-up an extra $15 million for some eye-catching and vote-winning alternative. (Something to do with Rugby, perhaps?)

Another motivation could be a strong desire to get rid of the governance and management personnel who caused him such acute political embarrassment. Any merging of RNZ and TVNZ would, almost certainly, be to the disadvantage of the smaller and weaker radio network. Perhaps Faafoi is anticipating that the big television elephants will make short work of the tiny radio mice? As a former TVNZ journalist, he is likely to identify much more strongly with the populist instincts of his former employers, than he is with what remains of the public service ethos at RNZ. Killing two birds with a single stone always elicits hearty cheers from career politicians.

Then again, it might be some sort of confused, ham-fisted attempt by elements within the Ministry of Heritage and Culture (MHC) to stop the rot in both state broadcasters and drag them, kicking and screaming, into some semblance of awareness of their obligations to New Zealand’s democratic political system, and to the cultural needs of the citizens they are supposed to serve.

Unfortunately, that is the least likely explanation for the proposed merger. After multiple changes at the upper echelons of the MHC there is simply not the critical mass of tough and talented public servants needed to drive through such a visionary (not to mention ideologically suspect) project.

To be reasonably confident of this (or any) government pulling off a successful and progressive merger of TVNZ and RNZ, the public would need to have been properly prepared by means of a full-scale public inquiry into the strengths and weaknesses of both entities. Those leading the inquiry would need to be genuinely independent, as well as fully conversant with the way public broadcasters are funded, managed and protected in other Western countries. Most obviously, it would study the Australian Broadcasting Corporation and the BBC, but it would also review the public broadcasting arrangements in Western Europe and North America.

The problem with this “solution” is, of course, that only a government already cognisant of the vital role effective public broadcasters can play in lifting the cultural and political discourse of a nation could contemplate such an inquiry. And, as we have already established, this is not such a government.

If it was, and if it had a Minister of Broadcasting and Communications worthy of his title, then New Zealanders might expect to see, hear and/or read about a minister who was not afraid to raise issues pertinent to the quality of public broadcasting in New Zealand.

Such a minister might ask why the important role of political commentator on RNZ’s Nine to Noon show is apparently now restricted to public relations personnel and pollsters with strong ties to the two major political parties, rather than to individuals demonstrably at arm’s length from these institutions, such as university academics, trade unionists and independent journalists and commentators. This was, after all, the previous practice – why the change?

That same minister might also wonder aloud why so much commentary on economic matters is provided by economists employed by the major trading banks, rather than, once again, by qualified individuals without quite so much skin in the game?

Or, why so many of our leading state broadcasters are more interested in the sound of their own voices, than in the voices of the unfortunate people they invite on air to interrogate and interrupt?

Questions might be raised as to why so much of the prime-time schedule is devoted to reality TV shows? Why there is so little political satire commissioned and broadcast on state television? Why the rural and business sectors are so well-served by our public broadcasters, while the lives of industrial and service sector workers are considered unworthy of such regular and dedicated journalistic scrutiny? Why we have a programme called Country Calendar, but not one called Working Life? Why sport flourishes while the arts struggle to be heard?

A government purporting to be “progressive” would not only ask these questions, it would question why they needed to be asked. Its Cabinet would be filled with people for whom the life of the mind was more important than likes on Facebook and followers on Twitter. Such a government would be filled with politicians who are as interested in reading books as they are in balancing them.

Most of all, it would have a Broadcasting Minister who made it his, or her, business to gather together the brightest, the bravest and the most creative souls this country can offer, and then provide them with the resources needed to broadcast back to New Zealanders their own compelling, revelatory, uplifting and unique reflections.

That is the sort of public broadcasting policy New Zealand needs: exactly the sort of broadcasting policy it is not going to get.

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Tuesday, 17 November 2020.

Of Messengers And Messages: Reflections On Rachel Smalley's Controversial Column.

Greater Gender Balance Equals Greater Diversity? Well, yes, Rachel Smalley, but only in relation to gender - a factor which in no way guarantees a diversity of viewpoints. And it is, surely, the messages which are carried on the nation’s airwaves that matter most – not the gender of the broadcasters who carry them?

 

IT WAS ONE of the most “respectable” of the Suffragette arguments. Give women the vote. Allow them to stand for Parliament. Make them ministers – even prime ministers – and society will be transformed. The mere presence of women in the halls of power (respectable women, that is, because powerful men and disreputable women have never been far apart) can only soften the raw masculinity of the political process and usher in a more caring, a more productive, and – most importantly – a more peaceful world.

 

All nonsense, of course. No sooner was war declared in 1914, than the leader of the British suffragettes, Emmeline Pankhurst, and her ambitious eldest daughter, Christabel, were up on the nearest platform, loudly urging every able-bodied British male to enlist in the great fight for King and Country. From chaining themselves to railings, the Pankhurst’s impressive army of suffragettes were swiftly redeployed to handing out white feathers to any young man not in uniform. When it came to mass slaughter, the female of the species was determined to prove herself no less deadly than the male.

 

Or, even deadlier. Because, once again, when women did become prime ministers (be it Israel’s Golda Meir, India’s Indira Ghandi, or Britain’s Margaret Thatcher) they did not show themselves to be one whit less willing to unleash fire and death than their male counterparts. (As anyone familiar with the careers of Boudica, Isabella de Valois, Catherine de Medici, Elizabeth I or Catherine the Great could confidently have predicted!)

 

Old news, one might say. But, one would be wrong. Because no matter how many times it is knocked down, the argument that women, simply by being there, or by virtue of some magical essence peculiar to the female of the species, will make an important difference to the way everything from corporations to cabinets are run, keeps popping right back up again.

 

The argument’s latest protagonist is the broadcaster Rachel Smalley, who used the occasion of John Campbell’s appointment as Radio NZ-National’s new drive show host to lament the preponderance of male voices on prime time radio.

 

“The perspective a male host takes into an interview is often very, very different to that of a woman”, wrote Smalley, in her column on the Newstalk-ZB webpage. “The perspective any of these hosts take into an interview about domestic abuse, sexual violence, or funding cuts to women’s refuge will be very different to mine.”

 

Really? I would have thought that, on any issue, a journalist’s perspective – male or female – would be determined by their willingness to set aside stereotypes and prejudices and allow their professional judgement to be guided by the evidence on offer. And isn’t their personal response to domestic abuse and sexual violence as likely to be determined by their capacity for empathy as their gender? After all, it was a male, David Cunliffe, who told a women’s refuge conference that the statistics relating to sexual violence made him “sorry to be a man”. By no means all the people who pilloried him for that comment were men.

 

Indeed, Smalley’s assumptions regarding the positions a male journalist is likely to take on everything from paid parental leave, to aid for victims of the wars in the Middle East, might, themselves, be characterised as examples of sexist prejudice. Do fathers have no stake in the quantum of paid parental leave? Do journalists like Robert Fisk, and our own Jon Stephenson, not risk their lives to bring the stories of the victims of war to the world?

 

Smalley’s argument would have been a great deal stronger if she had couched it in terms of ideological, rather than gender, diversity. The problem with prime-time radio in New Zealand is not a preponderance of male voices, but of right-wing voices. It is, surely, the messages which are carried on the nation’s airwaves that matter most – not the gender of the broadcasters who carry them?

 

Mary Wilson (the broadcaster John Campbell is about to replace on week-nights between 5:00 and 7:00pm) will soon be playing a major role in shaping the messages coming out of Radio NZ-National. Reality TV suprema, Julie Christie, already plays a very similar role at MediaWorks.

 

Now, ask yourself: Are the radically different messages carried by these women’s respective networks more likely to be the product of their makers’ gender – or their politics?

 

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of 10 August 2015.

Right Objectives - Wrong Network

Quixotic Mission? From its very inception TV3 has tried to fulfil the role of a creative and independent public broadcaster - largely because TVNZ declined to accept that role for itself. But commercial and public broadcasting are two, very different, things. In the end, if funds expended exceed funds received, a private sector corporation has to act. Campbell Live's supporters are attacking the wrong network.

 

JOHN CAMPBELL’S FRIENDS – and he has many – are attacking the wrong television network. Mediaworks is not the problem – and never has been. Nor is it the solution – though, from its very inception, nearly 30 years ago, it has (rather Quixotically, in my opinion) tried to be. If I may borrow that marvellous line from George Lucas’s Star Wars: Privately-owned, commercially-driven television, “are not the droids you are looking for”. The network John Campbell’s imperial stormtroopers should be pursuing, plasma rifles and light-sabres held high, is the one they already own – Television New Zealand.

 

It is one of the great ironies of New Zealand’s (relatively) recent cultural history that the impetus towards free and open airways has, to a startling degree, come from freewheeling cultural entrepreneurs like Colin Scrimgeour, Gordon Dryden, George Andrews, Marcia Russell and Rod Pedersen. Not forgetting that madcap piratical quartet who, in 1966, launched Radio Hauraki.

 

By and large, these were not individuals who cared a great deal about making a profit. What they did care about, however, was innovative, creative, challenging and, most of all, exciting broadcasting. Whether it was Colin Scrimgeour’s subversive “Friendly Road”; Gordon Dryden’s experiments in “talkback” on Radio Pacific; or Rod Pedersen’s anarchic “Nightline” programme on TV3; the point was always to fashion something as far removed from the dull fare of officially-sanctioned broadcasting as possible – and then beam it, with unapologetic glee, into the living rooms of the unsuspecting public.

 

One of the strangest aspects of New Zealand’s deeply conformist society is the way it drives so many of its non-conforming citizens into the private sector. Not, it must be said, in the spirit of avarice that makes true capitalists rich, but because it seemed to them about the only place where it was possible to set up an institution capable of saying “Yes”.

 

What many of them failed to grasp, however, was that although New Zealand’s state and local government bureaucrats were among the greatest nay-sayers in the world, the marketplace also possesses some pretty inflexible rules of its own. The greatest of these being the rule that insists money has to flow both ways. No matter what the enterprise, if funds expended are not exceeded by funds received, then: “Houston, we have a problem.”

 

Getting the money to flow both ways has always been TV3’s greatest challenge. Only intermittedly have the funds it received exceeded the funds it expended. Indeed, the mavericks and dreamers who founded the network had hardly begun broadcasting before they found their beloved creation placed in receivership. Throughout its relatively short life, TV3 has always, like poor Blanche Dubois in Tennessee Williams A Streetcar Named Desire, “depended on the kindness of strangers”.

 

Regardless, its extraordinarily talented staff (especially Head of News and Current Affairs, Mark Jennings) have done everything they could to stay true to TV3’s kaupapa. Running a network dedicated to producing the sort of creative and challenging television that the state broadcaster (with the important exception of a few, golden, years in the 1970s and 80s) either couldn’t or wouldn’t commit to the airwaves.

 

Those “golden” years bear closer scrutiny. For the first time, either before or since, television executives were encouraged to say “Yes”. Television One and South Pacific Television (both state-owned) were persuaded to give the green light to programmes designed not only to entertain, but also educate, and, in a handful of rare and very special cases, elevate their audiences.

 

What made it all possible was the Broadcasting License Fee. This relatively modest tax, levied on all television users, allowed public television to remain at least partially sheltered from the ratings-driven influences of commercial television. The problem was, people hated paying their Broadcasting License Fee. Viewers who, today, happily fork out $100 per month for Sky TV, thought a fee of less than $100 per year was far too much to pay for a creative, innovative and challenging television network run by – and for – New Zealanders.

 

TV3 – Mediaworks – have broadcast Campbell Live for as long as they could (and, arguably, a little bit longer than they should). Sometimes strangers have to be cruel to be kind. To expect a commercial network to ignore the most basic rules of private enterprise, in order to satisfy an audience that has yet to demonstrate an equal degree of militancy when it comes to demanding that Television New Zealand meet its responsibilities, isn’t just unfair – it’s entirely misguided!

 

As New Zealanders, shouldn’t we at least try to summon up the courage to imagine public institutions in which the creative, the challenging, and – yes – even the mavericks can find a place? And, isn’t it long past time that we encouraged the growth of a private sector dedicated to the dynamically dull, but indisputably important, business of making a buck?

 

Honestly, wouldn’t that be bloody marvellous!

 

This essay was originally published in The Press of Tuesday, 26 May 2015.

A Labour Cell In TVNZ's Vast Castle

Stairway To Hell: Like the decrepit dynasty at the heart of Mervyn Peake's grotesque fantasy novel, Gormenghast, the "Heads" at TVNZ's Auckland sprawling headquarters lost track of what was going on within their immense domain.

GORMENGHAST is one novel of a hell. Imagine J.R.R. Tolkien on acid, C.S. Lewis on speed, and you’ll hardly have made a mental dent in Mervyn Peake’s grotesque trilogy. I won’t spoil the books by giving away the plot in detail. Suffice to say that Gormenghast is an immense castle. So immense that the decrepit dynasty of Groan, to whom it ostensibly belongs, cannot possibly keep track of everything that goes on within its walls.

 

Watching Patrick Gower unfold (with ever increasing glee) the activities of Shane Taurima and his colleagues at TVNZ headquarters in Auckland, I couldn’t help being reminded of Peake’s gothic fantasy.

 

Like Gormenghast Castle, the sprawling TVNZ site had somehow spawned a secret cell of resistance. How was that possible? Because, like the Groans, TVNZ’s bosses appear to have become preoccupied with “the obscure and esoteric tenets” of their governance functions.

 

For the most part this involves large numbers of middle managers running up and down the great staircase that dominates TVNZ’s Auckland headquarters, ducking into tiny offices, and exchanging information with other middle managers who undertake to pass it on to yet more middle managers. Only very occasionally (or by accident) does this information ever trickle down to the people who actually make the television programmes we see on air.

 

Only very rarely do all the various functionaries of TVNZ gather together. And when they do it is almost always to pay homage to something called “The Ratings”. These are collections of viewing data gathered according to specifications laid down at some point in the far distant past but which are now almost completely irrelevant to the way people use their television sets, Sky decoders, PCs and iPhones.

 

The grand interpreters of The Ratings are the “Heads” (Head of Programming, Head of Marketing, Head of Sport, Head of News and Current Affairs). Their job is to advise the CEO who, in his turn, advises “The Board”.

 

TVNZ HQ - The higher you climb the less you know.

 

It is widely acknowledged within the sprawling edifice of TVNZ that the higher you climb in the organisation, the less you know about television. At the level of the Board, for example, virtually nothing is known about the rights and duties of a state broadcaster.

 

The similarities between TVNZ’s top brass, the Groans of Gormenghast, and the peculiar determination of both elites to cling to the “obscure and esoteric tenets” of their respective institutions are quite uncanny.

 

Certainly, it is very difficult to fathom how else Shane Taurima and his colleagues could run what amounted to a Labour Party branch out of the Maori and Pacific Television Unit – practically under the noses of TVNZ’s senior executives – without employing something like the Gormenghast metaphor.

 

And, really, can you blame them? It has been years since TVNZ management demonstrated the slightest respect for the news and current affairs obligations of what is still, officially, the people’s television network. They are required to operate in a culture of contempt for the principles of public service television – an attitude epitomised by the TVNZ CEO who claimed Police Ten-Seven as an example of Maori programming by pointing to the large number of young Maori men and women arrested on the show!

 

The atmosphere broadcasters are required to inhale at TVNZ may not be party political, but it is unquestionably ideological. Since 1989, when Labour removed all references to the public good from the Broadcasting Act, TVNZ has understood that its real (albeit unwritten) charter mandates the relentless promotion to New Zealanders of the virtues of neoliberalism, while rigorously eliminating all those programming options capable of constructing an alternative worldview.

 

Mr Taurima’s and his Maori and Pacific Television Unit colleagues’ biggest mistake – apart from believing that they could ever get away with behaving in such a nakedly party political fashion – was to hang their hats on securing the election of a Labour-led Government.

 

In the nine years that Helen Clark’s Labour Party governed New Zealand no serious effort was made to root-out the pernicious operational culture at TVNZ or, indeed, to address the manifold defects of this country’s recklessly deregulated media industry.

 

Even had TV3’s Patrick Gower not exposed Shane “Steerpike” Taurima’s cell of resistance in the bowels of the TVNZ Gormenghast, a change of government would only have confirmed for him The Who’s immortal line:

 

“Meet the new boss – same as the old boss.”

 

This essay was originally published in The Waikato Times, The Taranaki Daily News, The Timaru Herald, The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 21 February 2014.

Sky Is Not The Limit: Restoring Public Media

Searching For A New Signal: The restoration of genuine public broadcasting - and the reinvigoration of New Zealand democracy - could begin with the nationalisation of the Sky Television Network.

WHILE THE LAW COMMISSION’s latest Issues Paper has raised a number of important questions about how best to regulate the content of the news media, there is much less interest in discussing news media ownership. The political class, in particular, tends to run a mile from such discussions. The extraordinary domination of the New Zealand media market by just a handful of overseas-owned media conglomerates is one of those things that polite politicians simply do not discuss.

The implications of foreign media ownership for the quality of New Zealand democracy are, however, substantial. The maximisation of profit, unconstrained by even a residual sense of national responsibility, can only lead to the relentless downgrading of journalistic standards and the elevation of entertainment over news values. Intellectually taxing and culturally challenging media products are increasingly relegated to niche markets and the steady dumbing-down of the mass media’s bill-of-fare continues apace.

The question which politicians of the Left should be asking themselves is a simple one: ‘Do dumbed-down consumers make better, or worse, democratic decisions than well-informed citizens?’ And if they concede that an ignorant population is incompatible with an effective democracy, then what do they propose to do about foreign control of the New Zealand news media? In particular, what do they propose to do about the growing domination of the Rupert Murdoch-owned Sky Television Network?

Shortly before the General Election a senior media entrepreneur told me that within two years Sky would find itself in exactly the same position as the old, state-owned NZBC: exerting something perilously close to monopoly control over New Zealand broadcasting. With a friendly government willing to look the other way, Sky may soon be in a position to either drive out or absorb what remains of its on-screen competition. This country’s extensive cross-media ownership could also see Sky acquiring most of New Zealand’s radio audiences as a sort of broadcasting by-catch. Complaints about anti-competitive behaviour would be answered by pointing to the existence of the isolated, under-staffed and politically beleaguered state-owned broadcasting system.

A foreign-owned, privately controlled broadcasting network occupying a near-monopoly position within the New Zealand media market should be anathema to Labour, Green, NZ First and Mana politicians. Together, these parties of the Centre Left should take serious thought as to how the growing power of the Sky Television Network might be constrained, and public broadcasting restored to its former status as the prime guarantor of a well-informed and actively engaged democratic citizenry.

In my view, the most successful re-nationalisation strategy would involve a two-pronged regulatory thrust at the core of Sky’s profitability. The first thrust would involve passing a law limiting the amount of foreign share-holding in any New Zealand television network to ten percent. This would require a massive sell-off of foreign-owned shares – sharply depressing their value. Television New Zealand and Radio New Zealand could then be furnished with sufficient funds to acquire these shares on the public’s behalf. At the same time legislation would be introduced to Parliament requiring all existing networks to re-apply for a broadcasting licence. These would only be issued if the owners undertook to offer their viewers and listeners a comprehensive news and current-affairs service, and were ready to commission a generous quantity of local drama, documentary, children’s and ethnically-oriented programmes. The high cost of these licencing requirements would further depress the value of Sky’s shares, greatly facilitating their purchase by the state-owned broadcasters.

It would, of course, still be in the interests of the main content providers to sell their product to the new state-owned Pay-TV network. It’s monopsonistic (look it up!) position in the New Zealand market would, however, allow it to purchase that content at a significantly lower price. The subscription-price would be reduced accordingly (but not set so low that the public-service requirements of the State Broadcasters’ free-to-air programming could not be assured of a generous subsidy).

The Right will, naturally, protest loudly at such a policy. Dire warnings will be issued about the “sovietisation” of the New Zealand media, and the grave threats this policy would pose to our democratic way of life. They are, of course, the same people who cheered when the National Government of Jim Bolger legislated away the rights of hundreds of thousands of New Zealand workers with the Employment Contracts Act. And they will no doubt cheer again when, over the objections of nearly three-quarters of the population, our state-owned energy companies are “partially” privatised. They are also the people who have remained suspiciously silent as the democracy they so loudly claim to prize has been consistently undermined and weakened by the dumbed-down programming of the market-driven news media.

In his book The Economics of Feasible Socialism, Alexander Nove wrote of nationalisation:

The original notion was that nationalization would achieve three objectives. One was to dispossess the big capitalists. The second was to divert the profits from private appropriation to the public purse. Thirdly, the nationalized sector would serve the public good rather than try to make private profits ...To these objectives some (but not all) would add some sort of workers’ control, the accountability of management to employees.

Having seen what the “big capitalists” have done, and are continuing to do, to our world, policies directed towards refilling the “public purse”, upholding the “public good”, and increasing the “accountability of management”, recommend themselves as not only well worth a second look – but a second go.

And rest assured, Sky is not the limit. 

This posting is exclusive to the Bowalley Road blogsite.